Bob Woodward, the indefatigable Washington Post journalist who has chronicled several presidential administrations in best-selling books, has his latest subject: Donald J. Trump.
Simon & Schuster plans to publish “Fear: Trump in the White House,” on Sept 11.
The book reveals “the harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s White House and how the president makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies,” the publishing house said in a statement, adding that the book draws from “hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, contemporaneous meeting notes, files, documents and personal diaries.”
Jonathan Karp, the president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, called the book, Woodward’s 19th, “the most acute and penetrating portrait of a sitting president ever published during the first years of an administration.”
Mr. Woodward’s book about President Trump is set to be released on Sept. 11.The book’s title can be traced back to a remark Mr. Trump made in an interview with Mr. Woodward and another reporter in 2016 when Mr. Trump was running for office, The Washington Post reported.
Initially, Mr. Trump told the reporters that “real power is through respect,” according a transcript of the interview. Then he added: “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word: ‘Fear.’”
Mr. Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked for nearly five decades. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes — including one that The Post received for his coverage with Carl Bernstein of the Watergate scandal. The pair became famous for that reporting, and in 1974 wrote the best-selling book “All the President’s Men,” which was later made into a movie. In fact, 12 books that Mr. Woodward has written or co-written — including “The Final Days,” also about the Nixon White House and also with Mr. Bernstein — have been No. 1 national best-sellers.
Mr. Woodward’s latest book will come about eight months after Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” rose to the top of the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction. Its often unflattering portrayal of the early days of the Trump administration elicited a demand for a “full and complete retraction and apology” from a lawyer for the president. It also led to the banishment of Stephen K. Bannon, who had been President Trump’s chief strategist and was quoted in the book.
Several people mentioned in the book disputed the accuracy of words attributed to them, and journalists pointed to numerous errors in Mr. Wolff’s reporting. President Trump wrote on Twitter that he had not given Mr. Wolff access to the White House and that the “phony book” was “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
