agenda, it is an extremely careful process, and every decision being made about nafta in its implementation and what the government would have to do to implement it, is done with extreme care, both inside the clinton white house and in the congress when they re doing it. and then you cut to the 21st century version of this in the trump white house where we heard bob woodward tonight describe to you how he just wants to throw it all away and people are surrounding him telling him all of the things that nafta has done that he does not know about. he clearly does not know about. and it has and then new information has no effect. yes, that s that last point. that s the key part of it, because there is a difference between a president having suspect ideas at one point woodward uses the phrase dangerous ideas to talk about how even trump s top advisors advise think about the way that he thinks about the world. but it s another thing to be
here and this i think the lack of process is reflected in this. in bob s book, he talked about it with rachel. there are examples throughout the book. the president seems incapable of thinking. i know that sounds hyperbolic, but thinking entails absorbing information, considering the information, processing the information, and coming to some conclusion or output at the end. and instance after instance, he refuses to absorb information. maybe he can t even do so. and there is no process internally to match any bureaucratic or organizational process. and to me that s the mostly frightening thing. a guy with his finger on the nuclear button who is impulsive, egotistical and narcissistic doesn t seem to be able to engage in basic cognitive activity. and the world trade organization is a very good example of that. we heard bob woodward yes.
this. in bob s book, he talked about it with rachel. there are examples throughout the book. the president seems incapable of thinking. i know that sounds hyperbolic, but thinking entails absorbing information, considering the information, processing the information, and coming to some conclusion or output at the end. and instance after instance, he refuses to absorb information. maybe he can t even do so. and there is no process internally to match any bureaucratic or organizational process. and to me that s the mostly frightening thing. a guy with his finger on the nuclear button who is impulsive, egotistical and narcissistic doesn t seem to be able to engage in basic cognitive activity. and the world trade organization is a very good example of that. we heard bob woodward yes. describing this to rachel in the last hour, the president s inability to understand how things actually work in the world trade organization and why it generally works so much to the
there s personality staff and people calling people crazy. there are investigative threads to pull and this book is going to be a start of that reporting. what i m intrigued by and hasn t gotten a lot of concentration until your conversation with bob woodward tonight is the way the governing actually works in this white house. in that sense, that part those parts of the book you can compare them to previous woodward books inside previous presidencies and he made a reference to the book he wrote about the first book he wrote about the clinton administration and nafta and the way nafta worked its way through the legislative process. you can see in the story titled agenda, it is an extremely careful process, and every decision being made about nafta in its implementation and what the government would have to do to implement it, is done with extreme care, both inside the clinton white house and in the congress when they re doing it.
presidents i think the power of the presidency has grown each president i ve written about from nixon to trump. and presidents can do wonderful things, and they can do disastrous things. the process really matters. it finally gets to a point in the book where general kelly, whose the chief of staff, sits down with rob porter who is the staff secretary and says we need to write-up rules and we need to tell the president that if he makes one of these seat-of-the-pants decisions, it s not final. we have to sit down and have a process where the president will actually literally sign a document, a decision memo, and they say it s not final. you can t run around and do these things. there s got to be a process. you ve got to hear arguments and time and time again i mean, sometimes he does.