Aides to the President of the United States steal things off his desk, and they'll readily tell you they do it to save the world. That's one comforting detail to take from a new book by famed journalist Bob Woodward. The Watergate sleuth's new 448-page chunk of reportage, Fear, is a behind-the-scenes examination of the Trump White House. The Washington Post offered a first look at it, and the view ain't pretty.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them...

According to Woodward, [former top economic adviser Gary] Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

Cohn made a similar play to prevent Trump from pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement...Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

Needless to say, this is completely nuts. It is not normal procedure for a senior-level aide to steal documents off the president's desk. But then again, it's not normal for the president to disregard all formal policy procedures—like consulting experts in the fields of foreign relations and economics and trade—and try to withdraw the United States from agreements with key geopolitical allies on impulse.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

The book paints a picture of a White House that is almost run in spite of the president occupying it. That particularly goes for national security issues, of which Trump characteristically knows little and cares less.

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

For someone who spends so much time thinking about North Korea, it is astounding Trump can't internalize why we might value our relationship with South Korea. It speaks to, at the very least, a profound poverty of critical reasoning skills. And that wasn't the only incident:

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

So American national security policy is now essentially:

1. The president screams for an action-movie conclusion to an intricate geopolitical crisis.

2. His staff ignores him and develops a solution that may not even be effective—except to placate him—but avoids catastrophe.

Drew Angerer Getty Images

But the most terrifying bits were the frank assessments of the situation from those inside the rolling freak show that is this administration. Here's Chief of Staff John Kelly:

Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

And here's former staff secretary Rob Porter, who left the White House amid domestic violence accusations from his two ex-wives:

“It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Porter is quoted as saying. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken.” ... “This was no longer a presidency. This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.”

The aforementioned Cohn reportedly called Trump "a professional liar." And here's another ex-official, former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus:

Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop,” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

Good Lord. It's all exactly what it looks like.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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