Almost all of the final 15 pages of Fear are filled by a sequence of lengthy monologues by Dowd. Woodward, by this point, seems to have been racing toward a deadline. The Dowd soliloquies are dumped almost directly into the text, without comment or qualification. In the middle of page 352, Dowd is pep-talking Trump, assuring him of his innocence, vowing to win the case, worried only about the risk of a Trump misstatement if the president were to disregard Dowd’s advice against speaking directly to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The time is mid-March 2018.

Then there’s a section break—and wham, Dowd is gripped by total disillusionment and hovering on the verge of a resignation, a state of mind that fills the next and final four pages of the book to its much-quoted conclusion: “Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

There’s no explanation of the leap from one mood to the other; it reads as if a crucial couple of pages of Woodward’s text were inadvertently sliced from the manuscript without anybody noticing.

This omission of a transition may only be due to carelessness, but the effect is serious. When sliced from context by news reports, Dowd’s words sound like a damning condemnation of Trump. But in context, they are meant by Dowd—and reproduced by Woodward—as a defense of Trump. What Dowd is saying is that the Russia story is bogus and that Trump is completely innocent of it. Trump’s only legal risk, Dowd is saying, is that he is so compulsively susceptible to exaggeration that he could entrap himself in perjury despite having done nothing substantively wrong. It is this exoneration that Woodward offers as his grand finale.

Fear paints a damning picture of Trump the human being. Who will soon forget Trump’s derisive comment that H. R. McMaster—whose life of service to the United States crimped his clothing budget—“dressed like a beer salesman”? Yet in the end it offers a remarkably forgiving assessment of Trump the president. The Trump presidency without the corruption, without the Russia entanglement, without the racism, without the abuse of women is hardly recognizable as the Trump presidency at all. There are worse offenses than messiness, after all.

Woodward approaches the Trump presidency as he has approached every other subject in his long and distinguished career. But the Trump presidency is something quite unlike anything anyone in Washington has seen before. Woodward’s access to the administration’s relatively normal figures—Cohn, Porter, Priebus, and their colleagues—actually erodes rather than enhances understanding of the administration’s actions. Their need to justify their own service to Trump compels them to minimize what Trump is and extenuate what he is doing. Woodward’s reliance upon them leads him to minimize and extenuate, too. If the only things we had to fear about the Trump administration were the stories told in Fear, Americans and the world could relax. Unfortunately, by relying on Trump’s enablers, America’s most legendary reporter has largely missed the biggest part of what they enabled.