Fear: Trump in the White House. By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster; 448 pages; $30 and £20.

IN “MILES GLORIOSUS”, a comedy by Plautus from the second or third century BC, the main character is a soldier who has a thing for kidnapping women and constantly embellishes the truth. The audience know this because the soldier has a slave, Artotrogus, who flatters his master to his face but makes asides about what is really going on. When a liar is disparaged by someone who is himself only intermittently trustworthy, how can observers separate what is true from what is not?

Authors of books about the Trump White House are confronted by the same problem, as are their readers. In the words of his own lawyer, John Dowd—as cited by Bob Woodward in “Fear”—the president is “a fucking liar”. Like Artotrogus, his underlings praise him lavishly in public, then tell journalists that he is a “moron” (attributed to Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of state), an “idiot” (attributed to John Kelly, his chief of staff) and has the understanding of “a 5th or 6th grader” (attributed to James Mattis, the defence secretary).

There have already been four book-length attempts to solve this puzzle. Given the appetite for stories about what goes on in the room where it happens, there will be more. Two have been written by participants (James Comey and Omarosa Manigault Newman) and two by observers (Michael Wolff and, now, Mr Woodward). Mr Comey is reliable but only has a few encounters with the president to relate. Ms Manigault Newman has more access but is no Mark Twain. “I got many offers after leaving the White House, but I chose ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ because it has always been one of my favourite shows,” she writes in “Unhinged”. In “Fire and Fury” Mr Wolff gets some details wrong and includes things that were too good to check; still, he captures the absurd, terrifying early months of the administration.

Mr Woodward brings decades of Washington gravitas to the job. Together with his assistant, Evelyn Duffy, he interviews everyone he can, on tape if possible, and gathers documents. Then he reconstructs key moments of the presidency so far, told as if they were recorded on a bug under the Resolute desk. But even Mr Woodward puts in quotation marks dialogue that he got second-hand, so that it is impossible to distinguish between what someone actually said, what someone recalls saying and what someone else says someone said.

Set against the epistemological standards of the 45th president, pointing this out feels like nitpicking. Yet the technique, while making the book a better read, invites another set of questions about accuracy. Meanwhile Mr Trump’s indiscretion poses a different problem for the exposé form. Disagreements and conflicts that would normally count as insiderish gossip (the president does not agree with his secretary of state on North Korea, say) have already been tweeted by the subject himself.

Mr Woodward’s style, employed in books about five other presidents, is to report debates between the commander-in-chief, his cabinet and advisers. The impression this gives in “Fear” is, initially, of a reasonably normal administration. Cabinet secretaries disagree with each other and plot to win Mr Trump round. Everyone is obsessed with getting access to him. He in turn asks sensible questions about why America still has troops in Afghanistan, eventually dispatching a few more.

But the veneer of normalcy peels off fast. Mr Woodward’s Trump has no friends. Nobody who works with him seems to like him. The constant dissembling does not help (Mr Trump is “a professional liar”, in the view of Gary Cohn, formerly the director of the president’s National Economic Council). Nor do the small acts of cruelty towards his staff.

One story Mr Woodward recounts captures this personality. On board Air Force One, Reince Priebus told Mr Trump that he would soon resign as chief of staff. They agreed to talk later about the timing of the announcement and who might replace him. After the plane landed, Mr Priebus got in a car and opened up Twitter, to find the president had broadcast his resignation and named a successor. “It made no sense, Priebus realised, unless you understood the way Trump makes decisions. ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity in any way’.”

In principle, a certain sort of ruthlessness could be an asset for a president, but Mr Trump is too disorganised to profit from it. Memos must be kept to a single page, and even then often go unread. Attempts to brief him are futile. “It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president,” Mr Woodward quotes Mr Cohn as saying. “He’s going to get through the first ten minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic.” Mr Trump “acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skills in improvising,” according to an aide.

That distinctive approach is deployed in the service of two fixed ideas: that trade deficits are bad, and that foreigners should pay for American protection of their countries. When these two gripes come together, as in the case of South Korea—which has a trade surplus with America and an American missile-defence system on its soil—the president can become apoplectic. His desire to withdraw from a trade deal with South Korea is a recurring theme in “Fear”; the opening chapter has Mr Cohn swiping the paperwork to make it happen off Mr Trump’s desk.

The last laugh

This story, coupled with an anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times describing internal resistance to the president, has set off a debate about whether a silent coup is unfolding at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Fear” does not suggest that is so. Mr Cohn and his allies do slow-walk paperwork when the president is planning to do something unwise. But, says Mr Woodward, this only works because Mr Trump “seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete.”

In this account, what matters most to Mr Trump is not governing, but avoiding the impression of weakness. After the “grab them by the pussy” tape emerged during the campaign, he was contrite for about a day, then went on the attack again. After his inept first response to the killing of a woman in Charlottesville by a white supremacist, he eventually delivered a speech to mollify those who said he had given racists the impression that he was on their side. He quickly regretted it. “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made,” he told an aide. “You never make those concessions. You never apologise.”

Naturally, Mr Woodward’s bigwig sources have publicly denied saying the things he says they did. Mr Trump himself has denounced the author as a Democratic stooge. For all that, taken together the Trump chronicles throw up another quandary, beyond the issues of accuracy and novelty: whether these tell-alls actually do the president any harm. Plautus suggests otherwise. At the end of his play, the philandering soldier is humiliated—and turns to the audience for applause.