FRESH AIR: Veteran journalist Bob Woodward has written about every U.S. president since Richard Nixon — nine in total. But in all his years covering politics, he has never encountered a president like President Trump. Woodward’s latest work, Fear: Trump In The White House, paints a portrait of Trump as uninformed and mercurial. The book describes moments when staff members joined together to purposefully block what they believe are the president’s most dangerous impulses — sometimes by surreptitiously removing papers from the president’s desk. “There were drafts of a proposal to get out of the Paris climate accord that were removed from the president’s desk,” Woodward says. “[There were] draft statements about withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement — which would have been a disaster — and [former economic adviser Gary] Cohn just took it off the desk.” Woodward says he was shocked by the lengths to which staff went to circumvent Trump: “I’ve never heard in any way of staff going around a president this way and taking the paperwork, taking the orders in order to stop the action.” MORE