The Great Pyramid Of Giza

The  Great  Pyramid  Of  Giza

from  Awakening In The Dream

by David Wilcock

The Great Pyramid is considered the largest stone building on Earth, covering some thirteen acres at its base—the equivalent of seven Midtown city blocks in Manhattan—and it rises to the height of a forty-story building. Approximately 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks were used to build it, each of them weighing 2.5 to 70 tons apiece—for a total mass of about 6.3 million tons. No crane ever built in modern times is strong enough to lift stones this heavy—it would simply tumble over. The bedrock underneath the Great Pyramid was leveled out so perfectly that no corner of the pyramids base is more than a half-inch higher or lower than the others. Such precise leveling goes significantly beyond even the finest architectural standards of today.

Strangely, the pyramid is also located at the exact center of the Earth’s landmass—the one true axis mundi. Its east-west axis sits precisely on the longest land parallel, covering the greatest amount of land and the least amount of water on Earth—passing through Africa, Asia, and America along the way. The longest land meridian, crossing over Asia, Africa, Europe, and Antarctica, also passes right through the pyramid. The likelihood of finding this “perfect location” by accident is 1 in 3 billion. I didn’t understand why this location was so important until years later, as we will see—but it has to do with the flow and positioning of natural energy fields from the Earth that have remained unknown to mainstream scientists in our own modern times.In the thirteenth century, an Arab historian compared the pyramid to a gigantic female breast, noting the casing stones still looked perfect on the outside except for the original entrance carved by Caliph Al-Mamoun. Disaster struck in the year 1356, as the first of a series of earthquakes leveled significant areas of northern Egypt, collapsing entire city blocks to rubble. The pyramid was shaken so hard by these quakes that many of the casing stones broke off and tumbled into a giant mess. The people were desperate to rebuild—and used this fallen limestone from the pyramid as raw material to help build the new capital city El Kaherah, “The Victorious,” as well as to rebuild Cairo. Apparently, the stones that hadn’t already fallen off were then deliberately broken off, because the quality of the limestone was very pure and provided an excellent building material. According to the French Barond d’Anglure, who visited this area of Egypt in 1396, "Certain masons demolished the course of the great casing stones which covered [the pyramid,] and tumbled them into the valley." Two bridges were built across the Nile specifically to help drag the stones across the river via camel trains, so as to build mosques and palaces in Cairo and El Kaherah.

As the centuries rolled by, the legend of the once-great casing stones had faded into nothing more than a superstitious myth. However, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Howard-Vyse conducted excavations in and around the pyramid beginning in 1836 that permanently eliminated the skeptics’ arguments. Howard-Vyse found that the pyramid was surrounded by debris of limestone chunks and sand that had piled up around the base by as much as fifty feet. He cleared a patch in the center of the north facade, hoping to reach the base and bedrock of the pyramid. There he found two of the original casing stones—forever ending the scholarly argument about whether the pyramid had ever been covered with a perfectly flat, polished white surface. The original blocks were still so finely carved that an exact measurement of the slope angle could be calculated. According to Howard-Vyse, they were perfect: “in a sloping plane as correct and true almost as modern work by optical instrument makers. The joints were scarcely perceptible, not wider than the thickness of silver paper.” These connections again establish a very direct linkage between the exact dimensions of the Great Pyramid and the numerology in the Bible. This is another proof that the pyramid was intended to be a prophecy of the coming Messiah and the mass Ascension that would later occur.

The sides of the pyramid line up so well with true rotational north that they only deviate by 3 minutes of arc in any one direction—less than 0.06 percent. Another “coincidence” is that if you calculate the average height of land above sea level, with Miami as the low and the Himalayas as the high, you come out with 5,449 inches—which is the exact height of the Great Pyramid.

To me, the most surprising fact of all was that when the Great Pyramid was first built, it was covered with twenty-one acres of gleaming, brightly polished white casing stones—a total of about 115,000 blocks of pure white limestone averaging 100 inches, or 8.3 feet, in thickness. If you caught the glint of the sun’s reflection off of these stones in the daytime, it would be blindingly bright—thus earning it the name Ta Khut, or “the Light.” The reflections could apparently be seen from the mountains of Israel hundreds of miles away. Despite the fact that some of these casing stones weighed sixteen tons, all six sides were carved to fit together so perfectly that the cracks between them were only one-fiftieth of an inch wide—which is narrower than a human fingernail. Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie described this in the late 1800s as “the finest opticians’ work on the scale of acres,” comparing it to the precision used to grind lenses for a telescope. Richard C. Hoagland has pointed out that even the tiles on a NASA space shuttle do not fit together this closely. Even more surprisingly, these cracks are not empty—they are filled with a cement that is incredibly strong. There is no known way you could fit a mortar into cracks one-fiftieth of an inch wide, and evenly cover areas as large as five feet by seven feet wide in the vertical, with any known methods. And if you were foolhardy enough to smash the casing stones with a sledgehammer, you would find that the limestone itself breaks before the cement does.

I’m well aware of how fantastic this must sound. It’s one thing to see the pyramid sitting there as it is today—a giant mass of decaying stone blocks. It would be quite something else to witness it in its original form, looking like a gigantic, gleaming white sculpture in the desert—something totally unlike any other technological achievement we’ve ever seen on Earth—whether from ancient times or in our modern world. Thankfully, many people witnessed these casing stones in their original form and documented their observations in writing over the centuries—and the history can be found in Peter Tompkins’s Secrets of the Great Pyramid.

According to Tompkins, limestone becomes harder and more polished with time and weather, unlike marble—think about the gorgeous stalactites and stalagmites of limestone you can find in underground caves. Therefore, the pyramid did not get progressively more dull-looking as the centuries rolled by after it was first built. In approximately 440 BC, Herodotus wrote that the pyramid’s casing stones were highly polished—with joints so fine they could scarcely even be seen with the naked eye. The thirteenth-century Arab historian Abd-al-Latif said that despite their polished appearance, these stones were inscribed with mysterious, unintelligible characters—enough to fill ten thousand pages. His colleagues assumed these writings were the graffiti of ancient tourists. William of Baldensal visited the pyramid in the early 1300s and described these strange inscriptions as being all arranged in long, careful rows of strange symbols. When the casing stones eventually were lost, so went any hope of documenting these mysterious writings for future code-breaking analysis and study.

Diodorus Siclus, who lived soon after the time of Christ, wrote that the casing stones were “complete and without the least decay.” The Roman naturalist Pliny witnessed native boys running up the polished sides, to the delight of tourists. In about AD 24, Strabo visited Egypt, and said there was an entrance on the north face of the pyramid that was made of a hinged stone you could raise from the bottom up, but was otherwise indistinguishable from its surroundings when it lay flush.

Inside the Great Pyramid, there are three different chambers. The largest of these is known as the King’s Chamber, and is the only part of the pyramid that is made of red granite, which is extremely hard. In the 1990s, Bernard Pietsch analyzed the twenty different stones on the floor of the King’s Chamber and made startling discoveries. Strangely, although the stones are all either square or rectangular, hardly any of them are the same size—except when you have an identical pair side by side. These stones are arranged in a series of six different rows—and each row has a different width from any of the others. In Anatomy of the King’s Chamber, Pietsch presents staggeringly complex and compelling evidence that a variety of measurements from Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—including their orbital periods—are encoded in the stones’ dimensions.

Within the King’s Chamber there is a loose stone coffin carved out of an extremely hard chocolate-brown granite, estimated to weigh three tons. The external volume of the sarcophagus is exactly twice the internal volume. Thanks to the patterns of circular drill marks found inside, engineer Christopher Dunn calculated that the coffin was carved out by tubular drills that could cut through granite five hundred times faster than any technology we now have available. Skeptics believe this may have been done with diamond-tipped drill bits in Egypt, de- spite the impossibility of achieving the necessary speeds involved with any modern technology. Dunn points out that the strongest metal they had at the time was copper. The diamonds would have cut through the copper like butter before they ever even put a dent in the granite.

The sarcophagus has grooves for a lid to be fitted in place, but no such lid has ever been found—as if it were never intended to be found. Many pyramid researchers, including Peter Lemesurier, interpret this open tomb as symbolizing a time when there will be no more death, i.e., the coming Golden Age. The coffin was empty—and there is no evidence it ever held a mummy. The granite sarcophagus also cannot fit through the Antechamber, meaning that it had to be built into the pyramid from the very beginning—totally in contrast with any known Egyptian burial practices.

Although this was not discovered until much later, the north and south walls of both the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber also contained airshafts that went on an upward-sloping angle, all the way out to the surface of the pyramid. This supplied just enough oxygen to refresh the atmosphere inside each room. In the mid-1990s, Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a miniature robot some sixty-five meters up the shafts, and confirmed that in the King’s Chamber, the south shaft points at the star A1 Nitak, or Zeta Orionis. The north shaft points at Alpha Draconis, which used to be the pole star in the third millennium BC. The northern Queen’s Chamber shaft is aimed at Beta Ursae Minoris, and the southern channel points to Sirius. All these alignments date back to about 2500 BC. That was the most recent time in which they all lined up. According to ancient-civilizations researcher Joseph Jochmans, “As Bauval and Gilbert showed through computer calculations, the constellational alignments imprinted in the Air Passages for 2450 BCE were also present earlier, in about 10,500 BCE, because of the Precession of the Equinoxes.” An Edgar Cayce reading from June 30,1932, said that work on the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx began this very same year.

In the thirteenth century, an Arab historian compared the pyramid to a gigantic female breast, noting the casing stones still looked perfect on the outside except for the original entrance carved by Caliph Al-Mamoun. Disaster struck in the year 1356, as the first of a series of earthquakes leveled significant areas of northern Egypt, collapsing entire city blocks to rubble. The pyramid was shaken so hard by these quakes that many of the casing stones broke off and tumbled into a giant mess. The people were desperate to rebuild—and used this fallen limestone from the pyramid as raw material to help build the new capital city El Kaherah, “The Victorious,” as well as to rebuild Cairo. Apparently, the stones that hadn’t already fallen off were then deliberately broken off, because the quality of the limestone was very pure and provided an excellent building material. According to the French Barond d’Anglure, who visited this area of Egypt in 1396. Certain masons demolished the course of the great casing stone which covered [the pyramid,] and tumbled them into the valley.” Two bridges were built across the Nile specifically to help drag the stones across the river via camel trains, so as to build mosques and palaces in Cairo and El Kaherah.

As the centuries rolled by, the legend of the once-great casing stones had faded into nothing more than a superstitious myth. However, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Howard-Vyse conducted excavations in and around the pyramid beginning in 1836 that permanently eliminated the skeptics’ arguments. Howard-Vyse found that the pyramid was surrounded by debris of limestone chunks and sand that had piled up around the base by as much as fifty feet. He cleared a patch in the center of the north facade, hoping to reach the base and bedrock of the pyramid. There he found two of the original casing stones—forever ending the scholarly argument about whether the pyramid had ever been covered with a perfectly flat, polished white surface. The original blocks were still so finely carved that an exact measurement of the slope angle could be calculated. According to Howard-Vyse, they were perfect: “in a sloping plane as correct and true almost as modern work by optical instrument makers. The joints were scarcely perceptible, not wider than the thickness of silver paper.”

Howard-Vyse published his detailed measurements and notes in 1840, and his assistant John Perring published his own book as well. This opened up a whole new phase of study known as Pyramidology. John Taylor, a gifted mathematician and amateur astronomer who worked as an editor of the London Observer in the nineteenth century, was already in his fifties when Howard-Vyse’s data came in from Egypt. Taylor then began a rigorous thirty-year investigation into all the measurements that had been reported in and around the pyramid, looking for hidden mathematical and geometric formulas. Taylor found that if he measured the perimeter of the base in inches, it came out to roughly 100 times 366—and if he divided the perimeter by 25 inches, he got 366 once again. What’s the big deal about 366? It is suspiciously close to the exact length of an Earth year—365.2422 days. Taylor found that by slightly changing the length of a typical British inch, these figures could become exact reflections of the Earth year. Was this merely a cheap mathematical cheat, or was there any worthwhile science behind it? That question was soon answered when a highly fortunate “coincidence” struck at almost the exact same time.

Sir John Herschel, one of Britain’s most highly regarded astronomers at the turn of the nineteenth century, had very recently tried to invent a new measuring unit to replace the existing British system. He wanted it to be based on the exact dimensions of the Earth. Without knowing anything about Taylor’s research, Herschel used the most accurate dimensions of the Earth available at the time to suggest that we should be using inches that were very slightly longer than normal—by a mere half the width of a human hair, or 1.00x06 British inches. Herschel blasted the French for basing their metric system on the curvature of the Earth, which can change, rather than using a line that went straight through the Earth’s center, from pole to pole. A recent British Ordnance Survey had fixed that pole-to-pole distance within the Earth as 7898.78 miles, or 500,500,000 British inches. It would become exactly 500 million inches if the British inch were made just a slight bit longer. Herschel argued that the existing British inch should be officially lengthened to obtain this truly scientific measuring unit.

Fifty of these inches would then be exactly one ten-millionth of the Earth’s polar axis. Twenty-five of them would make a very useful cubit—which could replace the existing British yard and foot. Little did Herschel know that Taylor had already discovered these exact same units within the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. When Taylor found out about this, he was thrilled. He now had compelling evidence that the builders of the pyramid must have known the true spherical dimensions of the planet, and built their whole measurement system off it. That again implies that the ancient Egyptians possessed a significantly more advanced technology than we normally give them credit for. Lemesurier reported that in International Geophysical Year 1957, the Earth’s diameter from pole to pole was measured with flawless satellite precision—much more accurately than in Herschel’s time. As a result, we now know that the pyramid inch is indeed one five-hundred-millionth of the Earth’s diameter at the poles— and this connection is so exact that the numbers check out down to multiple decimal points of accuracy. This means the pyramid was indeed built to be a mathematically perfect reflection of the length of a year on Earth around its perimeter. These precisely Earth-scaled measurements appear again and again in obvious ways—both inside and outside the pyramid.

However, an even greater mystery is found when we measure the diagonals of the Great Pyramid—namely, the distance from one corner, over the top and down to the other corner. This distance comes out to 25,826.4 pyramid inches— remarkably close to modern calculations of the true length of the precession of the equinoxes in the years.

It definitely seems that the Great Pyramid’s designers wanted us to use the Egyptian inch. By making the pyramid’s diagonals add up to the precession of the equinoxes in Egyptian inches, we seem to have been given a message to pay attention to this great cycle. These same builders obviously knew the exact dimensions of the earth, and therefore may very well have traveled the world—seeding many different ancient myths in many different ancient cultures. As Santillana and Von Dechend revealed again and again in Hamlet’s Mill, the hidden message in each of these ancient myths told us to look at the precession—or what many ancient cultures also called the Great Year.

Another very interesting point to consider is the linkage between the Great Pyramid and the Bible. There is strong evidence that Isaiah spoke of the pyramid in chapter 19, verses 19 and 20: “In that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the Land of Egypt, and a monument at the border thereof to the Lord, and it shall be for a sign, and for a witness unto the Lord of Hosts in the Land of Egypt.” The Great Pyramid certainly is in the midst of the land of Egypt, and could definitely be seen as a monumental altar.

On page 293 of Great Pyramid Decoded, Lemesurier reveals that the mirror-polished white casing stones cast triangular reflections of light on the desert surface, and during the Summer Solstice, this would appear as a perfect, star-like Christian crucifix shape from overhead. The top, left, and right reflections are about the same length, and the bottom reflection is about three times longer.

Another intriguing fact is that if you draw a diagonal line to the northeast from the Great Pyramid, where you use the east-west meridian as your X axis and use the angle of the pyramid’s Ascending Passage at 26 degrees, 18 minutes, and 9.7 seconds, that line happens to cross directly through Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. The precision of this alignment is so exact that it is almost certainly not a coincidence.

An additional enigma I described on page 470 of The Ascension Mysteries is the fact that the measured size of the Granite Coffer in the King’s Chamber is precisely identical to the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament, at 2.5 by 1.5 by 1.5 cubits, even though the coffin in the Pyramid allegedly was not discovered until much later.

Lastly, the number 153 is of key importance in the Bible and in the Great Pyramid alike. In the Old Testament, the number of builders of Solomon’s first temple, a symbol of the light-body, was said to be about 153,000, and the Tetragrammaton, or name of God, happens to appear exactly 153 times in the Book of Genesis. In John 21:11, it says that Simon Peter brought in a net with exactly 153 large fishes after Jesus’ arrival. The net did not break even though they caught “so many.” The number 153 is therefore considered to symbolize the people who will be Ascending at the end of the cycle, as the fish-catch is another harvest metaphor.

The number 153 also has interesting numerological characteristics, as it is the sum of the integers from 1 to 17. This makes it a triangular number, where if you visualize each number like a coin and you arrange the coins into triangle shapes as you place them down one by one, the seventeenth row of the triangle ends in the number 153. The numbers 1 and 15 are also triangular numbers.

In the Great Pyramid, the roof of the Grand Gallery is exactly 153 units of twelve Pyramid Inches in length. The top of the Great Step, which is also the floor of the King’s Chamber complex, is exactly 153 horizontal layers of stone blocks below the existing flat top of the pyramid. And lastly, the two low sections of the King’s Chamber Passage together measure 153.057 P" in length.

David Wilcock

Trail  of  Smoke

Don Hynes

Stirred awake at dawn
smoke blanketed the island,
the forests of the Clackamas,
Santiam and McKenzie
lifted into white clouds,
passing on their trail
to the other side.
So many old friends
who knew my name,
sheltered me through
turmoil and grief.

I rose and walked

to the rock point

in early filtered light

to stand on the shore

and honor their journey.

Orcas exhaled

in deep bass sounds,

a line of them

near and far along

the smoke laden channel

signaling farewell.

Years of standing vigil

beside mountain rivers

leaving this life,

their mantle passed,

carried on the wind.

Through The Smoke Hole

Gary Snyder

  

There is another world above this one; or outside of this one;  the way to it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke goes thru. The ladder is the way thru the smoke hole;  the ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have been a tree or a pole; I think it is merely a way.

Fire is at the foot of the ladder. The fire is in the center. The walls are round. There is also another world below or inside this one. The way there is down thru the smoke. It is not necessary to think of a series.

Raven and Magpie do not need the ladder. They fly thru the smoke holes shrieking and stealing. Coyote falls thru; we recognize him only as a clumsy relative, a father in old clothes we don’t wish to see with our friends.

It is possible to cultivate the fields of our own world without much thought for the others. When men emerge from below we see them as the masked dancers of our magic dreams. When men disappear down, we see them as plain men going somewhere else.  When men disappear up we see them as great heroes shining thru the smoke. When men come back from above they fall thru and tumble; we don’t really know them; Coyote, as mentioned before.

Thank God

Don Hynes

After days and nights 
of smoke and darkness
the rains return, 
precious water 
clearing the sky,
renewing the earth.
Raven calls
from his perch, 
sleek black
in big drop rain.
The sea lays flat,
quiet before 
the winds to follow.

Darkness has been 
on the face of the deep
and now there is light.
We are one tribe,
one earth, one dream.
Thank God for the rain.

donhynes.com/blog

 RAGE

Epilogue

by Bob Woodward

"After I finished reporting for this book on President Trump, I felt weariness. The country was in real turmoil. The virus was out of control. The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million out of work. A powerful reckoning on racism and inequality was upon us. There seemed to be no end in sight, and certainly no clear path to get there.

"I thought back to the conversation with Trump on February 7 when he mentioned the 'dynamite behind every door,' the unexpected explosion that could change everything. He was apparently thinking about some external event that would affect the Trump presidency.

"But now, I've come to the conclusion that the 'dynamite behind the door' was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan.

"Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.

"Trump said the intelligence people needed to go back to school. The generals were stupid. The media was fake news. Trump had spent so many years undermining people who challenged him. Not only his opponents but those who worked for him and for the American public.

"And here was the problem: By undermining so many others not only had he shaken confidence in them but he had shaken confidence in himself. This was particularly apparent when the country most needed to feel the government knew what it was doing in an unprecedented health crisis.

'Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, maybe had it more right than he knew when he said understanding Trump meant understanding Alice in Wonderland.

"Trump talked a lot. Almost incessantly. So much that he weakened the microphone of the presidency and the bully pulpit, and too many people no longer trusted what he said. Half or more of the country seemed to be in a perpetual rage about him, and he seemed to enjoy it.

"I think of Robert Redfield knowing that the virus fight would not be merely six months or a year, it would be two to three years. Of Trump repeatedly saying the virus would disappear or blow away. And of the enormous wearing down of public health officials to not stray too far from the president's message.

"I close out this book with a belief that almost anything can happen in the Trump presidency, anything. Lots could get better or worse or much worse. It is unlikely lots could get much better. For the moment, in the middle of the summer, the virus, the economy, and the internal political divisions define Trump. The intensity of those divisions is at its height.

"The concentration of power in the presidency has been growing for decades and the power of the president might be at an all-time high under Trump. Trump uses it especially in dominating the media.

"Trump has talked very tough, often in a way that unsettles even his supporters. But he has not imposed martial law or suspended the Constitution, despite predictions of his opponents. He and his attorney general, William Barr, have several times challenged the traditional rule of law. Unnecessarily, in my view. Using the justice system to reward friends and pay back enemies is petty and Nixonian. Constitutional government might seem wobbly at times, and that could change overnight. Still, democracy has held.

"But leadership has failed. What did Trump want to accomplish? What were his goals? Too often he seemed not to know himself. Decision by tweet, often without warning to those charged with executing his policies, was one of the biggest sticks of dynamite behind the door.

"His relationship and letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un outlined in detail here were not by the foreign policy establishment playbook. But as Trump says repeatedly we had no war. That was an achievement. Diplomacy should always be worth a try. It may have been worth it. Where it goes next is one of the imponderables of the Trump era. Is Trump's and Kim's mutual pledge of fealty—the 'fantasy film'—sustainable as Kim is more threatening? 'We'll see,' as Trump says all the time.

"The shadowy presence of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is another imponderable. Highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments, Kushner's role is jarring. Was there no one else to act as chief of staff? Trump's friends are mostly others with money or social standing. Or those who liked to talk on the phone at night. Was there no real friend who shared Trump's interest in governing who could help and be called to service?

"Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump's First Friend in the Senate, has often been portrayed as embarrassingly and shamelessly subservient to the president, but actually at times provided wise counsel, urging Trump to take a strategic view.

"On January 28, 2020, when Trump's national security adviser and his deputy warned Trump that the virus would be—not might be, but would be—the biggest national security threat to his presidency, the leadership clock had to be reset. It was a detailed forecast, supported by evidence and experience that unfortunately turned out to be correct. Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care.

"For a long time Trump hedged, as did others, and said the virus is worrisome but not yet, not now. There were good reasons to ride both horses, but there should have been more consistent and courageous outspokenness. Leading is almost always risky.

"The virus, the 'plague,' as Trump calls it, put the United States and the world in economic turmoil that may not be just a recession, but a depression. It is a genuine financial crisis, putting tens of millions out of work. Trump's solution is to try to re-create what he believes is the economic miracle he created in the pre-virus time. Democrats, Republicans and Trump did agree to spending at least $2.2 trillion on recovery, which will create its own future problems with growing deficits. The human cost has been almost unimaginable, with more than 130,000 Americans killed by the virus by July and no real end in sight.

"The deep-seated hatreds of American politics flourished in the Trump years. He stoked them, and did not make concerted efforts to bring the country together. Nor did the Democrats. Trump felt deeply wronged by the Democrats who felt deeply wronged by Trump. The walls between them only grew higher and thicker.

"My 17 interviews with Trump presented a challenge. He denounced Fear, my first book on him, as untrue, a 'scam' and a 'joke,' calling me a 'Dem operative.' Several of those closest to him told him that the book was true, and Lindsey Graham told him that I would not put words in his mouth and would report as accurately as possible.

"Trump decided, for reasons that are not clear to me, that he would cooperate. To his mind, he would become a reliable source. He is reliable at times, completely unreliable at others, and often mixed. I have tried to guide the reader as best I can. But the interviews show he vacillated, prevaricated and at times dodged his role as leader of the country despite his 'I alone can fix it' rhetoric.

"As America and the world know, Trump is an overpowering presence. He loves spectacle.

"Trump is a living paradox, capable of being friendly and appealing. He can also be savage and his treatment of people is often almost unbelievable.

"In a time of crisis, the operational is much more important than the political or the personal. For tens of millions the optimistic American story has turned to a nightmare.

"My wife, Elsa Walsh, who had worked for years as a reporter for The Washington Post and then as a staff writer for The New Yorker, and I spent endless hours sifting through the story of the Trump presidency, talking intensely for the last year. What was the remedy, the course that could have been taken? we asked. Was there a way to do better?

"Elsa suggested looking at a previous president who wanted to speak directly to the American people, unfiltered through the media, not just during troubling times but during a major crisis. The model was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over his 12 years as president, FDR gave 30 fireside chats. His aides and the public often clamored for more. FDR said no. It was important to limit his talks to the major events and to make them exceptional. He also said they were hard work, often requiring him to prepare personally for days.

"The evening radio addresses concerned the toughest issues facing the country. In a calm and reassuring voice, he explained what the problem was, what the government was doing about it, and what was expected of the people.

"Often the message was grim. Two days after Japan's December 7, 1941, surprise bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR spoke to the nation. 'We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories” - the changing fortunes of war. So far, the news has been all bad. We have suffered a serious setback.' He added, 'It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war.' It was a question of survival. 'We are now fighting to maintain our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom and common decency.'

"FDR invited the American people in. 'We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.' Japan had inflicted serious damage and the casualty lists would be long. Seven-day weeks in every war industry would be required.

“'On the road ahead there lies hard work—grueling work, every day and night, every hour and every minute.' And sacrifice, which was a 'privilege.'

"Japan was allied with the fascist powers of Germany and Italy. FDR called for a systematic 'grand strategy.'

"A few months later in another fireside chat he asked Americans to pull out a world map to follow along with him as he described why the country needed to fight beyond American's borders. 'Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart.'

"For nearly 50 years, I have written about nine presidents from Nixon to Trump—20 percent of the 45 U.S. presidents. A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect, to define goals and the true national interest. It should be a truth-telling response to the world, especially in crisis. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency.

"When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job."

© Simon & Schuster 2020