Assuming that the reporting and sources in Bob Woodward's book about the early stages of the Trump Administration are accurate (which I do for the most part), there are two things that serve as massive warning flags that anybody who cares about the nation's physical and economic security should be absolutely terrified of. Neither of then has anything to do with Russian conspiracies or obstruction of justice. Both of them are troubling on their own, but both are also indicative of massive deficiencies in Donald Trump's ability to comprehend the complexities of the world we live in.
The first thing that frightens me is how Donald Trump is unable to comprehend the argument that all of the military assistance and the troops we have stationed in South Korea are actually to the benefit of the United States. He apparently fixated on the fact that the United States was paying for a missile defense system in South Korea and was livid that the Koreans were not paying for it. The fact that there was nearly a fifteen minute difference in the United States' ability to detect a North Korean missile launch and, therefore fifteen extra minutes to shoot it down before it could reach the United States, was apparently lost on him.
There were other intricacies to the benefits to the United States of our relationship with South Korea that numerous officials tried to explain to Trump, but his failure to grasp even this most simple of them is demonstrative of a startling lack of sophistication by Trump. That is not to say that Trump would ultimately need to agree with those arguing to keep the South Korea relationship as it was. The problem is that he did not even seem to grasp their arguments, even as simple as they were.
The other main source of fear, at least for me, was Trump's utter disregard of facts in the realm of economics. This came up in the realm of his obsession with trade deficits as a barometer for economic success. There is an account of an attempt to explain why trade deficits do not work the way Trump thinks they do, particularly in the context of the United States' transition to a service (as opposed to manufacturing) economy. When backed into a corner on his thinking, and confronted with all of the data to the contrary, Trump would simply say (paraphrasing) "This is what I think, I've thought it for 30 years, and if you don't agree with me you are wrong."
At one point, this came in the context of tariffs against China. It was explained to Trump that if China wanted to retaliate, they could raise the prices on antibiotics, of which they make the VAST majority consumed in the United States or they could refuse to export them to the United States. The United States buy them from a third party country. Germany was used as an example. Germany would mark them up to take a cut of the profit, like any middle-man would do. Trump's response (again, paraphrasing, but this one is pretty close): "Then we'll buy from another country."
There is no shortage of examples of people in the administration trashing Trump in the book. They call him all sorts of variation of stupid. Those are the quotes getting most of the attention. There were moments in the book that left me thinking, "Trump actually seemed to treat that particular situation with the gravity it deserved, regardless of whether I agreed with the outcome." Such moments were in defiance of my expectations and offered brief hopes of improvement to come.
Those moments usually were quickly followed by another demonstration of Trump's disregard for the value of facts or the way the government is supposed to work. It are Trump's own words that are the most fear inducing. They betray a lack of sophistication. They betray an (at best) outdated and juvenile idea of how countries and the world operate. The realization that we have a willfully ignorant man unable or unwilling to consider that leading the United States is not the same as running a private real estate company with nuclear weapons... that is fear.
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