Rages, Scandal, Chaos — It's a Normal White House

“Once Trump came into the Oval Office with a newspaper folded into quarters showing some story based on a leak from the White House. ‘What the (expletive) is this?’ Trump had shouted. Presidential flareups were common enough, but Trump often would not let an incident go, roaring on for too long before calming down.’’

“The White House problems . . . were organization and discipline. The staff was too often like a soccer league of 10-year-olds.”

You are probably thinking that you have read more than enough about Michael Wolff’s explosive bestselling book “Fire and Fury,” the core thesis of which (that President Trump is a retarded man-child) received fresh support last week from the president’s own potty-mouth and Twitter feed.

In fact, those quotations are taken from another book about another president’s first year in office — “The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House,” which Bob Woodward published in 1993. I just changed the president’s surname.

A recurrent theme of “The Agenda” is Bill Clinton’s explosively bad temper. His press spokesman George Stephanopoulos told Woodward that “he had seen and experienced Clinton’s temper tantrums . . . many times. . . . Others called them ‘purple fits’ or ‘earthquakes.’ Stephanopoulos simply called it ‘the wave,’ an overpowering, prolonged rage that would shock an outsider.”