My Amazon Review of Peter Baker's and Susan Glasser's "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021"

The Mad King

 

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, the husband-and-wife reporter team, have written a highly detailed chronicle of the four-year reign of the mad king, Donald Trump. In reading the book we become day to day witnesses of how some ostensibly smart people in the administration got caught up in the vortex of the Trump Administration on its roller coaster of lies down into the depths of hell. Instead of having the so-called adult supervision of Trump’s early cabinet with such luminaries as Rex Tillerson and General James Mattis, we ended up with a team of middle school rivals.

 

We see a totally unprepared Trump enter the White House with a host of resentments that are readily manipulated by the likes of a Steve Bannon and a Steven Miller. It begins with his inaugural address focusing on “American carnage” in 2017 and ends with the insurrection on January 6^th. Along the way we witness Trump sucking up to Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki summit.

 

Much of what is written we saw play out on television. This is especially true of the Covid epidemic which was grossly mishandled by Trump. Where Trump could have rightly taken credit for Operation Warp Speed which in record time developed live saving vaccines against Covid, Trump politicized the issue and thereby condemned thousands of vaccine-denying Americans to death.

 

None of this is a pretty picture. Baker and Glasser are short on Trump’s successes such as the 2017 tax cut, the booming economy of 2019, and the dramatic shift in our China policy. Where they are very good is that they describe the tick-tock that brought the Abraham Accords into being which established a settlement between Israel and several Arab states.

 

The book ends with the lead up to January 6^th where the authors, in my opinion, make a prima facie case that Trump is guilty of seditious conspiracy. As soon as the election was over Trump and is clown car of co-conspirators that include Rudy Giuliani, lawyer John Eastman, General Michael Flynn, and former Overstock CEO John Bryan, go all out in trying to overturn the election of Joe Biden with a web of lies and phony lawsuits. Thankfully, there were a few people still around in the administration to thwart them. First and foremost was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley and the better late than never conversion of Attorney General William Barr.

 

What Baker and Glasser leave unanswered is how this congenital liar got into the White House in the first place, how Trump managed to retain power through the end, and why do so many Americans still support him. My question is it support for Trump or tribal hatred of the coastal elites where Baker and Glasser are full members?

For the full Amazon URL see: The Mad King (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Bob Woodward's "Fear: Trump in the White House"

LOSER

Famed journalist Bob Woodward has written a book about an undisciplined narcissist who also happens to be a congenital liar; unfortunately he is the President of the United States. Much of the juicy tidbits in Woodward’s book have already been widely disseminated in the media so I won’t bore you by repeating them.

What comes across loud and clear is that Trump hates trade. He even writes in a briefing packet “Trade is bad”.  Like a stubborn 14 year old he is unyielding in his beliefs about trade even the face of strong evidence placed before him by his staff. As was widely noted Trump was ready to blow up the Korea –U.S. trade agreement just when we were working hand in glove with South Korea on the North Korea nuke problem. Woodward demonstrates how that jerk, Peter Navarro with his mercantilist views, plays to Trump’s worst instincts and somehow has easy access to the Oval Office.

Woodward was very successful in getting leading administration figures to talk to him mostly on deep background, but sometimes on the record. We can hear the voices of Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Trump lawyer John Dowd, Lindsay Graham, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Rob Porter, Reince Priebus, and Rex Tillerson. We continually see Priebus, Cohn, Porter and McMaster valiantly trying save Trump from his worst instincts. Although they had some successes, in the end they failed. It is a shame that Porter’s domestic difficulties forced him out; he was a real check on Trump.

The book ends in March so there is no discussion of the North Korea, G-7 and Putin summits. Hopefully Woodward will soon give us some insights into those events. Further for those looking for evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, it is not here.

Let me close with what Steve Bannon said with respect to the effects of #MeToo on the coming election.

  “Trump is the perfect foil. He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the

     boyfriend that f*****d you over and wasted all those years and (you) gave up

     your youth for, and then dumped you. And the terrible boss that grabbed you

     by the p***y all the time and demeaned you.”

Woodward gives the reader a real flavor of how the Trump White House works and he proves that Jeb Bush was dead right when he said that Donald Trump would be the “chaos president.”

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3T7G4N8GXMMXZ/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B075RV48W3