Not exactly beach reads, but a couple of new books about the last days of the Trump presidency are climbing the best seller lists right now. So, if you thought Trump was out of sight, out of mind, think again. These books won’t let us forget.
They are guaranteed to make us relive the anxiety of those last days when Trump refused to accept the 2020 election results and to concede. They are guaranteed to make us realize just how close to disaster we came when even the top generals in the country were afraid that Trump might declare martial law or start a war with Iran so that he could cling to power.
Two New Trump Books
I have just finished reading the second of two books. The first was Michael Wolff’s Landslide. This was Wolff’s third non-fiction account of the Trump presidency. I blogged about the first in the trilogy, Fire and Fury, here. Landslide covers just the last 77 days between the election and the Inauguration of Joe Biden
The second recently published book is Frankly, We Did Win The Election by Michael C. Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter. It is a more ambitious project about the last year of the Trump presidency. Bender conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 150 members of the Trump White House, Cabinet and campaign. His sources shared, among other things, their recollections, texts and emails.
Two Books, Two Different Styles
Bender writes attributed dialogue — as if he was a fly on the wall in the most important top-level meetings in the White House.
Wolff writes in a gossipy, colorful style offering more of an analysis about why certain key figures found themselves in the Trump White House — and what they did there.
Wolff’s spotlight shines perhaps most brightly on Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner. One suspects that it is Jared himself (maybe with Ivanka) who was the source for much of the insider information in Landslide.
Jared & Ivanka
How else to explain the clear thrust to describe Jared as the driving force behind Trump’s key accomplishments in prison reform and in the MidEast peace accords? And, in the description of Jared’s role as Pacifier-in-Chief?
Everything that happened in the Trump White House was a product of the president’s fevered impulses : a combination of resentments , dramatic flair , score settling , lack of knowledge or understanding , and a sense of what moved his audience .
But this was filtered through a management system Jared had created to lower the immediate temperature precisely to the point where the president would not notice and Jared would not be blamed .
One of Kushner’s own consistent justifications for his role , and one of his stated reasons for being in his father – in – law’s White House , was that he made things less bad than they would otherwise have been
Or how to explain the attempt to rehabilitate Ivanka on January 6 2021, Insurrection Day by presenting her as the calming influence on Daddy; the one who was sent in to beg the president to call off his fans who were storming inside the Capitol looking to hang VP Mike Pence?
Does this mean Jared and Ivanka are positioning themselves for their own political glory somewhere down the road? Or, is it because they just want to be liked again by the New York City intellectual, liberal elites where they were once accepted insiders? Who knows? And, at this point, who cares?
Weightier Study
Bender’s book feels like a weightier study with footnotes and more detail about the key scenes in the Trump presidency. These are the scenes or scenarios that most of us — who woke to immediately switch on cable TV News every morning of those long four years — still remember with a certain sense of dread in the pit of our stomachs like the tear-gassing of protestors in Lafayette Square.
Bender also interviewed and spent time with a dedicated band of Trump fans (the “Front Row Joes”) who travelled around the country to attend his rallies even at the height of the pandemic.
Out-From-Under-A-Rock
But it is Wolff who has an excruciating insight into the “crazies” that swell the numbers of the Trump base — and are so sought after by Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate. Fans who were acknowledged even by Trump himself to be his “out-from-under-a-rock fan base.”
Wolff writes about how “dumbfounded and awestruck” the White House aides closest to Trump were when they saw the “crazies” storm the Capitol walls and run amok in the building.
Wolff adds: “In some sense , all the currents of the conservative movement — its way of life , its power structure , its institutional identity , its carefully assembled philosophy — had been custom – designed to avoid this moment .
“The weirdos and misfits ; the extremists ; the apocalyptic people ; the paranoids ; the conspiracy believers ; the embattled remnants of an active racist world ; the followers of Robert Welch , the John Birch Society founder; and the admirers of James B . Utt , the congressman and racist from California’s Orange County ( what Fortune magazine in 1968 called American’s “ nut country ” ) ; and generals like Curtis LeMay , a face of the right wing in the 1950s and ’ 60s , ready to nuke whoever back to the Stone Age — all these had been for so long sanitized out of the conservative movement .
“But now , it turned out , the real right wing had not gone away at all , but , apparently , flourished unseen. ”
A third non-fiction account of Trump’s last days will be out next week. This one, titled I Alone Can Fix It by Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post journalists Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.