In Trump’s ‘cardboard mess’ presidency

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Distributor: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021


AuthorPeter Baker and Susan Glasser


Printer: Double day


Pages: 752


Price: 32 dollars


“His job was not to get things done, but to stop things from happening and prevent accidents.”

This line from Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s detailed history of the Trump administration; The Dealer: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, technically speaking for the first time Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But in reality, it describes dozens of aides to the former president, whose temper tantrums have kept Washington in a frenzy and the White House in permanent damage control for four years. Thoroughly researched and boldly told, The dealer It is a story of disasters averted and dangers realized.

Squeezing the tumultuous events of Donald Trump’s long national fever dream between two covers — even two covers too far apart, as in this 752-page anvil — pays for a single reporter’s skill. However, the husband and wife team of Baker and Glasser definitely pulled it off.

baker, New York TimesGlasser, the chief White House correspondent, and Glasser, the New Yorker’s staff writer, are the perfect pair to write this book, with a combined 60 years of Washington reporting experience and two others to their credit. (I know both of them in professional circles; when Glasser edited Politico Magazine, she hired me to write a history column.)

Even as they report on Trump’s most outrageous traits, Baker and Glassler strive to maintain a professional and dispassionate tone: analytical but not conversational.

In the year With the exception of the 2020 Abraham Accords that opened diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab countries, Trump’s concrete achievements have only been given fleeting attention, of which critics admit there are few. The strength of the pre-Covid economy — for which Trump doesn’t deserve full credit, but which still helped millions of voters see past his mistakes and failures — is rarely discussed. Trump fans will certainly take issue with the Tribune’s consistently negative judgments.

It is not easy to condense them all into a narrative given the number of crises and conflicts that have arisen under Trump. To bring order to the chaos, the authors focus each chapter on their own topic — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexican wall.

Some of the most weighty chapters deal with Trump’s ties to Russia. Former Moscow correspondents and longtime Russia geeks, Baker and Glasser shun the wild conspiracy theories that have been bandied about in left-wing circles over Robert Mueller’s 2016 campaign’s Russia ties.

rather than The dealer Trump’s shocking deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2018 Helsinki summit, the authors bluntly wrote, “Trump admits to accepting Putin’s word for his own intelligence.” Agencies” Chapters on the Ukraine scandal in 2019, when Trump linked aid to his government to deliver dirt on Joe Biden, reaffirmed the weight of the first indictment, which was later overshadowed by the second.

if so The dealer It has a central theme, perhaps the struggle in a “near cartoonishly chaotic White House” for people who are more rational and moral than Trump. Because everyone has different ideas about where to hold back and where to encourage Trump, the White House has become a den of “continuing tribal warfare,” they write.

The gossip and derisive nicknames Trump coin for each other (Kushner is the “Slim Reaper,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is “Nurse Ratched”) makes for interesting reading; They highlight a feat unusual even for a Washington freak show. Every chapter, it seems, has a sentence like this: “While Priebus, Bannon and Kushner don’t like each other, one thing they agree on is that they all hate each other.” [Kellyanne] Conway. Or: “Publicly, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster are portrayed together as members of an elite axis. In private, there were subtleties that sometimes suggested a middle school cafeteria.

His back talk resulted in constant staff turnover, a series of terrible firings, resignations and defenses. Even more surprising is the number of one-time loyalists who have emerged as some of the president’s staunchest critics after his tour of duty.

Many of Trump’s aides — even some, such as National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who deserve harsh criticism for other reasons — have sometimes intervened heroically to rein in Trump. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have been much worse. But Baker and Glasser appear to support the views of Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You can’t change it, you can’t limit it.”

In this case, Schiff was talking specifically about Trump’s “compromise of our elections,” and his words were sadly prescient. The dealer After the November 2020 defeat, Trump’s maddened takeover in a few chapters – Jan. 6, 2021 – set the Capitol ablaze.

In the book’s final chapter, Trump is defeated but not completely defeated in exile at Mar-a-Lago disguised as a movie villain. In Hollywood, endings like this are used to open the door to another episode. But let’s hope Baker and Glassler don’t write a sequel.



©2022 The New York Times News Service



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