I seldom look at the New York Times bestseller list, and when I glanced at it a couple of months ago I remembered why. Aside from a pop-science book by the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, there wasn’t anything on it I would want to read, ever. I paged through the top 10 on the bestseller shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. There was a memoir by a writer in her thirties about her long struggle to do something worth writing a memoir about; a plump sermon on national piety called, of course, The Soul of America; a book about opioids. And six books about Donald Trump. Evidently Trump has swallowed up the book-publishing industry the way he has swallowed up everything else. I bought all six, along with another by Ann Coulter, whose new book about Trump has failed to make the list. I like Ann and she looked lonely.
Once upon a time, it was common for TV shows, their plots and stories, to be spun off from books. Today books are just as likely to be spun off from TV shows. This is particularly true of political books, which follow the protocols laid down by the chat’n’grunt fare of cable news. The book buyers are mainly TV watchers, and the books they buy are meant to be rewarding in the way they must find cable news rewarding: They’re fast-paced, personal, one-sided, exaggerated, confident, dubious. They are well suited for an era superintended by a man who is both the chief consumer and most notable creation of MSNBC, CNN, and, preeminently, Fox.
1. The Villain
When I got home with my big, very heavy bag from Barnes & Noble, I started at the top with that week’s number-one seller, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. The nominal author, Omarosa Manigault Newman, acquired what fame she has—she thinks it rivals Trump’s, others disagree—on the first season of Trump’s own reality show, The Apprentice. She was cast as a selfish, unscrupulous knife-fighter. From the book it’s clear the producers knew what they were doing.
Omarosa (she prefers the solo name, like Napoleon and Cher) stayed in touch with Trump over the years, trying to stoke her fading fame with appearances on syndicated afternoon talk shows and more reality TV. She calls her relationship with Trump “symbiotic”; I think she means to say “parasitic.” Many of her post-Apprentice jobs were connected in some way to Trump, including a stint as “West Coast editor” of the company that owns the National Enquirer. Trump arranged a backroom deal for her to get the job when she agreed to drop a lawsuit against the company. Seeing the work of the Enquirer up close, she takes the line of Captain Renault in Casablanca. “I’m stunned”—stunned!—“that I was involved in this kind of shady dealing.”
As a liberal Democrat, Omarosa was originally for Hillary Clinton as the 2016 campaign approached. She volunteered to raise money for Clinton’s campaign. “As a celebrity my networks were vast.” But Clinton proved herself unfit for high office in mid-2015 when her campaign declined to hire Omarosa as an outreach director to African-Americans. Clinton, you’ll remember, lost. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Trump hired Omarosa and—nota bene—won. In her book, she spends too much time on the 2016 campaign, rehashing events that will be familiar to anyone unlucky enough to have been alive at the time. Much of what she thinks will be news to her readers, isn’t. She thinks she’s the first one to discover that the pivotal moment in Trump’s decision to run for president was President Obama’s pitiless mockery of him at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011—a theory that’s as common as dirt. There’s a “Yuh think?” observation every few pages. She suspects Dennis Rodman, an Apprentice costar, is high a lot of the time. Gary Busey has poor hygiene. “Donald was not a student of history.”
These are minor shortcomings. Unhinged is otherwise pure pleasure. The impress of Omarosa’s personality on the page is indelible and mesmerizing. There’s a reason her first book was titled The Bitch Switch. She says she’s a lot like Trump, and it shows in the vanity, the thin skin, the relentless quest to settle scores. Her treatment of Betsy DeVos, to cite one instance, is brutal. She insists her differences with the secretary of education were matters of principle. The alert reader will find a more compelling motive in the time DeVos’s traveling entourage stranded Omarosa at their hotel because she was late. They told her to call an Uber. Nobody tells Omarosa to call an Uber. As a consequence, DeVos’s educational reforms will destroy the nation’s schools. “Be afraid,” Omarosa tells America’s parents. “Be very, very afraid.”
After the election, Omarosa lobbied for a high-ranking White House job. Already she was beginning to suspect Trump was a lying racist—the evidence piled up pretty quick—but when friends asked why she didn’t hop off the train, her answer, she says, was always the same: “Trumpworld needed me and I didn’t want to let them, or the nation, down.” She was blocked from the position she craved, director of communications. Reince Priebus slow-walked and double-talked her, but Omarosa soon discovered the real saboteur: Paula White, the freelance pastor who is often described as the president’s “spiritual adviser,” which must be something like Trumpworld’s version of the Maytag repairman.
White, it turns out, wanted to install her own candidate in the communications job. This calls for one of Omarosa’s drive-by insinuations: “I could not stop myself from contemplating whether her position as his spiritual advisor had ever been missionary.” In time Omarosa settles for another job as White House liaison to the African-American community—one thinks again of the Maytag repairman—and she reconciles with White after what Omarosa calls a come-to-Jesus meeting. The heart hiccups at the very thought of a come-to-Jesus meeting with Omarosa. Jesus wouldn’t come to a come-to-Jesus meeting with Omarosa.
She takes her place in the new administration. “As soon as I took my seat at my desk,” she writes, “I . . . was filled with awe at the magnitude of the responsibility of running the government. What I would do from this desk, and beyond it, would impact many lives and make a difference for families.” It didn’t work out that way, of course. Trump never did let her run the government. Instead he used her as a kind of cowcatcher on the Trump train, pushing aside nettlesome African-American critics whenever they appeared, as Trump huddled in the caboose. “Don’t leave me alone with these people,” she says he whispered when she escorted him into a room with a group of pastors. Soon her bands of loyalty began to fray, and when John Kelly fired her not long after he became chief of staff, they snapped altogether. At once her eyes were opened to the Trump reality.
If Kelly hadn’t fired her, or if she’d left the White House under her own steam with a suitable bon voyage party and a presidential pinch, this book wouldn’t exist; or rather, it would be a much different book, and a much lesser one. Unhinged is such a pleasure to read because it is unashamedly, thrillingly vindictive. Yes, she makes feints here and there toward principle and policy, as in her demolition of DeVos, but Omarosa isn’t really here to argue income inequality or abortion rights; she’s here for character assassination. The cartoon villain Omarosa has played since The Apprentice comes vividly alive. For this we have to credit the consummate skill of her ghostwriter, a have-pen-will-travel veteran named Valerie Frankel. In her epic acknowledgments—Omarosa seems to thank everyone except the lumberjacks who chopped down the trees to make the paper—she commends Frankel for helping her relive the “painful subject matter” of her time in Trumpworld. Pain? I’m not buying it. I bet she loved every minute of it.
2. The Judge
Among the many figures Valerie Frankel has served as wordsmith are Ivana Trump (Raising Trump), Jersey Shore’s Snooki Polizzi (Baby Bumps), and Fox News’s “Judge” Jeanine Pirro (He Killed Them All). As it happened, the next bestseller from my B&N grab bag was Judge Pirro’s Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. For a couple decades now, the judge has been, as Trump once was, a third-tier demi-celebrity in her native New York, where standards for celebrity are notably lax. She has fallen in and out of politics, in and out of TV. The “Judge” appellation used in the name of her TV show and emblazoned on the cover of her book refers to her two years as an elected judge on the Westchester County Court a quarter-century ago. For the moment she anchors a weekend show with Fox, which her publisher has now re-created in book form.
Given the alliterative scheme of her title, it’s a mystery why Judge Jeanine didn’t include another of the president’s favorite epithets, Losers. Maybe she decided not to violate the Rule of Three; probably not. In any case, she misses the steady hand of Valerie Frankel. Her honor gets off to a rocky start and never quite recovers. “We know what the liberal media think of Trump voters,” she writes on page 2. “They’re deplorables, idiots, rednecks, and people who cling to God, guns, and religion. To those charges, I plead guilty—guilty and proud!”
Having pleaded guilty to being an idiot, she then proceeds to present her evidence—14 chapters’ worth, most of them seething with alliteration: “Lying and Leaking to Fix an Election,” “Lying Liberal RINOS,” and so on. When any of those titular words appears in the text, it is capitalized for emphasis. “LIAR Obama liked what he saw in LIAR Brennan.” “LIBERALS, you have a decision to make.” However questionable her legal skill, this judge knows from branding.
The book is marred by various stylistic tricks that I believe are meant to make her sound as frightening as she looks in the cover photo. This too is branding. The judge’s ex-husband lawyered some of Trump’s real estate deals, and she had Thanksgiving dinner at Mar-a-Lago, so she claims a special intimacy with her leonine, lubricious LEADER. She’s taken on the cadences of his speech, and her arguments have the meandering quality we expect from the president.
So there we are, just reading along, minding our own business, when suddenly, out of nowhere, she falls into using the second-person pronoun. Readers will wonder why she’s addressing them this way—and then they’ll realize she’s decided to talk directly to Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton or Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro or any of several other people who would rather be waterboarded than pick up her book and read it. “Meryl, you say you didn’t know about Harvey [Weinstein]’s predatory behavior. Really?” She can’t wait for an answer because De Niro has come into view. “Bobby, I think you’re taking your roles too seriously.” Whoops, here’s Hillary. “Hillary, could it be you said nothing because you have experience with pedophiles?” Then she collars Michelle and gives her a tongue-lashing about feminist hypocrisy.
It’s terribly unnerving, like eavesdropping on a schizoid outside the subway shouting at the people inside his head. “I don’t know about you,” she writes in summary, meaning you the reader, “but I’ve had it with all of them” meaning them her imaginary enemies.
Them includes “the media” too, who are the foot soldiers of the anti-Trump conspiracy she mentions in her subtitle. The judge believes, as so many Trump supporters do, that there is a thing called “the media,” much in the way that economists believe there is a thing called “the economy” or environmentalists talk about the thing called “the environment.” If there weren’t such a thing, if there weren’t this unitary object to concentrate on, they wouldn’t have much reason to get out of bed in the morning.
In truth, there are all kinds of media—print, digital, radio, TV, unfortunately Twitter—and there are many ideological shades within those media: liberal, left-wing, conservative, right-wing, even moderate. It’s a gorgeous mosaic! In the current usage, however, “the media” is just a term for any person we encounter in print or on TV or NPR that we find objectionable. Treating the media as a thing can be a convenient shorthand but it can also make you sound dumb. The judge has a news talk show on a news network surrounded by dozens of journalists who think the way she does, but you can be sure when they trash the media they’re not looking in the mirror.
Distinctions are not helpful in a made-for-TV book, so she avoids them. It’s certainly true you could throw a brick through the newsroom of the New York Times or NPR—who hasn’t been tested in this way?—and never hit a Republican, except maybe the IT guy. And you’d have a fair chance of knocking off several social justice warriors moonlighting as editors or reporters. But distinctions must be made. A careful and responsible reporter like Maggie Haberman at the Times or John Dickerson at CBS should not get tossed in with a much less responsible reporter like Philip Bump at the Washington Post, who is nevertheless a great improvement over the hysterical showboat Jim Acosta at CNN, who, hard to believe, is superior to a frothing youngster at ThinkProgress. This myth of the unitary media is irresistible because it allows you such wide latitude. Pirro says that the “media” don’t give Trump a fair shake, which is 90 percent true if you’re talking about the editors and reporters of the liberal media. Then she says the “media” routinely make fun of Trump’s 12-year-old son, which is not true at all unless you’re talking about a commenter at the Huffington Post.
Worse, she doesn’t have the courage of her anti-media convictions. Her chapter on the LYING RINOS goes after Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for sucking up to the LYING media. She gets all her facts lined up and commences firing. The chapter has 20 footnotes. Sixteen of them rely on articles in the Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, CNN, USA Today, etc. I’m not sure she’s even paying attention. “The Fake News,” she writes in disgust, “won’t tell you much about the amazing women who hold senior positions in the Trump administration.” She then lists Nikki Haley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Gina Haspel . . . all of them victims of a shameful media blackout.
LLL is a work of anger but also adulation. “As a Christian,” she writes of Trump, “he took on those who made believers uncomfortable for stating their Judeo-Christian beliefs. He stood for the hardworking, forgotten men and women. . . . He reignited the flame of liberty . . . a man whose views were most like the moral vision of the framers of the Constitution—a man whose philosophy was based not on politics, but reason.”
Pirro’s little lies and omissions are instructive. She praises Trump’s performance and his “epic destruction” of Jeb Bush at a pivotal debate in 2016. “Can you imagine any other Republican—any other politician—having the balls to say the Iraq war was a colossal mistake in front of a hostile crowd in South Carolina?” In fact, Trump went much further. “We should have never have been in Iraq,” he said that night. “They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew that there were none.” Which is effectively an accusation that George W. Bush and his advisers are guilty of monstrous crimes—mass murder and treason, just for starters. Now that’s balls. Judge Jeanine doesn’t quote this or any of a hundred other examples of Trump’s verbal incontinence. In a pro-Trump TV book, you’ll never find mention of his famous dismissal of John McCain’s heroism or of his insults to a Gold Star family.
But they don’t call me Little Mary Sunshine for nothing; my unconquerable optimism leads me always to see the bright side. It is indeed reassuring that Trump supporters like our judge have let these repulsive episodes and others like them slide down the memory hole (they need a pretty big hole). Some of Trump’s behavior is so indefensible that even his fans prefer to forget it. At least they recognize it as despicable. So we’ve got that going for us.
3. The Consultant
Guess who I found lying underneath Jeanine Pirro in my book bag? Rick Wilson. He’s a frequent contributor to MSNBC and a longtime Republican political consultant. He’s also a prominent member of the Never Trump movement, which holds its regular meetings in the spare bedroom at Evan McMullin’s house. Wilson’s book is called Everything Trump Touches Dies. With my own Never Trump sympathies, I wanted very much to like it. But the author kept getting in the way.
Like the judge, Wilson lets his readers know right from the start that he’s one tough hombre. How tough?
“Sure, I want to save the Republic from Trump and Trumpism,” he writes in the introduction, “but I don’t mind telling members of my party to f— themselves on the way there. . . . I’m not some hand-wringing do-gooder, and if you’ve fought either by my side or against me, you know I’m down to scrap.”
Pretty goddamn tough.
When he stops strutting, Wilson writes with the zippy, rat-a-tat-tat patter of a first-rate adman—a political adman, at that. Political consultants tend to be vastly entertaining talkers. His tone is slangy, sarcastic, and abusive, and he manages to keep it going for the entire book even though you wish he wouldn’t. Imagine a “lightning round” of cable-news pundits that lasts for six hours, without a tape delay to bleep the bad words. Wilson is overfond of the word “f—.” His enemies aren’t just insufferable; they’re “utterly f—ing insufferable.” Also, he needs to find a synonym for “shitty,” another of his go-to descriptors. (I suggest crapulent because it looks the part. It’s not a synonym for shitty but none of his readers will check.) In fact, he needs to steer clear of that anatomical region altogether. We think of the author and not Stephen Miller when he writes that a nonplussed Miller, a Trump staffer, looked like he was going “to crap out a kitten.” (We don’t think of the kitten either.) Freud taught us we would outgrow the anal stage of psychosexual development by the age of 3. Freud was wrong about a lot of things.
Wilson says he’s criticizing Trump from the right, and I think this is mostly true, but he also shows signs, like many Never Trumpers, of marching right past anti-Trumpism on into anti-conservatism. The sheer size of his contempt for Trump voters, not merely Trump, forces him in that direction. When he writes that “MAGA-hat fans” “revile” elites, he feels compelled to add: “ ‘Revile’ means hate. Sorry. I know you’re in an oxy stupor much of the time, so I’ll try to move slowly and not use big words.” So I guess crapulent is out too.
One clue to his ideological direction is that he seems much more comfortable with liberal cant than conservative cant. Wilson’s sources, to judge by his footnotes, range from Nicholas Kristof and Michael Wolff on the left to Vogue and the Huffington Post on the left. And so: The Republican tax bill last year was a sop to the rich; Trump’s ban on immigration from a handful of majority-Muslim countries was a “Muslim ban”; Trumpers are trying to suppress the free speech rights of NFL players and “purge America of the brown people.” “Not every Trump supporter is a racist,” he concedes. “However, every racist . . . is a Trump supporter.” Just so. And not every liberal calls the immigration ban a “Muslim ban,” but everyone who calls the immigration ban a “Muslim ban” is a liberal.
As with Judge Jeanine, the intensity of Wilson’s hatred pushes him into errors of fact and logic. It’s simply not true that Paul Ryan will “defend any outrage” from Trump. He says Ted Cruz “responded meekly” when Trump insulted his wife and slandered his father. That’s not true either. He thinks “the GOP is the party of big government, and it’s all Trump’s fault.” Alas, Trump arrived rather late to that party: So far as I know, Fred Barnes coined the term “big government conservative” to describe Jack Kemp and his allies in the late 1980s, and he didn’t mean it as an insult. A decade later, Robert Novak accused the Republican congressional leadership of big government conservatism, and he did mean it as an insult. The administration of George W. Bush was big government conservatism par excellence. In fact, most of Trump’s agenda, from environmental deregulation to education policy, is far less statist and more respectful of liberty than Bush’s self-described compassionate conservatism could ever be. Never Trumpers do the cause no favor by pretending this isn’t so.
Tu quoque isn’t exactly a logical fallacy, though the people who use it in argument—which includes every political partisan today—think it amounts to one. Really, it’s more a rhetorical trick. Veterans of the schoolyard wars remember the clever retort: “I know you are but what am I?” Lately it’s been referred to as “whataboutism.” It comes in handy as Republicans and Democrats switch places on issue after issue: the importance of character in politics, the probity of the FBI, the value of special counsels, the evil of government debt and overspending, the geopolitical ambitions of Russia, the need for civility, and on and on.
Wilson devotes many pages to trying to trap Trump voters in his tu quoque. They hated Barack Obama’s cult-like following, but what about their own Trump cult? They hated Obama’s “empty promises” about job creation in the solar industry, but what about Trump’s empty promises about job creation in the coal industry? They hated Obama’s Ivy League credentialism but love Trump’s boasting about his Wharton degree. Too true! But so what? Nearly every tu quoque can be easily reversed: Liberals were awed by Obama’s elite education and mock Trump’s degree from Wharton. They mock the Trump cult while gazing adoringly at the official portraits of Barack and Michelle. Whataboutism doesn’t get us anywhere. It’s not argument, it’s self-pleasuring.
I wonder if either Wilson or the judge, the Never Trumper and the Forever Trumper, see any of the other in themselves, assuming they give one another any thought at all. You wouldn’t have to worry about seating them side by side at your dinner party. They could discuss how much they hate Paul Ryan for being a sellout; after an hour or so of that they could start in on the sellout Mitch McConnell—indeed the entire Republican “establishment,” they both believe, has relinquished the right to call itself Republican. Wilson thinks he’s the real Republican around here; the judge believes she and her fellow Forever Trumpers are the vessel of true Republicanism.
Another trait they have in common is that they’re both wrong about this. If the last 30 years have taught us anything, it is that there is no ideological core around which the Republican party revolves. There is no real Republican. There’s just Republicans, corralled together for reasons they’re increasingly uncertain about. The chief thing that holds each party together is contempt for the opposite team. And many Never Trumpers are losing even this binding glue of ill will for the other party—understandably, I guess, since they and Democrats share a common enemy. Wilson wanders off into several digressions about the political ineptitude and overreaching of his former adversaries, but these read like fraternal criticisms. He insults Trump Republicans with a zest, bordering sometimes on cruelty, that he would never direct against any Democrat, no matter how bovine or credulous.
4. The Historian
Partisan animus is the starting point, the very foundation, for Dinesh D’Souza’s fascinating Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party. It’s a Trump book that’s more than a book about Trump and, among my pile of bestsellers, all the more refreshing because of it.
D’Souza wants to usher his readers through American political history from the origin of our political parties to the present moment. Much of his history is accurate and well-told. D’Souza may revile—it means “hate”—progressives, with their fantasy of history’s inevitable upward march to utopia. But his own view of American history also shows a steady direction and end point: It climaxes with the appearance of Donald Trump on the world-historical stage and the subsequent vanquishing of the Democratic party and its “plantation politics.”
His argument—and it is an argument—reminds me of those Victorian-era “ascent of man” charts that would trace the evolution of humanity in silhouette, from chimp to knuckle-dragging Neanderthal to club-wielding caveman to, at the final phase, a Victorian gentleman with splendid posture. The chart was meant to demonstrate scientifically that all human history had reached its perfection in the people who invented the chart. D’Souza’s chart would show the chimp and the Neanderthal and the caveman evolving into a tall, well-fed figure with Dreamsicle hair, wearing an unbuttoned suit coat and long tie. We have, in other words, arrived.
D’Souza’s tone is all business: solemn and pedantic and ostentatiously careful. The plantation politics of the subtitle is a nearly 200-year-old strategy of the Democratic party to maintain the power of its elite by keeping the lower classes, particularly black people, docile and dependent. A few things have changed since the antebellum South, he acknowledges. The welfare state is the new plantation; identity politics and government handouts are the new slavery, albeit without the violence, the degrading labor, the enforced separation of families, and the . . . um . . . slavery. From its slave-owning founder, Thomas Jefferson, to the identity politician Barack Obama, the political bloodlines of the Democratic party remain unbroken, having survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights era. “Racism,” D’Souza writes, “is the defining characteristic of progressives and the Democratic party.”
For D’Souza’s target audience this is a deeply satisfying thesis, and there’s enough truth in it to allow Republicans the same holier-than-thou preening they find so utterly f—ing insufferable in Democrats. And it’s a common theme in works of right-wing revisionism like The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. But if you’re crazy enough to jump down the rabbit hole of his footnotes, you’ll see that D’Souza’s apparently fastidious method covers a lot of hedging, speculation, and misinterpretation.
To take one small example: Lyndon Johnson is a pivotal figure in D’Souza’s tale. Johnson, he writes, “is a man who, according to a memo filed by FBI agent William Branigan, seems to have been in the Ku Klux Klan.” He was? “This memo was only revealed in recent months, with the release of the JFK Files. Progressive media . . . have largely ignored it, trying to pretend it does not exist. Branigan cites a source with direct knowledge.” D’Souza then treats LBJ’s Klan membership as settled fact and a building block in his case against the Democrats.
I’ve got to side with the progressive media on this one. The FBI memo that D’Souza is using to misinform his readers was written in early 1964. It was released last year in the (presumably) final dump of government documents about the Kennedy assassination. It is a piece of raw intelligence, unverified, repeated with no assessment of its credibility. Branigan, the FBI agent, writes that a “confidential informant” told him that the editor of a magazine published by the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana, himself a Klan member, had told the informant that he, the editor, had seen documented proof that Johnson was a member in the 1930s.
No proof was provided. Even the website D’Souza cites as his source for this damning nugget, thehayride.com, says the claim of Johnson’s Klan membership amounts to nothing more than a rumor.
D’Souza’s embrace of rumors is selective. Another FBI memo in the same document dump, for example, reported that the KGB thought Johnson had plotted to kill Kennedy. By D’Souza’s standard of historical evidence, this memo should be enough to write, “Lyndon Johnson seems to have plotted to kill his predecessor.” Wisely he keeps this bombshell from his readers.
Johnson is a pivotal figure for D’Souza because he presided over the period in which the party of racism somehow became the party of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. In an ingenious and completely unsupported argument, D’Souza tells us that these legislative landmarks constituted a spectacular feat of misdirection.
As white racism dimmed following World War II, D’Souza says, Johnson knew the party of racism would start losing white voters to the non-racist Republican party, which already claimed a large number of black members. Political doom awaited Johnson and his friends unless he could replace those white voters as they fled. He decided to steal black voters from the Republicans. The Great Society, including civil rights legislation, was constructed as a snare to draw them in. When the trap was sprung at last, black Americans found themselves confined to LBJ’s new “urban plantation” (which in fact had been designed by Martin Van Buren in the 1840s—don’t ask). The civil rights bills thus prove the Democrats’ undying commitment to racism, which has been demonstrated by their commitment to passing racist civil rights bills, which were passed as a racist plot, which proves Democrats have an undying commitment to racism. History is full of little ironies.
A dark and sinister story, yes, but as an experienced marketer, D’Souza knows the value of a happy ending. A new Lincoln, he tells his readers, by way of bucking them up, has come to rescue Republicans. The similarities between the two men are eerie indeed. “Trump, like Lincoln”—when a sentence starts like that, you’ve just got to keep reading—“came out of nowhere; both men were outsiders.” Both won close elections. The opponents of both men portrayed them as dangers to constitutional liberties. Both men were hamstrung by a “befuddled Republican party.” Both men set out to smash the plantation and free the oppressed.
And this time, D’Souza suggests hopefully, Trump might just do it. “Trump somehow knows all this, either through learning or just intuitively,” he writes. (I think I’ll go with “intuitively.”) “With our support,” he continues, “Trump can bring to an end the vicious train of exploitation that the Democratic Party has wrought for nearly two hundred years.”
Death of a Nation is as thoroughgoing as a political polemic can be, malice from start to finish. If his political opponents are truly as depraved as D’Souza asserts, then it follows—as he would say in his pedantic mode—that they are probably unfit for the rewards and obligations of democratic self-government. “The Democrats are like the Corleones,” he writes. They’re running a criminal operation, not a political party. It is a small step from Lock her up! to Lock ’em all up!
5 & 6. The Russophiles
I wish I had Dinesh’s gift for an upbeat ending. But I don’t. At the bottom of my bestseller pile—and you thought we’d never get there!—is a dispiriting sight: two fat books about Trump, Russians, and the slow-moving attempt by Robert Mueller to wrap them all around each other’s throats. Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump is, as you will guess, an attempt to exonerate the president by accusing his accusers. Craig Unger is on the other team. His House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia is built on the assumption that Trump is guilty as charged, whatever the charge is.
The books are premature, to state the obvious. Nobody but Mueller and his associates knows what information he has collected or where it points. But these are TV books. You never hear a pundit say “I dunno” on TV, do you? Ignorance is no excuse not to publish.
Anyone with the patience to wait for Mueller to finish his investigation will read the books with diminished enthusiasm. Since Watergate we have seen so many promising scandals collapse under the weight of their own expectations: BCCI, Iran-contra, Whitewater, the Plame affair, Uranium One—so many timelines to construct and memorize, so many minor characters to keep straight, so much testimony to parse, so much smoke and so little fire. The Russian scandals, whatever they are, are beginning to have the anticipatory feel of a letdown.
By my count House of Trump, House of Putin is the fifth volume in Craig Unger’s ongoing series on the depravities of the Bush family, neoconservatives, and Republicans generally. He’s a freelance scandalmonger. I’ve often wondered from afar how he does it—how he keeps his blood up under the mass of tedious details he collects and savors and arranges and rearranges in sinister patterns. Now, having read House of Trump, I have an answer: He suffers from a case of permanent overstimulation.
In his introduction, Unger promises “explosive allegations,” which are different from explosive facts; in the telling they don’t offer much bang for the buck. For instance, he says Russian intelligence operatives “studiously examined the weak spots in America’s pay-for-play political culture.” It would be an explosive allegation if he said they didn’t. Also, “millions of dollars have been flowing from individuals and companies from, or with ties to, Russia to GOP politicians, including . . . Mitch McConnell, for more than twenty years.” This awkward sentence refers to donations from Len Blavatnik, an American citizen born in Russia. His explosive donations were finally uncovered, like the purloined letter, in filings with the Federal Election Commission! Those Russians are tricky bastards.
And even when one of Unger’s allegations does explode, it promptly fizzles. He promises his book “will show that President Trump . . . was likely the subject of one or more operations that produced kompromat (compromising materials) on him regarding sexual activities.” Now we’re talking! Then the explosive allegation goes unmentioned until page 128, where we read: “According to Oleg Kalugin [a Russian defector], Trump likely had his first taste of sexual kompromat in 1987. There were similar reports, unconfirmed, about possible comparable incidents in 1996.” “Likely”? There’s no footnote and only one more reference, on page 214: Unger mentions an interview with an unnamed American mobster who told him two of his buddies in the Russian mafia have “talked about” Trump’s kompromat but hadn’t seen it. Kaboom.
The ultimate explosive allegation, of course, is that Trump is actually a Manchurian candidate, “implanted” in the White House by the Russian government—“a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House as the most powerful man on earth.” Unger proves no such thing and almost certainly never will. It’s hard to believe that even the Russians are incompetent enough to leave a trail that could be pieced together by an American freelance, no matter how caffeinated he is.
Still, in its paranoia and credulity, House of Putin offers a sense of why Trump’s opponents are so eager to believe the Manchurian candidate phantasm. Unger gathers in one place what we know about Trump’s dealings with Russians beginning in the late 1970s. One thing is beyond doubt: As a businessman on the make in 1980s New York, Donald Trump didn’t mind hanging out with very ripe characters, mobsters in particular. The surprise isn’t that a New York City real estate developer is as sleazy as Trump. The surprise is that a New York City real estate developer got elected president. For liberals, the surprise has been so great that they’ll believe anything to account for it—even a fantasy lifted from the plot of a Frank Sinatra movie.
Gregg Jarrett, an analyst with Fox News, also warns us of the enemy within. But he’s found a different enemy: not Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy with a murderous background, but Robert Mueller, a former Marine with a Bronze Star.
Jarrett’s book is breezier than Unger’s book. Its narrative will be familiar to anyone who has jogged past a television playing Fox News in the last six months. Faced with theories about Trump and Russia, plausible and implausible, Jarrett and his colleagues have adopted a strategy long known to defense lawyers: If a story looks incriminating, create another one and distract the jury with that.
Jarrett’s story is studded with facts that MSNBC viewers have probably never been exposed to: 13 of the 16 lead lawyers on the Mueller investigation are registered Democrats, none is Republican, and most of them have given money to Democratic candidates and causes; except in antitrust law, there is no such crime as “collusion”; there is such a person as Bruce Ohr, who works for the Department of Justice and whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, the research firm that wanted dirt on Donald Trump and hired an intelligence agent named Christopher Steele with money funneled from Hillary Clinton’s campaign; Steele was friends with Bruce Ohr; James Comey appointed Andrew McCabe as his deputy to help handle the investigation into Hillary’s emails a few months after Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia and a friend of the Clintons, persuaded McCabe’s wife to run for the state senate and came bearing $675,000 for her campaign fund.
You’ll notice that none of these facts, pointed though they are, has anything to do with the Russians or whatever else Mueller is investigating. For a curious reader the most frustrating thing about Unger’s and Jarrett’s books is that they seem to have been written in different universes. A book by a Trump supporter that addressed even the milder claims in Unger’s confetti machine would be a genuine public service; a Never Trump response to the Jarrett/Fox scenario would be nice too. Instead the two books here, though ostensibly on the same general subject, talk right past each other.
And yet, like Judge Pirro and Rick Wilson, like Lincoln and Trump, the two books do bear similarities. Both authors say they are defending “the rule of law,” an unavoidable catchphrase these days. Both overstate their themes; Jarrett, after making an unsupported assertion, writes sentences like “no other conclusion is reasonably supportable.” Both stretch the facts past the breaking point and caulk the holes in their story with pure speculation. In the acknowledgments, one author thanks two hatchetmen who work for the Clintons, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer; the other author thanks two hatchetmen who work for Trump, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs. Both authors appear to be consumed with paranoia brought on by the uncontrolled emotions President Trump generates in his fellow citizens. Neither book is worth your time.
And voilà! Ta-da! Fini! After weeks of reading, all my TV books, dog-eared and spine-cracked, are back in the book bag, destined for Goodwill, assuming Goodwill will have them. As I put them away, though, my heart sank. I had forgotten Ann Coulter. There she was, still looking lonely, still unread. Maybe another time.
