LANDSLIDE: THE FINAL DAYS OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
By Michael Wolff
I ALONE CAN FIX IT: DONALD J. TRUMP’S CATASTROPHIC FINAL YEAR
By Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker
PERIL
By Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
For four years the mantra of the Trump presidency was that “there was no bottom.” Just when you thought he couldn’t sink any lower, some fresh outrage either to democratic norms or just plain decency would come along.
Still, it seemed that he’d reached a kind of nadir when January 6 brought a shambolic riot to the Capitol while behind the scenes an earnest albeit ham-handed effort was underway to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In the aftermath, the feeling one sensed, even in the media, was more one of relief at the end of a long national nightmare than the usual shock and disgust that Trump specialized in generating.
While in office Trump ruled the bestseller lists, and the most recent round of books, focusing on his final year in office, gives us what is perhaps (and hopefully) the final chapter. Written by authors who have covered the court of Trump extensively in previous books, and dealing with events already given saturation news coverage, do they have anything new to tell us?
Perhaps not much that’s new, but on at least a few points an indelible portrait is drawn of the calamitous final days.
In the first place, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi succinctly put it, the president at this time was “not well.” More precisely, his behaviour in fighting the election results was “a complete, total manifestation of insanity.”
This was not a clinical assessment, but while the talk of having Trump removed from office due to incapacity was always a non-starter, for many close to him, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, it was clear that in his final year Trump “had gone into a serious mental decline.” What the country was experiencing, in Michael Wolff’s words, was a chief executive suffering “mental derangement of a kind and at an intensity never before known at the highest level of the U.S. government.”
There was more to this than the Narcissistic Personality Disorder that Trump himself seemed to see as a super power, and that then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was being briefed on as soon as Trump took office. Trump was living in a fantasy world. He honestly believed, or at least affected to believe in the absence of any evidence, that Pfizer had deliberately withheld the rollout of a vaccine for COVID in order to hurt him politically, that the election had been stolen by various fraudulent means, and that he would be able to overturn the results in “his” courts.
The only word for this is madness.
The second point drilled home is that, at a time when the United States was faced with a major crisis, Trump basically quit his job. There had, of course, long been reports that Trump had no interest in doing the work of being president but only enjoyed being the center of attention. When COVID struck, however, what resulted was, in Leonnig’s and Rucker’s account, “a leadership vacuum,” where “the president had almost entirely ceased doing the business of running the country.” Then, according to Wolff, after the election he “put aside every other presidential function except the election challenge.” Which just meant watching more TV and flying off into foul-mouthed rages at everyone around him.
The final point is that this was a situation that the people closest to him (that is, his supporters) understood but that no one had the courage to speak out against. His immediate circle of family and aides thought he was living in an alternate reality, but they were either too sycophantic, afraid of him, or (as in the case of bizarre figures like Rudy Giuliani and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell) too far gone themselves to do anything about it.
One could take this a step further and wonder at the fact that Trump seems not to have had any real friends or confidants at all. What’s more, many of those who knew him and worked with him (and for him) more or less openly despised him. The Trump haters among his current and former officials constituted, according to Wolff, “a large club.” His one-time secretary of state Rex Tillerson famously thought him a “total fucking moron.” Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News was little more than a propaganda arm for Trump during these years, hated him, as did Ted Cruz, one of his staunchest defenders in the Senate. Meanwhile, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell had a “view of Trump [that] was as virulent as the most virulent liberal’s view: Trump was ignorant, corrupt, incompetent, unstable.”
No doubt this grated on Trump, making him feel even more isolated and resentful of the establishment “elites.” But it underlines that question of why people continued to support Trump even though they not only knew he was crazy but personally hated him as well. Obviously self-interest was part of it but Wolff gets at something more fundamental in what he has to say about the psychology of the political class:
The question that was asked since the beginning of the administration but that became even more urgent as Trump’s single-minded and senseless election challenge progressed was: Why would anyone tolerate this? The answer was simply that, in 2016, he had been elected, no matter how loopy and unexpected that was, and this was the nature of politics: you bowed down to the winner. (In fact, already some of that tolerance was seeping out because of the stark reality that he had not been reelected.) But the other answer was that, in politics, there was a whole professional class whose essential skill sets involved dealing with maximally difficult and damaged bosses. You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this is what you did; this was the job you had. And the more you could tolerate or accept or rationalize, the better you were at it and the higher you would rise in the universe, the brutalized universe of power.
Each book has its strengths and offers a slightly different perspective. Wolff’s account of the last days focuses mainly on the fight over the election and its fallout. Leonnig and Rucker give an account of Trump’s entire final year and so deal more with the COVID crisis. Woodward and Costa are broader still, even including a slightly off-topic look at the incoming Biden administration.
All the authors strain hard to be non-judgmental and present their sources in the best possible light. These books aren’t hatchet jobs. While Leonnig and Rucker refer to Trump’s “extraordinary capacity to say things that were not true” they balk at calling him a liar (Trump tells them he prefers “a more beautiful word called disinformation”). Meanwhile, the cabinet members and congressmen who enabled Trump are allowed to walk away with their excuses, if not their dignity, intact. But there are no heroes in this story.
Will there be a sequel? By all accounts Trump is enjoying life in his alternate-reality bubble at Mar-a-Lago. Leonnig and Rucker get an invite and are suitably impressed:
Here, beneath the gold-leaf ceiling of winged griffins and crystal chandeliers, Trump still rules, surrounded day and night by applauding fans, obsequious courtiers, and dutiful servants. At the perfectly manicured Mar-a-Lago, none of the disgrace that marked the end of his presidency pierces Trump’s reality. Here, he and his aides work to maintain the gospel according to Trump, with the most important revelations being that Donald Trump was the greatest president of all time and was unjustly denied a second term.
It sounds very nice, but given where things stand today, with Trump maintaining his position as the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, we shouldn’t be surprised if he tries a comeback. For a narcissist, fame is a powerful drug. There may be a new bottom yet. As Woodward and Costa conclude, “peril remains.”
Notes:
Review first published online November 8, 2021.
goodreports.net 