The Read: Leonnig and Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
One way I try to support excellent long-form journalism is through buying books like this—during the Iraq War, I pretty much bought everything by journalists and in-depth nonfiction writers that came out about the war. The Washington Post presently is my main morning paper, so I was familiar with the work of these authors.
Is it what I thought it was?
More or less. That’s unfortunate, in some ways. The best books of this kind are ones that allow journalists to engage in deeper reflection and analysis than they can in daily reporting. Leonnig and Rucker are so keen to demonstrate that their reporting was scrupulous and precise that this functions more as a stitching together of what they have already written, with a regular sprinkling of previously unreported details. Reading it sometimes made me feel like a guy who has just showered off and gotten dressed after spending hours walking through an underground sewer only to be told he has to go back and walk the sewer again.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
For some other historian in the future, this will serve as a decent primary source. If there are historians in the future who aren’t just functionaries of a white ethnonationalist state created in Trump’s shadow, that is.
Quotes
I feel as if almost everything in this book that’s quotable has been quoted already on social media and in the news. There’s some situations or scenes that are pretty memorable—I’ll mention those below.
I did appreciate Trump policy advisor Joe Grogan’s reported description of Jared Kushner as “not like any asshole who lies and misrepresents data. He is a zero-sum-game motherfucker from New York”.
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
As I noted above, one thing that came to me powerfully while reading is that the time I’ve not had to think about Trump since February 2021 or so has been a very blessed time. I think everybody who wasn’t a Trump voter in 2020 feels the same way. The white-hot froth of anxiety, fear, anger and astonishment that stirred our waking minds each and every day, often bubbling over as Trump himself used social media or any available venue to spew new outrages across public culture, has calmed down—though I’m sure most of us have some measure of background anxiety ready to roar back simply at the thought that he and his followers aren’t finished trying to destroy this country. In this respect, Biden is doing a great job simply by being someone who doesn’t make us all have to think about politics every damn day. I suspect the mass media, even the major dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post, don’t entirely feel the same way. Their owners, editors and reporters know just how bad Trump was for the country, but he also made people read the news.
The style of investigative reporting in the book is more or less the familiar template of Woodward’s books, where it’s generally easy to see who the main sources were and even to see what their motivations for speaking with the reporters might have been. (Usually it’s protection of their own reputation, vindication of a position they took during a protracted insider’s debate, or some measure of getting their own back against some internal enemy.) I often find myself sympathetic to individuals that I recognize were doing their best against long odds to prevent a disastrous decision from being made and who didn’t really know just how bad the people they were working with might be until they’d been there for a while. In this case, there’s really nobody I can feel even slight sympathy for. These are folks who knew what they were getting into with a very few exceptions—Fauci, for example. (Though I don’t like him any better after reading this book; if anything, I like him less.)
Similarly, sometimes I end up with more sympathy for people whose public role was loathsome because they turn out to be more savvy than they seemed or because they seem like conflicted individuals with some measure of reflective self-awareness and even guilt. (Say, the Nixon of Woodward and Bernstein’s Final Days.) But Trump in this account is 100% the same lethally odious and self-involved person behind the scenes as he was on Twitter or in front of the cameras. About the only vaguely exculpatory thing you could say is that in the first three to four weeks of discussions of the coronavirus pandemic, he was genuinely getting a lot of conflicting information—but part of the reason for that, as Leonnig and Rucker point out, was the dysfunctional and poisonous environment within his administration that was a direct consequence of his cruel and shambolic leadership.
I suppose the one other interesting moment is that Trump initially reacted more like a human being to the images of George Floyd’s death than Bill Barr or others in his administration, meaning, he felt strong emotions of anger at the obvious injustice to Floyd. Every once in a while, the person that some Trump voters thought they were getting—the impulsive outsider who would usefully tear down the elaborate phony theater of mainstream politics—does show up as a kind of phantom possibility, an alternate-reality doppleganger. I’ll get to the thought that had Trump been smarter or more disciplined, we might already be in a post-Constitutional autocracy, but I was occasionally struck at a few moments in the book by an opposite thought, which is that if Trump hadn’t been as plainly impaired by his own laziness and self-involvement but instead was simply trying to change the way politics looked to have it be more visceral, honest, emotionally real, and to have his policies follow from a more human and less technocratic or calculated basis, whatever the outcome, he might also still be in power. I don’t think the hunger for a kind of protocol-destroying kaiju has gone away—that’s what got Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger into office, it’s what made Ross Perot a contender. It’s what movies from Mr Smith Goes to Washington forward to Dave or Air Force One are fantasizing about. Trump himself plainly on the evidence of this book and much else was never ever capable of behaving in this way, but you can see the inflection points where that counterfactual leader would have had some successes or where they were what people were really hoping for and imagining.
Conversely, by the way, you can always tell in reading these books or stories who isn’t providing any material to the reporters, because they either vanish as dynamic, thinking actors in decisions or contexts that they were certainly a part of, or they’re portrayed entirely through the animus of some rival—all you get is the visible public transcript of what that person clearly was doing or saying.
The book’s reportage reinforces a point that has been on a lot of minds since 2018 or so, which is that the United States may have just missed becoming an openly authoritarian state simply because of Trump’s personal incompetence and the incompetence he inspired in those who worked for him. The book lays out about twenty or thirty points where almost any other leader, no matter how feckless, would have been able to muster the personal discipline and sound judgment to follow advice, reign in some dangerous impulses, and change tone strategically. What’s been plain about Trump from the beginning but comes out here even more is that he is profoundly unable to do even the slightest bit of that even if that might secure his continuing hold on power. He’s just been able to bluster his way through life and past his innumerable mistakes in judgment because he’s had a cushion of money from his father and a shameless infantilism that intimidates people simply because they rarely encounter anyone with that kind of profoundly arrested development.
But one thing that I got a new appreciation for was that there’s something more deeply structural about this incompetence. Essentially, Trump was an opening for a long-festering American version of crony capitalism to burst and spill its rot everywhere. When the book turns to Jared Kushner’s brief, strange moment of anointment as Coronavirus Fighter #1, there’s a bit about how Kushner’s feckless team was deluged with requests from VIPs like Mark Cuban, Jeanine Pirro, Charlie Kirk and Tana Goertz for special assistance or with their own dumb ideas about medicine, therapies or policies, and how people who had absolutely no business modelling an epidemic elbowed their way in the room (like Kevin Hassett, economist) to deliver models or facts that were based on nothing at all. The pits of American hell turn out to be deeply stocked with talentless conmen and hucksters who swarmed over Trump’s Administration like it was a piece of fried chicken left too close to the ant hill—and at least some of the people who came to Washington on January 6th 2021 were just latecomers to the feast, hoping that there was still room on the grift train. God help us, there might yet be.
Anyway, the main takeaway from this book for me is that I want this desperately to be history. And unusually for me as a historian, it is a history I am hoping to forget because I want it to be nothing more than a freak show interlude. I am unfortunately certain that I will not get my wish, so perhaps all I can ask is a few more months to dwell on other things. I kind of wish I hadn’t read this book in that respect. Knowledge may be power, but it’s also pain.