Mr. Trump's Wild Ride

August 20, 2018
Mistakes, malignancies, and some real achievements emerge from the chaos in this rollicking, perceptive history of President Trump’s first year in office. Garrett (The Enduring Revolution) observes the Trump administration from his perch as CBS News’s White House correspondent, devoting chapters to the warp-speed staff turnovers, uproars over immigration policy and NFL anthem kneelers, and diplomatic U-turns that changed Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from trash-talking enemies into buddies. Drawing on his own encounters with the president, Garrett paints a sharp portrait of Trump’s domineering personality. He also explores the president’s hidden, fitful processes of governance as they spectacularly fail, as in the collapse of health-care initiatives in Congress, and sometimes work, as in the smooth passage of the “transformative” tax cut bill. Although he allows that covering Trump left him “physically exhausted and mentally traumatized” after the firing of FBI director James Comey, Garrett’s assessment of Trump manages the difficult task of being both hard-hitting and even-handed, as well as smartly entertaining. (Trump’s deregulatory program, he writes, “has not so much drained the swamp as stocked it with pro-business piranha.”) The result is one of the best accounts yet of Trump’s impact.

September 1, 2018
A veteran Washington, D.C., reporter assesses Donald Trump's first year as president."The difficulty in writing a book about what actually happened during Trump's first year is you write in a frenzied state of dread," says CBS News chief White House correspondent Garrett (The Enduring Revolution: How the Contract with America Continues to Shape the Nation, 2005, etc.). "What the @#%*& is next? Is what I'm writing what really matters?" The author examines the Trump phenomenon and takes an early stab at identifying 10 presidential actions likely to have a "lasting impact." He seeks to be "credible, balanced, and nuanced," noting both the "unadulterated love" of supporters who believe Trump "says things that need to be said" and the abhorrence of critics who find his "belligerence," "indifference" to facts, and TV-animated consciousness make him "exhausting to the soul and corrosive to the spirit." As Garrett writes, "Trump is recklessly authentic--a living, breathing, orangish and hair-sprayed Rorschach test of what early 21st-century America wants and expects from politics and the presidency." The author devotes a detailed chapter to each important Trump action, including his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the travel ban, his "malicious" criticism of federal law enforcement, and his firing of FBI director James Comey. Other chapters focus on the potential of Trump's Saudi Arabia visit to "realign" the Middle East, his failure to repeal Obamacare, the "haunting racial overtones" of separations of border-crossing families and remarks on "shithole" countries, his confronting North Korea, the elimination of 879 federal regulations, and tax reform. Billed as a disruptor, Trump is "a reliable, pliable conservative ideologue on about every issue but trade." Garrett refuses to speculate on collusion: "I still don't know the bottom line of the Russian story." Some readers may be taken aback by his belief that media-hungry Trump merely "pretends to hate reporters" and his answer to the query, "is Trump a racist? No one can know but Trump."This generally thoughtful analysis is especially good on Trump's "coarsening influence on political dialogue."

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