An insight into Trump's years in office
Having observed and taught about Trump for five years, I got to the point in the last year where I vowed not to read another book about him. I am pretty certain that immersing yourself in MAGAworld is detrimental to one’s mental wellbeing. So instead, I read lots of articles and watched endless news bulletins, which I now admit, is probably just as damaging.
Having had six months “off” Trump, since President Biden’s inauguration, I was lured back to the dark-side following the publication of a slew of new books about Trump’s last year in office.
“I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.” - Donald J. Trump, 2016
As a lover of history, I think there is something very important about what I like to call “the first draft of history”. Whilst it is often difficult to have the perspective that time and distance gives you, there is a lot to be learned whilst events and issues are still fresh in people’s minds. That is especially true of the past year and particularly the events that led to the Insurrection on January 6th on Capitol Hill, where the facts and narrative of what happened have already been subject to so much distortion and rewriting.
Of the books that have come out in the past month, I chose “I Alone Can Fix It”. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker are very experienced Washington Post correspondents, whose last book “A Very Stable Genius” on Trump’s first three years was well received (even though it still sits unopened on my bookcase, as a victim of my Trump moratorium!). The Washington Post gave us Woodward and Bernstein who brought down Nixon, so there is a high bar here. The access to Trump’s inner circle is exceptional and they interviewed over 140 people, including Trump himself, to bring together the narrative of Trump’s final 12 months.
Understanding the factors that motivate Trump
The title of the book comes from Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 2016. He told an enraptured audience “I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.” This one sentence captures the most important fact about the Trump presidency, that it was always, and only, about Donald Trump. Obviously, even the greatest of presidents have enough ego to put themselves forward for, and win, the most powerful job in the world. However, Trump’s presidency was not about ideas or being part of a movement, it was about Trump and the attention he would attract as president.
Leonnig and Rucker’s book brings home the extent of Trump’s narcissism and self-obsession. Whilst reading I lost count of how many times he worried about looking weak, or accused someone else of being weak. Weakness, or perceived weakness, appears to be a key factors that motivated every decision he made; and, of course, how those decisions would be received by his adoring voters. It also played into his inability to ever apologise. One of the strangest anecdotes in the book is his meeting with his Vice President, Mike Pence, after the Insurrection. Trump had essentially put a target on Pence’s back leading up to the events of January 6th which could have easily led to Pence’s death – the book brilliantly describes the near misses and what could easily have happened on that day. Yet, when the dust has settled and the two of them are brought together, it was understood that Trump would never apologise and Pence, knowing him all too well, accepted that.
A chilling account of "what happened"!
With Coronavirus still now a huge part of our lives, the book details the first few months of the pandemic in USA, and the mistakes that were made. It is easy to recall many of the facts because they happened so recently, but they are contextualised very well with what was going on behind the scenes and the petty politics of a highly dysfunctional White House and a president who is clearly out of depth and disinterested. The coverage of response to the Black Lives Matter protests is chilling and made even more so, by knowing that Trump planned to do so much more, but was thankfully thwarted by his own aides.
Very few of the men, and Trump’s White House was mostly populated by white men, come out of the story well. Even those that appear to, make you wonder whether they have just been better at writing history in order to excuse their part in it. The main question that has to be asked of many of them, is why they got involved with Trump in the first place?
The book is hugely damning of Trump and Trump’s administration. At over 500 pages, it keeps you very engaged, even though you mostly know “what happened.” The thing that the book doesn’t do, is really tackle the question of why, if it was truly this awful, did almost 75 million people vote for him last November? Understanding the nature of a truly divided America will probably need much more distance and a lot more analysis over the coming years.
