| I ALONE CAN FIX IT Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Carol Leonning & Philip Rucker New York: Penguin Press, July 2021 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-593-29894-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-593-29894-2 | 578pp. | HC | $30.00 | |
The unprecedented debacle of Trump's last year in the Oval Office prompted the authors to undertake this second book. Trump's first three years had also been an unprecedented debacle, but this was a whole 'nother level of unprecedented. It takes a specially twisted form of genius to fumble the response to a highly contagious respiratory disease pandemic when the experts trained for pandemic response are on staff and the guidebook of lessons learned in previous outbreaks is on file.1
"Trump arrived back in Washington to face turf battles, which were flaring up in the West Wing and among the agencies. Distrust between the president's political appointees and career health officials and other professionals was deepening. This was the consequence of him having spent three years molding the government in his own image. The White House had largely abandoned the pretense of following a methodical policy process to make decisions or crafting long-term strategic plans. The driving imperative for those at the top was to survive the daily news cycle by diagnosing every problem as a public relations crisis. Senior officials were on edge about their employment. This weakened the chain of command and risked paralyzing the administration at the very moment the machinery of government needed to be running at maximum tilt. Mick Mulvaney, who had been acting White House chief of staff for thirteen months, still had not shaken the "acting" from his title, which was interpreted fairly or not as an indicator the president lacked confidence in him." – Page 32 |
Tucker Carlson, like the other "Fox News" talking heads, was doing back then what he does now: spewing blatant falsehoods.
Trump's interest in a military response flared, however, when he turned on Fox News. He brooded watching Tucker Carlson sound dire warnings on his nightly show about "the descent of our nation into chaos and craziness," which prominently featured Seattle as Exhibit A. Carlson claimed invading hordes were overtaking the city and nobody was stopping them. During his June 11 program, Carlson took a moment to jab mockingly at Trump. He said the CHOP organizers were like conquistadors who smartly seized their six-block territory as their own country. Then, Carlson said, "They built a wall around the place just like Donald Trump once said he would do." Fox found that its reports and commentaries about unrest in Seattle and elsewhere drew sizable attention, especially when paired with ominous images of burning cars and looting rioters. On June 12, Fox's homepage featured an image of a man carrying an assault rifle in front of a Seattle storefront with shattered glass. But the picture had been digitally altered by splicing together multiple photographic images and putting the man with the rifle—a volunteer working security, in fact—in front of a looted store. Another Fox story on Seattle unrest carried the headline CRAZY TOWN and showed a man running through a street with a car on fire behind him. The image was in fact from a different city, Minneapolis, and had been taken on May 30. When contacted by journalists about the altered or misplaced images, Fox removed them. – Pages 203-204 |
I hope you all noted the subtle reminder in the last sentence that Fox News is not journalism. The images were removed, after a delay. By then, their message had gone viral.4
The quotation refers to Trump's return from Davos, where he described his very good relationship with China's President Xi and said the newly discovered coronavirus was "totally under control" — a conclusion public health professionals already understood to be unwarranted. By the time this book was published, everyone in the country who had been paying attention understood it to be unwarranted based on the abundant evidence. But some 30 percent of the populace had not been paying attention, or had been paying attention to the wrong sources. For that reason, the evidence the book presents is a vital reminder of how easily public understanding can be led astray.
That abundant evidence includes Trump's consistent public dismissal of the seriousness of the coronavirus problem, his determination to minimize the numbers of cases known by limiting testing, and his refusal to heed the advice of infectious-disease professionals.2 No matter how much they or his White House staff urged him to wear a mask and set an example, he rarely complied because he felt it made him look weak. His White House gathering during the Republican convention and his numerous rallies became known as superspreader events — the most notable being his rally in Tulsa on 20 June 2020.
The fallout was not merely political. Tulsa had experienced a sharp rise in coronavirus cases in the two days before the June 20 rally, but suffered a record-setting spike in the week that followed. Tulsa County racked up 902 new cases in the week after the event, gaining as many as 200 to 260 cases each day. Before Trump's visit, the daily count of new cases ranged from 76 to 96. Back at Trump campaign headquarters, staff expressed dismay and fear about having been exposed to the virus. The Trump campaign contracted a medical testing company in Virginia to administer new tests for everyone. Staff were told to keep the testing location a secret, however, to avoid more bad press. *
* * Among those who tested positive for coronavirus after attending the event were Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt and former presidential candidate Herman Cain. Stitt, who complained of feeling achy mostly, recovered. He insisted he had not contracted the virus at the president's rally, although he, like most attendees, did not wear a mask at the rally. Cain, also maskless at the rally, fell ill a few days later. He was soon hospitalized with COVID-19 and died on July 30. – Page 202 |
The authors walk us through Trump's disastrous campaign moves, his bungling of the response to the coronavirus, and his delusional fixation on the election having been stolen from him — which leads him to espouse the cascade of baseless court challenges and finally to incite the storming of the Capitol. Through it all, his staff — while they often work behind the scenes to undo his chaotic orders — cater to his whims face to face. That mostly ends after the Capitol is defiled on 6 January, with people like Meadows, Kellogg, and Trump's daughter Ivanka trying to persuade Trump to tell the rioters to stand down. But by then he was too invested in the Big Lie, too surrounded by enablers of it: Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, James Eastman, and others too numerous to list. It took most of the afternoon before he came up with a half-hearted order.
This is a more coherent account than Frankly, We Did Win this Election or Bob Woodward's Fear. It is long, but very readable, with very few grammatical errors. It is well researched and has an excellent index. I give it top marks and rate it a keeper.
Leonnig and Rucker capture the high drama inherent in that long year's momentous events. They neatly sum everything up by quoting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley.3
It was time for the Bidens to make their way down the parade route that now was practically a hermetically sealed street topped off by razor wire. Milley kept looking at his phone, receiving security updates. The city was a "ring of steel," just as he had said it would be, and there were no signs of trouble. As Milley recounted to aides, he got home that night to his house high atop Fort Myer and took in his most perfect view. From his front lawn, he could stare down over the monuments to America's great presidents—Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—and to Martin Luther King Jr., as well as to the hard-fought wars that enshrined the country's commitment to democracy. He saw the White House in the foreground and the Capitol off in the distance. Looking out over the capital city at peace, Milley thought to himself, Thank God Almighty, we landed the ship safely. – Pages 504-505 |
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