Donald Trump’s last days | Business Standards News

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Two new books about the last year of Donald J Trump’s presidency are entering the bloodstream of culture. The first, Landslide, by gadfly journalist Michael Wolff, will be the jumpsuit, though the second, I Alone Can Fix It, from Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, is more enthusiastic and zealous, to a sin.

This is Mr. Wolff’s third book about Mr. Trump in many years. Second were Ms. Leonnig and Mr. Rucker, after the great A Very Stable Genius, which appeared in early 2020. This one, alas, reads like 300 daily newspaper articles that have been tape identically to an inky Kerouacian scroll.

It’s probably not the authors ’fault that I Can Fix It is tedious. Perhaps a reader, who survived the Covid-19, had “stopped stealing” and spray bearers, and felt a certain amount of relief not to think to be moved soon by a dense, that-fact scrapbook just a sad year.

A major achievement in I Alone Can Fix It, however, was its introduction of a new hero to America, someone who hadn’t received a lot of attention: Gen Mark A Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A better title for this book might be “Mr. Milley Goes to Washington.”

There is a possibility that not many people will root for Trump’s books. Reading them is like watching WWE fights where all the fighters are on heels, breaking each other in folding chairs. General Milley gives Ms. Leonnig and Mr. Rucker not only an adult in the room, but a man with a command of facts, a long view of history, a strong jaw and a center of morality.

I Can Only Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Strong Last Year | Author: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker | Publisher: Penguin Press | Price: $ 30 | Pages: 578

We are, General Milley suggested, closer than we know to the gorge. The book details the last weeks of Trump’s presidency, when the ball actually bounced. General Milley told aides he feared a coup, and, Ms Leonnig and Mr Rucker wrote, “saw similarities between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence on his followers at the Nuremberg rally that he was both a victim and their savior. ” Milley told the aides: “It’s a Reichstag moment.”

Regarding the Proud Boys and the like, he told military leaders and law enforcement: “These are the same people we fought in World War II.”

Can I Fix It is an almost daily accounting of Mr. Trump’s last year in office, from Covid’s disruptive response to the second impeachment to Rudy Giuliani’s public self-blasts. There are apocalyptic scenes of Mr. Trump dressing up and humiliating those around him, including former Attorney General William P Barr.

In Landslide Mr. Wolff, also tells a broad, clever, event -filled story about the last year of this shambolic. But he is particularly interested in Mr Trump’s X-factor as well as his dark telepathic relationship with his admirers and is sick of realizing that in his universe standard morality is waved as if mandatory.

Mr. Wolff blames “hard -working, orderly, result -oriented, liberal world and its media,” including this newspaper, for missing the point about Trump. He suggests that Mr. Trump is living outside of what the gentleman understands. He has never been cynical and armed with a good strategy. He has “completely left the truth.”

Mr. Wolff was once ridiculed in the world of journalism and politics. He was accused of being less than diligent in his fact-checking and for reckless writing. These complaints are valid, up to a point. But Landslide is a clever, clear and fearless book. He has great instinct. I read it in two or three situations.

Landslide: The Last Days of President Trump | Author: Michael Wolff | Publisher: Henry Holt | Price: $ 29.99 | Pages: 312

Mr Wolff is not with Mark Milley. He was less interested in Covid’s narrative. He was alone in the chaos and the bureaucracy, how almost everyone with modesty had fled Mr. Trump in his last months, and how he was left with applauding charlatans like Sidney Powell and Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani’s gastritis is a running joke in this book, but the author doesn’t even find him funny at all.

Mr. Wolff has scenes Ms. Leonnig and Mr. Rucker does not. This includes details on election night, such as Trump’s freak-out in the world when Fox News called Arizona early for Joe Biden. Mr. Wolff, who wrote Rupert Murdoch’s biography, describes the frantic phone calls winding down before the word dropped from the old Dirty Digger himself: “[Expletive] he. “

In this accounting, Mr. Trump belittled his followers. “Trump has often expressed confusion about who these people are,” Mr. Wolff wrote, “their low-rent‘ trailer camp ’stance and their‘ get-up, ’once joking that should he had invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and was shaking his head about ‘well unwashed.’ ”

It was another Wolfe, Tom, who commented that “the dark night of fascism is always coming down in the United States and in Europe is just coming.” The authors of both of these books ended with fresh interviews with Trump, on the beach in Mar-a-Lago. No one thought that the threat of that night would pass any time soon.

© 2021 The New York Times News Service

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