Excellent reporting and assured writing—an ominous warning.
Another damning portrait of a disastrous administration.
“I am your retribution,” Trump promised his followers in a recent speech, since elaborated on with threats to root out “junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.” As ABC News chief Washington correspondent Karl writes, none other than Steve Bannon himself pointed out to him that retribution was a code word employed by Confederate agents in a plot to assassinate Lincoln. Trump may be undisciplined and often unhinged, but he tells you who he is and what he means: The promised concentration camps for undocumented immigrants are likely not metaphors. After the 2020 election, Karl reveals, an irate, ego-deflated Trump threatened to leave the GOP and form his own party. He was dissuaded from doing so not by RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s pleas for party loyalty, but instead by her threat of withdrawing millions of dollars in funding from him. Karl rightfully asks, Why not let the “wounded, vindictive, and angry former president” go? After all, as many GOP insiders have said behind closed doors, Trump is a loser. With him, the GOP has lost two midterms and a presidential election, and it’s demonstrable that non-Trump GOP candidates won in 2022 while pro-Trumpers lost. Still, Karl notes, Trump has a stranglehold on the GOP, so much so that “there may be no quicker way to lose a 2024 Republican presidential primary than to admit you’d consider trying to oust Donald Trump from office.” Just ask Liz Cheney. Other intriguing nuggets from this news-packed and newsworthy book: Trump fell full tilt under the sway of a QAnon theory that he’d be reinstated as president by a court decision, and, “more detached from reality than ever,” he now views the Jan. 6 rioters as heroes.
Excellent reporting and assured writing—an ominous warning.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593473986
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A mostly compelling account of one woman’s struggles within Trumpworld.
An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
Hutchinson, who served as an assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, gained national prominence when she testified to the House Select Committee, providing possibly the most damaging portrait of Trump’s erratic behavior to date. In her hotly anticipated memoir, the author traces the challenges and triumphs of her upbringing in New Jersey and the work (including a stint as an intern with Sen. Ted Cruz) that led her to coveted White House internships and eventual positions in the Office of Legislative Affairs and with Meadows. While the book offers few big reveals beyond her testimony (many details leaked before publication), her behind-the-scenes account of the chaotic Trump administration is intermittently insightful. Her initial portrait of Trump is less critical than those written by other former staffers, as the author gauges how his actions were seemingly stirred more by vanity and fear of appearing weak, rather than pure malevolency. For example, she recalls how he attended an event without a mask because he didn’t want to smear his face bronzer. Hutchinson also provides fairly nuanced portraits of Meadows and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who, along with Trump, eventually turned against her. She shares far more negative assessments about others in Trump’s orbit, including Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and adviser Rudy Giuliani, recounting how Giuliani groped her backstage during Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. The narrative lags after the author leaves the White House, but the story intensifies as she’s faced with subpoenas to testify and is forced to undergo deep soul-searching before choosing to sever ties with Trump and provide the incriminating information that could help take him down.
A mostly compelling account of one woman’s struggles within Trumpworld.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781668028285
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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