A smart assessment of a presidency marked, the author argues, by blatant disregard for law, custom, and democracy.
In which the Donald is recast as the don—as in Gotti, Corleone, et al.
Former U.S. attorney McQuade knows corruption: She successfully prosecuted former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for racketeering, earning him a 28-year prison term. In office, President Trump commuted the sentence. What favor Trump earned for that, we don’t know, but McQuade assures us that the transactional president doesn’t do anything for anyone without expecting something in return. When he granted clemency for the convicted Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, for instance, he expected Cuellar to switch parties to the Republican side—tearing into Cuellar’s decision not to run and his “lack of LOYALTY.” In this, as in the opening of The Godfather, McQuade writes, Trump demands payback, maybe now, maybe later. By her account, Trump has made a specialty of using his office for his own enrichment: “And just like John Gotti, he was doing it in broad daylight. Trump seemed to know that, like a mob boss, the more he got away with, the more untouchable he appeared to be.” A president covers a lot more territory than a mafioso, of course: Trump’s dismantling of federal departments, razing DEI standards, and waging war without congressional approval are far beyond the purview of organized crime. Yet the cruelty and corruption that McQuade chronicles are of a piece, speaking to mob-style governance that leverages “public power for personal benefit.” To battle the lawlessness she perceives, she offers a multifaceted program of resistance, from turning out in number at events such as “No Kings” rallies to waging satire (“Laughing at a tyrant, of course, undermines his authority”), and, most important of all, voting and otherwise refusing to acquiesce. All of these are useful, but McQuade also suggests that the mobocracy will collapse under its own weight, brought down by corruption and sycophancy.
A smart assessment of a presidency marked, the author argues, by blatant disregard for law, custom, and democracy.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781644215555
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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