A must-read. The gun’s not quite smoking, but the barrel’s plenty hot, and there are Russian shell casings all around.
Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? Yes, according to longtime president-watcher and journalist Unger, who builds on and extends the case he built in House of Trump, House of Putin.
It’s not news that well before becoming president, Trump revealed himself to be “a tyrant who had mesmerized tens of millions of people, and that it didn’t matter to them what he said or did”—or that he has long been suspected of owing a profound debt to Russia and that the place to look for it is in the tax returns he keeps hidden. Unger’s book is valuable primarily because he connects any number of loose ends, even if the result may sound like a conspiracy theory. Point 1: Trump owes Russia big, and while in office, he was ever eager to please. Point 2: Russia began to cultivate him long before the Soviet Union collapsed. Point 3: It all comes down to money. Point 4: There are connections among Opus Dei, the Trump administration, and the “world of decadence and depravity tied to figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.” Unger links all of this to what CIA sources call the “Monster Plot,” which posits that Russia placed an asset or agent “at the very top” of the U.S. government to make it collapse. Trump was ideal. As one Russian handler noted, “in terms of his personality…the guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.” The believability of Unger’s case lies less in these points laid bare than in the fact that one can see them in abundant evidence in the actions of Trump and his allies, from leaving Syria to Russia to packing the Supreme Court and Justice Department with right-wing Catholics—nefarious work that will take years to undo even as Trump continues to attempt to bring about “the end of democracy.”
A must-read. The gun’s not quite smoking, but the barrel’s plenty hot, and there are Russian shell casings all around.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18253-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
IN THE NEWS
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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