Essential reading for students of the Trump corruption machine.
Why isn’t Donald Trump in prison? Perhaps because he has one of the country’s foremost law firms at his back.
Longtime Trump-watcher Enrich, the New York Times business investigations editor and author of Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, moves from finance to law in this account of Jones Day, a legal firm that expanded in D.C. over the last few decades in order to weave itself into “the fabric of the capital’s conservative firmament.” Founded in the 1890s in Cleveland, the company had always been conservative. However, under the guidance of principal Steve Brogan, it has turned increasingly hard right, “a champion of right-wing politics, organizing legal challenges to Obama’s health care program, white-collar prosecutions, government regulations, and voting rights laws.” Much of this turn involved Don McGahn, who was Trump’s in-house counsel for a couple of years until falling out over the Mueller Report. McGahn and his mentor, Ben Ginsberg, had not expected Trump to win, and they believed that Trump would convert his campaign into “an influence-buying PAC” that Jones Day would manage. “More than five years later,” when Trump lost decisively in the 2020 election, “the PACs were all that was left, and Jones Day was their law firm,” still exercising tremendous influence over Republican politics. The firm bought into Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, though not without some internal dissent. As the author shows, Jones Day—which had previously represented massive pharmaceutical and tobacco companies and the sex scandal–ridden Catholic Church—was vigorous in “trying to stop votes from being counted—not because they thought there was something improper underway (there was zero evidence of that), but because they detected an opportunity to use the law to give their side a political edge.” There are plenty of other shameful episodes, and Enrich is unblinking in reporting them, yielding a fast-moving, damning book.
Essential reading for students of the Trump corruption machine.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-14217-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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