AMERICAN RECKONING

Justice comes for an ex-president.

Alter, a longtime political reporter who has interviewed nine presidents, isn’t known for his courthouse journalism, but the bulk of his latest book is about a felony trial in Manhattan. The case is momentous yet surreal, pitting the world’s “most famous man” against the prosecution’s key witness, a former lawyer for the accused who once helped Madame Tussauds secure a likeness of Melania Trump. Alter attended the entirety of Donald Trump’s 2024 trial for hiding hush-money payments to a porn star. His goal: capture the “tactile sense” of this strange historical moment and give the prosecution of a corrupt former president “the constitutional grandeur it deserves.” This is galvanizing stuff, but Alter undermines the book’s seriousness with swipes at Trump’s self-evidently ludicrous hair and penchant for sleeping in court. Alter is far more readable when focused on the prosecution’s strong case. The proceeding pivots on the testimony of erstwhile Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, a somewhat pathetic figure—in his only memorable work for the president in 2017, we learn, he reviewed the first lady’s contract for a wax statue—who nevertheless secures a place in history, testifying about being Trump’s hush-money deliveryman. Alter uses other parts of the book to look inward, admitting that he’s unashamed yet “not proud of” his coverage of the sexual dalliances of Bill Clinton and other officeholders. He confesses that Trump’s political success has shaken his faith “in the common sense and good judgment of roughly half of the American people.” The book’s opening pages, which recall his mother’s political convictions and Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 visit to Alter’s Chicago home, are particularly strong, contextualizing his belief in the importance of holding even the most powerful to account.

A clear-eyed paean to equality under the law.