A thoroughly revealing account of a spectacularly inept presidential campaign that politics junkies will eat up.
Wall Street Journal senior White House reporter Bender turns in an engaging fly-on-the-wall account of the losing Trump 2020 campaign.
“I’m the president, and I’m going to stay the president.” So said the former president, who, throughout this circumstantial narrative, wanders hallways late at night, bewildered that it didn’t work out that way. Trump, of course, is famously unreflective—though also a fan of magical thinking, as when he asserted that Covid-19 was simply “going to go away.” Paranoid and superstitious, Trump tried in vain to reconstruct the 2020 campaign so that it went exactly like 2016, but he failed at every turn. “Trump had made derisive nicknames his hallmark but couldn’t find the handle in 2020,” Bender writes, to give just one example. “He tried at least ten different times to rename the former vice president. ‘Sleepy Joe’ was one of the first and most common, but that didn’t sound like a villain so much as someone who needed to go to bed at 9:00 p.m.” Bender’s account would be a comedy of errors if Trump weren’t so spectacularly unfunny. As Trump flubbed at every turn, his support team was even more incompetent, from a clueless Ivanka to a raging Don Jr. to a panoply of advisers whose chief interest seemed to be to soak the campaign for every cent they could. Ranging from the halls of power to the “Front Row Joes” who dutifully showed up for every Trump rally, Bender delivers a nuanced, sharp account whose leitmotif is puzzlement: Trump’s that he lost, Mitch McConnell’s that Trump wouldn’t let it go (he tried to get Bill Barr to convince Trump to back off his claims of election fraud), and Mike Pompeo’s that, as he put it late in the day, “the crazies have taken over.”
A thoroughly revealing account of a spectacularly inept presidential campaign that politics junkies will eat up.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3480-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
IN THE NEWS
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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