A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.
The veteran journalist delivers an in-the-bunker account of the disastrous end of the Trump administration.
Following Fire and Fury and Siege, Wolff makes it clear that Trump is our first postmodern president, completely uninterested in doing any real work but obsessed with the media and his media image: “What was on television left a greater impression on him than what was said to him, or what intelligence he received, or what facts were known.” He surrounded himself with corrupt operators, cheerleaders, and, at the end, “crazies [who] kept identifying people who were even crazier.” In this well-paced but seldom newsworthy account of the weeks between the 2020 election and the Trump family’s anticlimactic departure on Inauguration Day, Wolff depicts a thoroughly inept, endlessly self-dealing swirl of hangers-on and sycophants whose goal was singular: to gain Machiavellian advantage while always “assuring the president that he was right.” In between the lines, the author suggests that Trump was fully aware that his retinue was loyal in order to be rewarded and was contemptuous of them all. Regarding the associate who proved perhaps the most loyal in the end, Rudy Giuliani, Wolff writes that Trump has frozen him out of his would-be shadow government at Mar-a-Lago and won’t pay any of his bills. Meanwhile, anyone with a wisp of competence was long gone before Election Day, leaving it to the likes of Sidney Powell to attempt to make Trump’s case that the election had been stolen from him and to defend him in his second impeachment. A few memorable episodes make the book worthy of attention: Trump showing patent scorn for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol at his behest or promising that he’ll be back in 2024, ready to exact vengeance on everyone who’s ever crossed him.
A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-83001-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2021
IN THE NEWS
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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