Strong testimony to Trump White House cuts that have exacted a “heartbreaking human toll.”
A righteously aggrieved account of the destruction of one of America’s best ideas.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the brainchild of foreign-policy experts in the Kennedy administration, a teach-someone-to-fish extension of humanitarian aid that was a friendly, soft projection of American power. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as a former U.S. senator, was a “stalwart supporter of USAID,” writes former employee Enrich. Even the authors of the right-wing Project 2025 operating manual “recognized the critical value of the agency.” Yet Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cohort put USAID in their sights, with Musk tweeting that it was “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” as did “influential crusader” Mike Benz, who deemed the agency “a manipulative tool of the ‘deep state’ to spread a system of international censorship.” One might hazard a guess that the agency was put on the chopping block because it aided the developing world, but, as Enrich notes, in doing so, it also benefited Americans: A people delivered from famine might think well of their benefactor, and helping control the outbreak of diseases such as Ebola “makes us safer here at home”—and all at the per-capita annual cost to Americans of just $24. No matter—when DOGE landed, an early demand was to cease shipping medicine and food, even if it was already in transit. That happened, and when a judge ordered continued funding, the Trump administration ignored it. After Enrich leaked documentation of these cuts—“to expose the administration’s lies, cruelty, and recklessness”—he was terminated. “The story of USAID’s destruction is important because saving lives matters, but also as a symbol of where this administration was heading,” he argues. In a foreword to the book, Atul Gawande, the former assistant administrator for global health at USAID, writes that the shutdown of the agency “has already killed at least three-quarters of a million people, most of them children.”
Strong testimony to Trump White House cuts that have exacted a “heartbreaking human toll.”Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781668226957
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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