Subtitled "inside the Trump White House", this book chronicles the career of one of US President Donald Trump's advisers, Steve Bannon, during the first seven months of Trump's first presidency.
I used to love books like this. I adored All the President's Men and The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and John Dean's Blind Ambition, all of which were about the Watergate crisis that brought down Richard Nixon's presidency. But this book I found boring.
Part of the problem was that it seemed written for insiders. There were multiple references to people I didn't know, sometimes as part of explanations which meant that nothing, for me, was explained. There were references to American institutions and consumer goods and customs that, for me, obscured the story rather than enlightening it. I don't know to what extent a US citizen would understand what was going on but it certainly needed either translation or footnotes for me, and I think for a general reader living in the UK I am reasonably well-informed about US politics.
But footnotes would have added even more to the clutter of detail. There was quite enough. There is a large cast of characters, all of whom seem to spend their time slagging one another off and eating (do political memoirs in other countries spend quite so much time listing restaurants and even menus or is this something characteristically American?). I was swiftly swamped by the minutiae.
I suppose it must be very difficult to tell this story without overwhelming the reader in a flood of specifics because this is fundamentally a story about chaos. The thesis of the book is that Trump's team never expected to win the Presidential election so they hadn't planned for what would happen afterwards. Add to this a President who isn't very intelligent and quickly gets bored with detail and who delights in rambling stream-of-consciousness speeches and messages with no-holds-barred. Then there is his team. It seems to be that in politics what matters most is access to the leader (and especially with this leader whose decisions seem to echo the thoughts of the last person he has spoken to). Trump's team contained his daughter and son-in-law who naturally had privileged access to him. The others - his chief of staff, his special advisers, his speech writers, his director of communications, his secretary of state, almost everyone except his vice-president - all seemed to spend most of their time in-fighting with the others. The result was chaos leading to an administration lurching from crisis to crisis.
Not a single one of them seems like a nice guy (not one of them can even control themselves) and that is a problem for any story.
In the end, I grew bored and started skim-reading. This didn't help me understand what was going on and so I became even more bored. Two or three times I was on the verge of giving up but I read it all the way to the end. Even the epilogue. But I didn't enjoy it.
Selected quotes:
- "Bannon ... was profoundly disorganised. ... You couldn't really make an appointment with Bannon, you just had to show up." (Ch 2) And he is the person trying to control the chaotic Trump.
- "If Halberstam [a political historian who write a best-selling book about the Kennedy presidency] defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it - and defiled it." (Ch 3)
- "There was no competition in the Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation." (Ch 4)
- "You can't rule by decree in the United States, except you really can." (Ch 4)
- "Trump ... could not really converse ... in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him, nor particularly considered what he said in response." (Ch 5)
- "Ivanka and Jared ... seemed less interested in bending to advice and more interested in shopping for the advice they wanted." (Ch 5)
- "If we have to be in Afghanistan, he demanded, why can't we make money off it? China, he complained, has mining rights, but not the United States?" (Ch 20) A pretaste of his demand for minerals from Ukraine for the US having supported them in their war with Russia?
February 2025; 310 pages
Published in the UK in 2018 Little Brown
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