Governing Trump’s way

Trump administration is the leakiest administration since the Founding Fathers created parchment, much of what happens behind the scenes in nearly real-time accompanied by the running commentary from the President’s Twitter account.

Washington Post reporters Philip Rocker and Carol Leonnig reveal Trump at his unvarnished, showing the unhinged decision-making and incompetence that has floored officials and stunned foreign leaders, including unscripted calls with Vladimir Putin, Steak dinners with Kim Jong-un and calls with Theresa May, so hostile that they left her aides shaken. How his investigation slowly unravelled an administration whose universal value is loyalty not to the country but to the president himself and Trump’s vainglorious pursuit of power in his first term- the rages and the frenzies, the dishonesty and the depravity which reads like a horror story, and a comic immorality story.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel who produced the two-volume jaw-dropper in April 2019, and the House of Representatives Judiciary committee’s 300-page impeachment report last month turn the focus on the workings of the Trump administration.

Rucker and Leonnig whose coverage of Trump with higher standard-setting work on Trump beat has won them both Pulitzers, in their  book “A Very Stable Genius” reveals two accounts by Trump insiders on penned by anonymous “ Senior Trump Administration Official” and the other by  John Bolton.

Trump’s obsequious news conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, his one-time fixer Michael Cohen’s sober testimony on Capitol Hill. The book, however, gives an insight into the cumulative effect of what has happened in the Trump presidency, the reminder outrage piled on the outrage that shocks the conscience.

Trump’s handling of Robert Mueller’s investigation, starting with the ill-fated appointment of retired army intelligence officer Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser and finishing with the release of Mueller’s 450-page report more than two years later.

Rex Tillerson, a private sector fish out of the water and the former ExxonMobil CEO who was Trump’s first and much-abused secretary of state, the book reveals brilliant flashes of insights in the presidential cacophony. However, it was Tillerson, as one of the senior officials who took on Trump in the White House during Trumps all-too-frequent misinformed tirades and literally stand up to Trump in the White House situation room, turning his back on president to apologise to the assembled uniformed military leaders after Trump suggested that foreign allies should pay for the deployment of US troops as if they were mercenaries for hire.

Tillerson said “ Every person who has put on a uniform, the people in this room, they don’t do it to make a buck. They did it for their country to protect us. I want everyone to be clear about how much we as a country value their service.” Three months later, Tillerson was dismissed by the presidential tweet.

Every time we find ourselves becoming blasé about the president’s efforts to coerce foreign leaders to intervene in US elections, or calling the developing nations “ shithole countries”, or setting policy based on the conspiracies proffered by cable news talking heads, we must take a step back and remind ourselves that this is an aberration.

 

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leaning, Penguin $30/ Bloomsbury £20, 480 pages.