The authors now compare Trump to Napoleon, exiled to Elba.Ĭongress impeached him twice. Trump’s time behind the Resolute Desk translated into “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals”. It never happened.īaker and Glasser depict a tempestuous president and a storm-filled presidency. Eventually, he forgot he had spun that yarn. Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations. “When we sat down with a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser write, “the first thing he told us was a lie.” They met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “his rococo palace by the sea”, to which we now know he took more than 300 classified documents. Those who were in and around the West Wing talk and share documents. Their book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Glasser works for the New Yorker and CNN. Baker and Glasser lay out receiptsīaker is the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. The insurrection stands as bloody testament to populism and Christian nationalism. The tectonics of education, religion and race clang loudly – and occasionally violently. Trump’s “big lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen, is potent. Half the country deems Trump unfit to hold office, half would grant him a second term, possibly as president for life. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and possibly future prime minister of Israel, he had a tart “fuck him”.Īt home, the US is mired in a cold civil war.

In a moment of pique, Trump sought to give the Israeli-controlled West Bank to King Abdullah of Jordan. He treated Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as a plaything, to be blackmailed for personal gain. Trump spoke kindly of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t are the authors’ open questions. In electing Trump, Baker and Glasser write, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. The US is still counted as a liberal democracy but is poised to stumble out of that state.

Review of the plot against america