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Bezig met laden... A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America (origineel 2020; editie 2020)door Philip Rucker (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkA Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America door Philip Rucker (2020)
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. The authors of "A Very Stable Genius", Pulitzer Prize winners Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, used President Trump's self-description as the title of their book, and then proceed to show why the President's opinion of himself is far from true. Rucker and Leonnig's book seems similar in approach to Bob Woodward's earlier book "Fear". Like Woodward, Rucker and Leonnig interviewed Trump insiders and senior members of the Trump Administration. And like Woodward's book, the authors tried to write as reliable a book as possible, even if some of the sources they interviewed may be considered to be unreliable by critics. But when coupled with the plethora of other books already written about the President and his Administration, such as Michael Wolf's Siege, David Frum's Trumocracy, Omarosa Newman's Unhinged, David Cay Johnson's It's Even Worse Than You Think and The Making of Donald Trump, Michael Isikoff's & David Corn"s Russian Roulette, Katy Tur's Unbelievable, Michael Kranish's Trump Revealed, etc., the multiple of sources and the multiple corroboration of the same stories makes you believe that most of these stories are true. One new source the authors had access to, which wasn't available to earlier book authors, is the recent information produced in the Muller Report. The 448 page Muller Report, which investigated possible collusion of the Trump campaign with Russia, is a catalog of presidential scheming and misconduct. Volume 2 of the report details 10 events scrutinized for obstruction of justice. The report notes that Trump pressured his aids to lie to investigators and fabricate false records. Muller suggested that Congress could / should investigate and prosecute, since Muller felt that Department of Justice policy prevents charging a sitting President with a crime. The only punishment option is Congressional impeachment. The Report writers stated that if the investigators were confident that Trump did not obstruct justice, they would have said so. The Muller report concluded: "While this Report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him". On other matters, Rucker and Leonnig had access to a number of Trump associates, who while feeling honor bound to not openly criticize the President, did discuss what they observed within the White House. A theme which recurs throughout the book is that the dominant value of the Trump Administration is loyalty to the President. And the President's dominant value is the accumulation of wealth, praise and respect. There's no shortage of critical commentary of the President in the book. But the criticism isn't from political opponents. Rather, it comes from Trump's own aides, people who have worked with the President. Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and someone who's been Trump's "fixer" for 10 years, stated he was ashamed about his behavior acting for Trump. Cohen had copies of Trump's financial statements, copies of checks for hush money payments, copies of letters he wrote on Trump's behalf to Trump's high school, college, and college boards, threatening to sue if they ever release Trump's school grades or SAT scores, etc. None of these actions give credence to Trump's claim that he's as rich as he claims, or was as good a student as he claims. In pleading guilty in 9th District of NY, Cohen identified Trump as a racist, a con-man, a cheat, and said Trump was more craven, dishonest, and racist in private than seen in public. Others, as we've heard previously, are no less kind. It was widely reported that former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster referred to the President a dope, that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis likened him like a 5th grader, Steve Mnuchin called him an idiot, as did Reince Priebus. Omarosa Newman, a former Trump aide and supporter, calls him racist. Anthony Scaramucci, briefly the White House Director of Communications, calls Trump a congenital liar. Replacement Chief of Staff John Kelly called him a f'n idiot, former Sec. of State Rex Tillerson called him a f'n moron, and Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn called him dumb as s#it, etc. With all that, the authors seemed to clearly make their point on this "Very Stable Genius". This book impugns Trump mightily by his own actions and words. If you have been paying very close and steady attention to reliable news sources, then you will not learn much more from this book (and you may have been keeping your local liquor store in business since 2016 as I have), so not recommended for you diligent news followers; only two stars, for freshening your recollections. It is you Fox fans who will benefit most from the book, if you are of the reading type; stars galore, for broad-mindedness and courage.
By now, four years into Donald Trump’s nearly-inconceivable first term in the Oval Office, the pattern of such books is well-known. ... Those cycles are the fuel for all such Trump books, and the combustion is the simmer of impotent outrage felt throughout the country every minute of every day by the majority of the population who correctly see Trump as an existential threat to the survival of the idea itself of the United States. ... But a noteworthy Trump book is still a Trump book, and by now one other thing is known about them: they’re every bit as sordid, opportunistic, and money-grubbing as their subject. They can’t help but be; if you touch the pitch of a lifelong grifter and conman like Trump, for a book contract, no amount of credentials will save you from being defiled. Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post offer A Very Stable Genius. As befitting Pulitzer winners for investigative reporting, their book is richly sourced and highly readable. It sheds new light on how the 45th president tests the boundaries of the office while trying the patience and dignity of those who work for or with him. It is not just another Trump tell-all or third-party confessional. It is unsettling, not salacious. ... Leonnig and Rucker quote Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution, who says Trump “appears to be daring the rest of the political system to stop him – and if it doesn’t he’ll go further. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it.” Rucker and Leonnig offer lots of gory details about the president. He blusters about, desperately solipsistic, relentlessly ignorant. His gaffes are breathtaking. And yet, gradually, despite the consternation of his aides (and the authors’ narrative intent), Trump emerges as more than just a needy adolescent throwing spitballs at the deep state. He has a definite worldview and a strategy, a feral brilliance that has cracked the political code in the digital, postmillennial era. ... Rucker and Leonnig’s sources make much of the need to keep guard rails on the president, but Trump has his own rigorous set of boundaries: He will always appear tough. He will always be crude. He will be relentless in his pursuit of his agenda. The problem is, ultimately, that the world is more complex than any ideology, especially one so simple as Trump’s. Rucker and Leonnig have composed their book, they write, out of a desire to step out of the churning news cycle and “assess the reverberations” of Trump’s presidency. The result is a chronological account of the past three years in Washington, based on interviews with more than 200 sources. ... It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It’s as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass. Rucker and Leonnig's mission is manifest in their title, a sarcastic jab at one of Trump's more memorable moments of self-congratulation. Accused of being either unthinking or unstable, Trump at the time denied being either. He was, he said, "a very stable genius." Whether the president meant that with a touch of self-deprecating humor or not, it functions here as the epitome of self-delusion. ... Older readers may recoil from much of this assessment — not only because the behavior described is repellent, but also because its depiction in such relentlessly damning detail is disturbing. People naturally ask: How much of this can be true? ... there is something unsettling about the evolution of this genre. Is it purely a matter of Trump's excesses or has he occasioned a sea change in journalism as well?
Politics.
Nonfiction.
HTML:The instant #1 bestseller. â??This taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trumpâ??s shambolic tenure in office to date." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trumpâ??s presidency â??I alone can fix it.â?ť So proclaimed Donald J. Trump on July 21, 2016, accepting the Republican presidential nomination and promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet as he undertook the actual work of the commander in chief, it became nearly impossible to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal, investigation, and constant bluster. In fact, there were patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the Trump administration was loyaltyâ??not to the country, but to the president himselfâ??and Trumpâ??s North Star was always the perpetuation of his own power. With deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reveal the forty-fifth president up close. Here, for the first time, certain officials who felt honor-bound not to divulge what they witnessed in positions of trust tell the truth for the benefit of history. A peerless and gripping narrative, A Very Stable Genius not only reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished but shows how he tested the strength of Americaâ??s democracy and it Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)973.933092History and Geography North America United States 1901- Bush Administration And Beyond Donald Trump BiographiesLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Where is the planet headed? Where is democracy headed? When the traveling masses are in the hundreds of millions where and when, if ever, will they settle? What are we to do without work? ( )