I Read (Almost) Every Memoir by a Former Trump Official
By LAURA MILLER
JUNE 29, 2020 5:50 AM
A few weeks into the Trump administration, I overheard a friend who works in publishing remark, “Possibly the only good thing that will ever come of this is a bunch of tell-all memoirs that will be a lot juicier than the typical White House book.” That prediction, rather like a Trump campaign promise, has yet to be fulfilled. Exposés of the dysfunctional inner workings of the Trump White House have reaped plenty of cash for the book business, but the best dish has mostly come from outsiders, journalists like Michael Wolff (2018’s Fire and Fury), Bob Woodward (2018’s Fear), and Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker (this year’s A Very Stable Genius). Books by former Trump staffers—of which John Bolton’s headline-making The Room Where It Happened is the most recent—tend to be stunted, partial accounts, twisted like bonsai trees by the authors’ needs to make excuses, cover their tracks, and justify choices that in retrospect look poor indeed.
But taken all together, these staffer memoirs offer a sense of something that no outsider can ever completely understand: what it’s like to live in Trump World. That’s what its denizens call the alternate reality surrounding our petty, distractible, praise-hungry president. Under its spell, people strive to gain and hold onto their perches in what has to be one of the worst workplaces in the history of the ruling classes, short of Caligula’s Rome. The Room Where It Happened contains its share of outraging scoops, thoroughly covered elsewhere, and is as replete with pontification, chickenhawk saber rattling, and numbing notebook dumps as its initial reviewers have attested. But it also provides the public with yet another facet of the mad tea party that is Trump World.
Bolton replaced H.R. McMaster, who had been forced out as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and whose own memoir is due in September. According to A Very Stable Genius, by the end of McMaster’s tenure, Trump had taken to imitating McMaster behind his back by puffing up his chest and barking in a “fake shout like a boot camp drill sergeant.” Bolton claims that he went in with “no illusions” about his ability to change Trump, perhaps believing that his frequent quoting of Eisenhower, Cato the Younger, and Thucydides would at least succeed in shaping policy. In this, he firmly belongs to the White House contingent he names “the axis of adults,” officials with experience in governing who sought to direct Trump’s wayward impulses and uninformed notions into some kind of consistent leadership. But Bolton insists that these people (a group that presumably includes such figures as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and McMaster) failed because they “didn’t do nearly enough to establish order, and what they did do was so transparently self-serving and publicly dismissive of many of Trump’s very clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy)” that Trump became mistrustful of his advisers and “saw conspiracies behind rocks.” Bolton did succeed in ticking off a few items on his to-do list, most notably the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—an obsession of his, as is everything Iranian—but eventually he got on everyone’s nerves and was fired in September.
In opposition to the “adult” staffers who deluded themselves that they could manage Trump are the believers, who have published their own set of memoirs. These include staffers like former press secretary Sean Spicer, communications aide Cliff Sims, and Trump satellite Chris Christie. Of these three, Spicer voices the fewest reservations about Trump’s management style. At times, in his 2018 memoir, The Briefing, his obeisance verges on Stockholm syndrome. After only six months in the White House, Spicer was effectively pushed to resign when Trump hired Anthony Scaramucci over him as communications director, the position Spicer had been seeking since the campaign. “This is the change you need and deserve,” he said to the president when handing over his resignation letter. “OK, if that’s what you think,” was Trump’s reply, prompting Spicer to rhapsodize about having seen a side of the president that is “caring, kind, and gracious.” (Scaramucci lasted only 11 days but got his own book out of it anyway—one that was so slim that, as with Omarosa’s, even I could not be bothered to read it.)
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https://slate.com/culture/2020/06/best-trump-books-memoirs-bolton-room-where-it-happened.html?utm_source=digg
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