****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The three years since Donald Trump took office have been difficult, to say the least. The US has never had a President so ill-suited for public office, so devoid of talent, and so narcissistic as Donald Trump, and observing his guilty progress and the accompanying damage to the nation and the world has been painful for concerned patriots. The immediate reaction for most decent-minded folk is to turn away and shield our eyes from the ghastliness, but that only abets Trump and his minions, here and abroad, in their ongoing work of destruction. Fortunately we have some able chroniclers, and among the best are the authors of A Very Stable Genius, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, respectively the White House bureau chief and a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, both Pulitzer Prize winners and both determined to ferret out in detail the truly miserable events of the last three years.A Very Stable Genius is meticulously detailed and documented, relying on interviews from dozens of officials and other eye witnesses. It is not a polemic, it is a rigorous work of history which will be an invaluable reference in the future. It is chronological in scope, beginning the day after the 2016 election and continuing to the impeachment inquiry that began in the fall of 2019. I suspect most readers of A Very Stable Genius, like me, are already familiar with the basic details of Trump's reign of errors, but Rucker and Leonnig have done an outstanding job of digging out the odd details and giving new life to old accounts. Their account of the notorious Pentagon meeting between Trump and military leaders attempting to educate him on world realities in July 2017 has been given a lot of publicity, but let me assure you that no second hand reporting does justice to what really happened that dark day in "the Tank." I was already well aware of Trump's basic ignorance, but I was shocked to read Rucker and Leonnig's tales of his lack of understanding of the US Constitution, of his complaining of how unfair it was that US companies were not allowed to pay bribes, and of his cluelessness on a visit to Pearl Harbor. I gained new respect for some of the honorable men and women who did their best to serve Trump, like James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, until they were rudely dismissed in favor of more pliant and less able replacements.In the early days of 2020 America is well into yet another election season. While it is a truism that "the stakes have never been higher," there's no other way to describe how important the next weeks and months will be in our history. Rucker and Leonnig's account underlines that importance, and all concerned Americans should read it and keep it close at hand.
