In Other Words
It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America by David Cay Johnston
For American publishers, 2018 is already the year of the Donald Trump tell-all. While Michael Wolff’s bombshell, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White
House, was chattier, more salacious, and a bit more fun to read — the Trump administration equivalent of a bodice-ripper — David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse
Than You Think is nothing short of a true crime book, and the murder victim is the United States of America.
Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has been covering Trump for over three decades, which makes It’s Even Worse Than You Think a bit like asking someone’s oldest frenemy to give you the skinny on them. It was Johnston who received the copy of Trump’s tax return in the mail that was later disclosed on MSNBC, a jaw-dropping moment he describes in the book. For that, Johnston, who has penned many acclaimed articles and books on business, taxes, and the economy, is an appropriate messenger. More than many of his colleagues, Johnston remains hyper-focused on the nitty-gritty details of Trump’s presidency, brushing aside the manufactured drama of a reality-star-cum-president and his peccadilloes to instead write about the fudged numbers and wild lies and obscene practices of a deeply corrupt and delusional man who, as Johnston puts it, “creates his own reality.”
Johnston breaks down the issues of this dark day in American democracy in digestible, essay-size chunks: the “Jobs” section discusses, for example, how the shrinking of government has disabled OSHA; “Taxes” lays bare how the tax plan mumbojumbo is designed to confuse and obfuscate taxes for anyone except someone, like Trump, who avoids paying them; and the chapter called “Kleptocracy Rising” makes clear how, for a businessman with no principles, the office of the president is merely a license to rob the nation blind.
To say the book is a biting indictment is an understatement. It would be more accurate to call it an agonizing, blowby-blow commentary on the fight between Trump’s White House and the sagging remnants of the nation’s integrity: “As these pages show, based on his own words and deeds, Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to hold any public office,” Johnston writes. “That Donald Trump legitimately holds office under our Constitution is beyond question. That he is a clear and present danger to the whole world should be obvious by now.”
Of course, like anything Trump-related, the book became somewhat outdated even before it was published. The hyperspeed soap opera that is the Trump machine has already killed off several of the figures he discusses (Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault, for example, initially appointed director of African-American outreach for the Trump administration, is no longer on the White House reality show), but the principles behind the appointment of the new personnel remain the same — which is to say, as Johnston would point out, that there simply aren’t any.
Meanwhile, the daily news cycle marches on, and the current chapter of collusion-or-not with Russian cloak-and-dagger tactics seems to have just begun. It is terrifyingly foreshadowed at the end of Johnston’s book: “Whether Trump is merely a fool or a knowing Kremlin agent is unresolved at this writing,” he says. “What we know for sure is that the Trump campaign eagerly solicited the Kremlin’s help to defeat Hillary Clinton … and that Trump directly participated in lying and covering up that secret collaboration with a hostile foreign power.”
Despite stiff competition, the most depressing moment in the book is the chapter titled “The Road to Charlottesville,” wherein Johnston delves for a moment into the dark shadow Trump casts with regard to the impulses and outrage and injured sense of “heritage” of the Americans that elected him. But while that topic could be a whole book in itself, Johnston remains with his protagonist. As coolly as could be expected under the circumstances, he describes Trump’s ominous flirtations and affiliations with white supremacy, along with his unwillingness to decry the kind of unapologetic racism that, with the previous election of the first African-American president, many of us thought to be the most outdated of American evils.
It’s Even Worse Than You Think is, essentially, a vivid portrait of a man who manifests the worst impulses of humanity, an unbelievably cartoonish supervillain who currently helms the good ship USA, leaving America and its people to become casualties to his ego: “The Trump presidency is about Trump. Period. Full stop,” he writes. And while this book will do nothing to sway Trump’s supporters, who seem untroubled by inconvenient truths, Johnston’s book is a useful volume for those who want to know exactly how many inches of water per hour the water is rising since we hit the iceberg back in Nov. 2016.