The campaign that was
Political junkies who are eager to relive the crazy cacophony of the 2016 election need wait no longer. Two new books offer a rich trove of sharply written essays from the campaign: “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, and “Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Netherland of the 2016 Presidential Race,” by best-selling novelist Richard North Patterson.
As the titles suggest, neither of these books pretends to offer a reverential view of the process or a flattering portrayal of the winner. Each is scathing in its dissections of the candidates’ weaknesses and the inability of the Republican Party to find a way to stop Donald Trump, whom each author regarded as an existential threat to the party and to American democracy.
What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase from these two wordsmiths. Each evokes a distinct aura of the gunslinging, spare-no-niceties outsider approach that Hunter S. Thompson brought to the 1972 Nixon-McGovern campaign in his seminal work, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.”
As with Thompson’s book, the core of “Insane Clown President” and “Fever Swamp” comes from essays written during the campaign: Taibbi for Rolling Stone and Patterson for the Huffington Post. Each predicted the demise of Trump early and often.
In an interesting touch, Patterson even
includes margin notes with his post-election reflections. On the same page of his Aug. 30 essay in which the author observed that Trump’s refusal to pivot from his hard line of playing to fear and mass anger “in all likelihood, would precipitate his defeat in November — killing off other Republicans in the bargain,” his margin note reads, “It is still stunning to consider how completely Trump violated every paradigm for a successful candidate. Any one of his endless mistakes would, in any other candidate I can think of, be disastrous.”
Taibbi showed a similar touch of humility in early September when a CNN poll showing Trump in the lead over Clinton coincided with his Rolling Stone piece that suggested Trump was in a “freefall,” having “lost his mojo.”
“What can I say?” he wrote. “Sometimes in journalism, you can’t help looking like a buffoon.”
They weren’t alone, of course.
The shortcomings of mainstream media coverage receive critical scrutiny from both authors. Patterson, a former trial lawyer and assistant attorney general for the state of Ohio, cites Watergate as a turning point, for better and for worse, in media coverage. While it underscored the importance of free and independent media, he writes, it also “created a template for ambitious reporters” — where uncovering scandal became the Holy Grail, with insufficient regard for its context or gravity. He suggests the extensive coverage of Clinton’s emails, Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation — not matched by similar scrutiny of Trump’s business dealings and Russian ties — fed into “a metanarrative” of her as untrustworthy.
Taibbi is no less condemnatory of the media role in the election. As with Patterson, Taibbi chronicles how a reality-TV star played to the desire of the media, especially cable news, for conflict and outlandishness. He notes how truth became secondary to shock value — and it wasn’t just Trump. Carly Fiorina’s graphic description of videos showing Planned Parenthood’s callous treatment of fetuses, unsupported by the evidence, gave her a momentary surge in the polls.
Taibbi also deplores the way media outlets have become so partisan: “The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.” He adds that “stories usually must be picked up by outlets across the spectrum to have an impact. That happens less and less in the partisan age.”
So true. Yet Taibbi makes no attempt to bridge that chasm. A Trump voter might well push aside Taibbi’s book before the first reference to their candidate, now president of the United States, being called “a con man” or a know-nothing who is “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.”
Although both books are well done as far as they go — as far as they could go with such a quick turnaround — “Fever Swamp” is in one sense the more fascinating in assessing how Patterson, who has written novels about presidential politics, applies his fiction techniques to real life.
“Insane Clown President” is a breezy read and will bring knowing chuckles among liberals who will savor its wickedly clever shots at all the jesters in the clown car who constituted the Republican primary field. It also will offer soothing words for supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the one figure who seems to emerge unscathed. “More than any politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality,” Taibbi wrote. “It’s the rest of us who are lost.”
These accounts of history in a hurry, while entertaining and surely maddening to those who either like or hate the ending, are handicapped by the knowledge that the full story of the 2016 election, especially the extent and manner of Russian meddling, is still unfolding. And it remains to be seen whether Trump’s election represents a profound turning point or a bizarre blip in American democracy.
We will just have to wait for the definitive book.