Diss and tell is making the US book trade great again
Say what you will about Donald J Trump, but he’s certainly made America’s book trade great again. Greatest ever, beautiful, as he might say. Never before in US history have so many beans been spilt by so many ex-White House staffers. The rapid turnover in the administration, and its sometimes unorthodox ways, have produced a healthy supply of egos with a story to tell and beans to spill all over the Rose Garden. Normally this stuff spews out messily when an administration leaves office; not this time.
The American public had to wait to discover how profane Richard Nixon was in private, or how amorous was Jack Kennedy. Now there’s at least a dozen books by those who’ve known or worked with Trump very
recently, plus plenty more indirectly linked to events, such as the gripping reads from Michael Wolff and Bob Woodward, where the intimidating presence of Steve Bannon is almost tangible. They’ll have to reinvent the Dewey Decimal system to cope.
John Bolton, former national security adviser (the third in three years) is only the latest to make a contribution to the booming sub-genre. It very much conforms to type. There’s the usual appalling Trumpian ignorance, such as not realising Finland is a country or knowing the UK has (US-supplied) nuclear weapons; the alleged leaning on foreign leaders to help get him re-elected, this time pleading with President Xi for China to buy more midwestern farm produce; and the usual vulgar abuse, such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s assessment that the leader of the free world is “full of shit”.
More of the same, one may assume, will follow from Bolton’s immediate predecessor HR McMaster when he produces his account in the autumn. Meanwhile Trump’s niece Mary L Trump is putting the final touches to the promising-sounding Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. There’s even a mildly controversial biography of Flotus, by Mar Jordan entitled Melania: The Art of Her Deal. You can guess what that’s all about.
It’s incredibly important in Trumpworld that you protect yourself, because everyone constructs their own reality
Just to browse the range of titles is a bit like walking through a fashionable DC diner catching snatches of conversation – Fire and Fury, Siege, Fear, Let Trump Be Trump, Let Me Finish, Unhinged, Team of Vipers... you get the picture. Not an HR case study in best practice.
Some names are familiar, some less so, but all have their moments. Cliff Sims, for instance, was a relatively junior figure in the comms team and came up with a fine description of what he encountered – “the whole thing felt like Games of Thrones, but with the characters from Veep”. Omarosa Manigault Newman was also on the comms team and followed Trump from The Apprentice. She claims she heard a tape from his TV days where he uses a racial slur, and “it confirmed that he really is a racist”. Her advice? “It’s incredibly important in Trumpworld that you protect yourself, because everyone constructs their own reality.”
A Higher Loyalty, by sacked FBI chief James Comey, is one of the more prominent offerings, and again the gangster quality of life with Trump is brought to mind: “I was once again having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, on service to some code of loyalty that put the organisation above morality and the truth.” “Weak and untruthful slimeball” was Trump’s verdict on the author.
The trivia and gossip is always amusing. Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie were aides to Trump in the 2016 campaign and after, and tell the story of how spokeswoman Hope Hicks “used a steamer to press Trump’s pants [trousers] while he was wearing them”. The president-elect’s favourite McDonald’s order was “two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted”.
Surely there can be no more intimate details left after Stormy Daniels, in her 2018 Full Disclosure, described Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but not “freakishly small”.
The odd thing, though, is that the public Trump is nearly as astonishing anyway, compared to the one who appears in the insiders’ tales. The whole world has seen him advocate bleach and sunshine as possible treatments for Covid-19; everyone has read the Twitter spats with the “Little Rocket Man” in Pyongyang, about who’s got the bigger nuclear button.
Chris Christie has a particular hostility towards Jared Kushner, and just sums up the personnel concerned as ‘amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons’
Even those mostly supportive of the president, a minority, describe a badly functioning executive arm. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, for one, describes how former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former chief of staff James Kelly tried (and failed) to recruit her in an effort to subvert Trump and “save the country”. Such clandestine rearguard activity is covered even more extensively in the Woolf and Woodward instant histories.
Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, who spent all of 10 days as director of communications, is also kind to Trump, but calls ex-chief of staff Reince Priebus “a rat”, Bannon “borderline delusional” and Kelly “ineffective”, quite mild, all things considered. Chris Christie, ex-governor of New Jersey who ran the transition team, has a particular hostility towards Jared Kushner, and just sums up the personnel concerned as “amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons”.
Whichever such category they fall into, it seems anyone who emerges from the American government needs to write a book as some sort of PTSD therapy. We do of course still await the thoughts and reflections of Bannon and, the greatest prize of all by the greatest author, the sequel to The Art of the Deal, President Trump. How long will we have to wait?