‘The Fifth Risk’ sounds a five-alarm warning
From its beginning to its final line (“It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you”), Michael Lewis reveals so much, and writes so insightfully, as he tackles what would seem to be the most mundane of his many magnificent investigations. The federal bureaucracy?
But instead of dull and wonkish, his new book, “The Fifth Risk” (Norton, 219 pp., ★★★★), is an alarming analysis of the most serious threats to Americans’ safety happening now from inside the U.S. government. And, Lewis nails the most catastrophic threat to your continued existence. Got your attention?
Lewis, author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” has built an impeccable reputation as a straightshooting journalist, a research junkie and analyst whose entertaining storytelling can make any subject captivating.
On the heels of his 2016 best-seller, “The Undoing Project,” about how people grapple with everyday risks, Lewis investigates the Trump administration’s ideological shakeup of the nation’s capital. Here are five eye-opening things we learn in “The Fifth Risk”:
1. Election night in Trump Tower was bizarre.
Lewis gives a stunning picture of Trump Tower on election night when Trump was declared the winner. Mike Pence tried to kiss his wife, Karen, and she snubbed him, saying, “You got what you wanted Mike, now leave me alone.”
She also had no time for Trump, who stared vacuously at the television “like a man with a pair of two’s whose bluff had been called,” Lewis writes.
No acceptance speech had been prepared. Chris Christie tried to prep Trump on protocol when foreign leaders called to congratulate him, but jumping the switchboard was Egypt’s president. Not knowing what to say, Trump mentioned the Bangles: “You know that song, ‘Walk Like an Egyptian?’ ”
2. Trump hated preparing to run the government.
When told federal law required him to form a transition team, Trump exploded. He saw no need and didn’t want to pay for it.
3. The government’s main function is keeping Americans alive.
In countless scenarios and matters of everyday life, the U.S. government stands between Americans and what might kill them. The feds’ wheelhouse is preventing or dealing with the aftermath of risks such as financial disasters, terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents and natural catastrophes such as hurricanes. But there are harder-to-imagine risks the feds handle: addictive prescription painkillers, attacks on the nation’s electrical grid, outbreaks of airborne viral epidemics; toxic waste spills, destructive wildfires. Six months into his presidency, Trump hadn’t nominated anyone to head FEMA, no one to run the Transportation Security Administration, no one to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no one to prepare for the 2020 Census.
4. The hallmark of the Trump administration is the disappearance of data.
At the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior, links to climate change data on their websites have been erased. Trump’s Department of Agriculture appointees have removed inspection reports on businesses accused of animal abuse. FEMA has deleted statistics on access to drinking water and electricity in postHurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
5. Lewis finds the “fifth risk” deeply troubling.
The fifth risk is “project management,” meaning the incompetence of leaders Trump has appointed. Lewis says they’re “responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions,” which leads to “the existential threat that you never see coming.” The government “is under siege” by appointees who are underprepared, unsuited for their duties, in it for themselves and ideologically hellbent on dismantling the federal government with little idea or care about the consequences, Lewis writes.