Steve McGookinChildren love fireworks.
And the Fourth of July weekend is the perfect opportunity for some collective “ooh”s and “aah”s as their world is magically illuminated in patriotic colours and for a few brief seconds, nothing else matters.
In a presidency where fireworks in a more metaphorical sense have become increasingly commonplace, the great White House distraction circus pitched its tent last night at Mount Rushmore to collect some free propaganda footage for the upcoming election and belch out a rambling, divisive speech about culture wars and statues – described by former Ambassador Michael McFaul as “Perhaps the most un-American speech ever delivered by an American president, on the eve of July 4th.”
As indigenous protesters clashed with law enforcement outside and the largely unmasked audience huddled together under the president’s banner of white grievance, the whole production was another dystopian dark carnival on the road to November.
By the time the pyrotechnics began, the First Lady appeared to have the look of an exhausted mother suddenly relieved that their infant’s attention was now drawn to the sky, meaning they had stopped scribbling on her dress with a Sharpie.
Children love fireworks. (Dogs, not so much. But that’s probably ok with a president – the first in a century not to have a pet in the White House – who doesn’t seem to have much time for man’s best friend except as a way of demeaning his opponents.)
Today is America’s 244th birthday, and the celebration, if there is that much to celebrate at the moment, comes at the end of a traumatic week for the Trump administration– but, really, has there been a time recently when we couldn’t say that?
The country had to come to terms over the past few days with the hugely serious – and at their heart, fundamentally sad – issues of Russian “bounties” on American troops in Afghanistan; as well as allegedly flawed Covid-19 tests amid a surge in cases, compounding the spotlight on the administration’s handling of the virus and how its politicization has poisoned the country as surely as the infection.
Every day now seems to be a combination of episodes that even a skilled political satirist or a writer for “Black Mirror” would be at pains to make up.
In desperate search of a counter-narrative, the president himself re-tweeted video of an old man yelling “White Power” during a confrontation with other old people in a Florida retirement community. I kid you not. Trump subsequently removed the retweet but perhaps the worrying thing for his re-election campaign is this level of conflict among a key demographic and how he unwittingly drew attention to it.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker thinks Trump’s current trouble with older voters is due in large part to his handling of the pandemic, but that “the incendiary manner in which Trump responded to the wave of protests following the killing of George Floyd seems to have had a similar effect.”
With multiple crises crashing around them, and poll numbers becoming so ugly that former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville thinks the president might not even contest the election, the standard operating procedure for the White House continues to be to blame the media for highlighting whatever thing they don’t want people to talk about. Beyond the base, though, that tactic is becoming old news.
Signs of dysfunction appear to be everywhere.
We’ve all seen enough of Donald Trump by now to suspect at some point or another that he might be unhinged. Or “delusional” as some of his former advisers might put it. So it’s probably not much of a shocker if a trained psychologist might say it.
But when the psychologist in question is a member of his own family, then maybe that’s worth twenty-odd bucks.
Mary Trump, the president’s niece, has written a book deliciously titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man”. It’s due for publication on July 28, but has been the subject of a legal tug of war with other members of the Trump clan, with yet another court hearing set for next Friday.
All of which, of course, has helped generate interest and advance sales for Simon & Schuster, the publishing giant which is also behind two other notable Trump-related books in recent weeks – the aforementioned First Lady’s very own “The Art of Her Deal,” written with Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan; and “The Room Where It Happened” by Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton – which saw Bolton widely criticized for waiting to reveal information which may have bolstered the impeachment case against his former boss.
While Simon & Schuster says it approaches the presidential market in a non-partisan way – it also published Trump’s own campaign book, “Great Again” – in September it will bring the world another volume about the president by Bob Woodward, whose best-seller last year “Fear: Trump in the White House” was based on hundred of hours of interviews with members of the administration past and present.
For the new one, apparently, Trump himself appears to have been open to being interviewed.
There seems to be no limit to the public’s appetite for books about Trump – for and against – which prompts the question exactly why people want to read about something that is larger than life and in their face, like it or not, every single day? Is it for the unique insights of real insiders or simply confirmation bias? Or is it a genuine desire to understand the workings of a unique political phenomenon, possibly in time to save ourselves from it.
While academics, pundits and political reporters (and God only knows where they find the time) opine at length on the political world that created Trump and his supporters, how he’s used his power, or the danger he poses to the established world order; publishers have reveled in a regular flow of White House staffers eager to leave Trump’s employ and tell stories about his persona.
(We wrote about some of them here two years ago, covering the release of the book by former FBI boss James Comey, while there’s a list here from Business Insider of all the books about Trump published up to the middle of last year.)
Perhaps the one that set the template was Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury”, with well-placed stories of how he got access and Trump’s reaction acting as the best promotional material imaginable; a pattern of publicity repeated right up to the Bolton book.
Laura Miller at Slate wrote recently about how she had read (almost) every memoir by a former Trump official and says that collectively they “offer a sense of something that no outsider can ever completely understand: what it’s like to live in Trump World. That’s what its denizens call the alternate reality surrounding our petty, distractible, praise-hungry president.”
The challenge for all of them is timing: making sure your story doesn’t miss the moment by being overtaken by events or a new wave of outrage that sends the collective audience off in an entirely different direction. With this administration, that’s never easy to foresee. Meanwhile the intricacies of the publishing industry are also a fascinating insight – NPR reported last year on exactly what the bestseller lists can tell us about a book’s popularity.
And the tide of material will surely keep flowing, regardless of the outcome of November’s election. This administration, and this president, will likely keep publishers in business long after he is gone – whenever that might be. John Harris at Axios writes about the things we still don’t know about one of the most explored American presidencies, and says there are “six Trump bombshells waiting to explode.”
While Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 novel “It Can’t Happen Here” may have seen a resurgence in sales after Trump’s election eighty years later, the aim for Joe Biden and the Democrats will be to avoid a similar spike in popularity for Philip Roth’s more recent work “The Plot Against America.”
See Also:
Review – Devil’s Bargain
Review – Shattered
Review – What Happened
