MAKE RUSSIA GREAT AGAIN

Veteran Washington satirist Buckley skewers the Trump administration in a farce that imagines several all-too-credible political crises ahead of Election Day 2020.

In a parody of a White House memoir, Trump loyalist Herbert K. Nutterman writes from federal prison about his brief tenure as chief of staff. His first challenge is to deal with the fallout when a rogue government computer program called Placid Reflux threatens Vladimir Putin’s reelection bid. Also from Russia with bromance is oligarch Oleg Pishinsky, an old buddy of Donald Trump’s who is upset because Congress passed a law freezing his assets after he was implicated in the murder of a U.S. newspaper’s Moscow bureau chief. He wants the law repealed and brandishes a secret weapon: a thumb drive holding video of Trump in flagrante seriatim with 18 Miss Universe contestants. Trump tells Herb and Sen. Squigg Lee Biskitt of South Carolina (read Lindsey Graham) to engineer the repeal. As these narrative lines get tangled in various ways, Buckley, a former White House speechwriter, adds comic spin to recent events, providing a plausible view of the crude, jury-rigged, stopgap daily carnival that is No. 45 at work. The author can be witty and clever but also sophomoric and sexist. Seamus Colonnity (Fox’s Sean Hannity) makes a joke about something “going around like Wuhan coronavirus.” Greta Fibberson, the White House chief of communications, has “a balcony you could play Shakespeare from.” Herb can recognize the “Rubicon moment” that eventually lands him in prison while elsewhere thinking he should avoid a problem because “this was not a caca of my making.”

Buckley is a smart, entertaining observer, but the weak spots in his humor can leave a reader wincing.