A thoroughly revealing account of a spectacularly inept presidential campaign that politics junkies will eat up.
Wall Street Journal senior White House reporter Bender turns in an engaging fly-on-the-wall account of the losing Trump 2020 campaign.
“I’m the president, and I’m going to stay the president.” So said the former president, who, throughout this circumstantial narrative, wanders hallways late at night, bewildered that it didn’t work out that way. Trump, of course, is famously unreflective—though also a fan of magical thinking, as when he asserted that Covid-19 was simply “going to go away.” Paranoid and superstitious, Trump tried in vain to reconstruct the 2020 campaign so that it went exactly like 2016, but he failed at every turn. “Trump had made derisive nicknames his hallmark but couldn’t find the handle in 2020,” Bender writes, to give just one example. “He tried at least ten different times to rename the former vice president. ‘Sleepy Joe’ was one of the first and most common, but that didn’t sound like a villain so much as someone who needed to go to bed at 9:00 p.m.” Bender’s account would be a comedy of errors if Trump weren’t so spectacularly unfunny. As Trump flubbed at every turn, his support team was even more incompetent, from a clueless Ivanka to a raging Don Jr. to a panoply of advisers whose chief interest seemed to be to soak the campaign for every cent they could. Ranging from the halls of power to the “Front Row Joes” who dutifully showed up for every Trump rally, Bender delivers a nuanced, sharp account whose leitmotif is puzzlement: Trump’s that he lost, Mitch McConnell’s that Trump wouldn’t let it go (he tried to get Bill Barr to convince Trump to back off his claims of election fraud), and Mike Pompeo’s that, as he put it late in the day, “the crazies have taken over.”
A thoroughly revealing account of a spectacularly inept presidential campaign that politics junkies will eat up.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3480-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
IN THE NEWS
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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