A devastating survey outlining Trump’s worst qualities.
An anonymous author roasts former President Donald Trump in this biting nonfiction book.
From its grotesque front cover caricature of Trump to its list of the erstwhile commander-in-chief’s most “despicable” acts on its final page, this work is relentless in its message that Trump “should not be President.” The book begins with an overview of the former president’s propensity to lie, in ways that are both innocuously bizarre (such as his claims that it didn’t rain at his inauguration) and frighteningly dangerous (such as his election result denials and claims of voting fraud after his 2020 loss). In total, the author posits, Trump “made over 30,000 false or misleading statements when he was President.” Beyond his reputation as a liar, Trump, per the book, is an “idiot” who constantly says “dumb things,” including claims that he would build an anti-immigration wall on the border of Colorado and that he is “highly educated” because he knows “the best words.” He is also a con artist, according to the author—the book includes a chapter-long history of Trump’s “scams.” These include Trump University—approximately 1,000 individuals paid $34,999 for a “Gold package” seminar taught by real estate market instructors whom Trump had never even met. Other examples include the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity whose expenses included the purchase of a $60,000, 9-foot-tall portrait of Trump, and the Presidential Inaugural Committee, which was charged an inflated amount by the Trump International Hotel to host inaugural ceremonies. The former president’s entourage is not spared from the author’s wrath, from Steve Bannon, who was charged with fraud for his “Build the Wall” campaign, to son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose diplomatic efforts were beholden to his business ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (per the author’s convincing analysis). The book concludes with an appeal to conservatives to vote for Republican candidates “down ballot if they are the better candidate, but do not vote Trump,” emphasizing that Trump is a unique threat. As such, the book avoids partisan critiques of Republicans in general (aside from those most loyal to the Trump camp). The author argues (based on Trump’s own declarations) that a second presidential term for Trump would likely feature blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, a restructuring of the Department of Justice to target the president’s enemies, and an upending of the current world order by withdrawing America’s support from NATO and Ukraine.
While the book’s polemical tone and ad hominem attacks will likely irk the former president’s supporters, it nevertheless packs a meaningful punch, backed by almost 50 pages of source references, with its exhaustive overview of Trump’s legacy. The most damning evidence, ironically, comes straight from “the horse’s mouth” as Trump is directly quoted throughout the book, displaying his willingness to openly air “racist, petty, hypocritical, and dishonest” statements “for everyone to see and hear.” The book’s dire warnings about a second Trump presidential term are tempered with a satirical panache. Writing under the pseudonym Tom Praddlun (an anagram for Donald Trump), the author includes a humorous, full-color, multipage gallery of unflattering photographs of Trump and a word-search puzzle that highlights his “Terrible Traits.” A well-designed work, the book features a wealth of images, screenshots of tweets, graphs, and other visual elements.
A devastating survey outlining Trump’s worst qualities.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Expono Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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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