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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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