I have just finished reading the 700-page book, The Divider, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, which is a day-to-day, if not minute-to-minute account of how the Trump Administration functioned, or better yet didn’t function from 2017 through 2021.
On the one hand, the book can be read as a chronicle of how a dysfunctional Presidential Administration somehow muddled through four years. On the other hand, the text can be seen as a warning about what would be in store for us if Trump gets back into the Over Office in 2025
Either way, Baker-Glasser make it clear that they found Trump uniquely unsuited to be the CEO of the world’s largest corporation, largely due to his inability to either understand any of the issues which created the daily governing agenda or having the temperament to deal with anyone who didn’t necessarily share his views of what needed to be done.
That being said, I’m going to make an argument which won’t necessarily find any favor with my liberal friends, but as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, “history also has its claims,” and I do not believe that the history of Trump’s Presidency as presented by Baker-Glasser does Trump the justice that he deserves.
First and foremost, I didn’t find a single issue presented in this book which was either new or different from what I heard and read during the four years that Trump sat his fat ass behind the real Resolute desk. Whether by accident or design, the daily ministrations of Trump’s staff were openly exhibited to a degree never before seen in American political life.
When was the last time that the political media carried any mention of a disagreement in the Biden White House which was based on any first-hand testimonies, compared to the daily statements, quotes, asides and tweets which proliferated during the Trump years? When was the last time that Biden made any public reference to negative judgements (or positive judgements, for that matter) about political friends or political foes?
Remember when Barack made that unfortunate statement about people ‘clinging to guns and religion’ during the 2008 primary campaign? That was the first and very last time that Obama ever made a public statement which hadn’t been scripted in advance by Robert Gibbs or someone else on his staff.
We may have been insulted and shocked when Trump decried all those immigrants coming to America from ‘shithole countries,’ but what we were getting was a very honest picture of how Trump saw the world, not some manufactured portrait which had gone back and forth in Obama’s PR department before it was put out there for public consumption or as a headline for the Sunday talk shows.
How about when Sarah Palin couldn’t remember the name of one, single newspaper that she ever read? Everyone, me included, who rejoiced over how Palin had managed to demonstrate her errant stupidity, never paused for a moment to consider how this rather candid, unscripted response to an interview question would never have been produced by the Obama campaign which invented ‘change we can believe in’ as a campaign slogan, even though nobody really knew what those words meant.
Try this quote: “We have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” That statement was made by President Kennedy in a June 1961 interview with The New Tork Times.
I can just imagine how many hours were spent by JFK and his team of experts from Harvard and the Ford Foundation figuring that one out.
And Trump can’t keep his mouth shut? Good for him.
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