Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Want to read a tirade about the Trump presidency? If so, EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES (ETTD) should be near the top of your TBR pile. Interestingly, Rick Wilson, the author of this rant, is no ally of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Instead, he is a rock-ribbed conservative who believes in small government, responsible spending, free trade, and international alliances. This, in Wilson’s view, was what the Republican Party stood for before the Trump takeover. But that’s enough about Wilson. Here’s a taste of his ranting: “Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. Pushing a tax bill that jacks economic inequality into the stratosphere? Check. Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check.” Interestingly, Wilson, who calls himself a master of political attack ads, acknowledges that he and his colleagues within the grown-ups wing of the Republican Party—he includes William Kristol and George H. W. Bush in this group—bear responsibility for what Wilson definitely considers Trump’s desecration of conservative politics and principles. Although Republicans, according to Wilson, have long tried to exploit the dark forces in American politics, they have, until Trump, always succeeded in corking the bottle after using racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and class resentment to win elections. Then came the 2008 Presidential election. Wilson observes: o “The creature that emerged after Sarah Palin… in 2008 kept growing, hungry not for policy victories that realigned the regulatory state, but for liberal tears, atavistic stompy-foot rages…” o “…we fed the monster and trained it. I know how patronizing that sounds, the thought that we could activate and—call it what it is—manipulate voters. Well, we did. As the tools of data, targeting, and analytics improved, we got very, very good at it.” o “We kept feeding the monster. We rewarded its darkest impulses. We brought it out when the time was right. The portfolio of messages, political rhetoric, and communication venues we built constituted a suite of powerful political tools.” o “Then Trump came along. We lost control of those tools, the party, and the movement. The monster is out of its cage, and new trainers (both here and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel, and violent behavior.” In his epilogue, Wilson posits two possible paths forward for American politics. The first he calls his Mad Max Outcome, which includes Donald Trump Jr. named as President in 2024 and the mysterious death of Rick Wilson in the crash of a small airplane. In contrast, he calls his second option the Big Reset and imagines the emergence of a new conservative movement in American politics. This second option, BTW, is the least persuasive element in ETTD since the Republican Party, in renouncing racism and resentment, becomes the conservative movement led by Bill Buckley, who was principled and quirky and never in power. Wilson gets the final word. “When Trump slithered down the golden escalator in his eponymous tower in 2015, I felt bile rising in my throat. This guy? This jackass? I was quite sure nothing had changed about his blustering ego, fever-swamp birtherism, and con-artist modus operandi. Given the ideological underpinnings of Trumpism—slurry of barely coherent nationalism, third-world generalissimo swagger, and the worst economic ideas of the 19th century—I recognized that he was an existential risk to the country, win or lose.”