Frankly, We Did Win This Election

Starred review from August 1, 2021
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.

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July 20, 2021
Let the avalanche of new Trump books begin. Well, it never exactly ended, but COVID-19, along with the forty-fifth president's refusal to concede the 2020 election and the storming of the Capitol, has provided plenty of grist for the mill. Bender, White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, chronicles Trump's last year in office, which was bookmarked by impeachments. Bender's 150 hours of interviews with those close to Trump, both inside and outside the White House, show what previous books have also revealed--an undisciplined president surrounded by a staff mostly dedicated to pleasing him (and backstabbing one another). As the account details, this executive-wing chaos was never more true than when it came to COVID-19. The pandemic angered the president, primarily because it chewed up his chances for reelection. Bender details the opportunities Trump missed to address the pandemic, as masks were frowned upon while super-spreader events were not. There isn't much that's surprising here, though the many sources consulted, including Trump himself, give the narrative substance. Sometimes, unlike in some similar books, it's even clear whom the source is, as with the anecdote about Chief of Staff John Kelly's effort to get the president to avoid praising Hitler. Also making this Trump book stand out--along with Bender's page-turning writing style--are the portraits of some of the self-proclaimed Front Row Joes, folks so dedicated to Trump that they stayed in line, sometimes for days, to get the best seats at his rallies. What comes across clearly is the affection and loyalty these acolytes have, not just to Trump but also to each other. With his access to both people and internal communications, Bender's deep dive will make a splash.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 2, 2021
Wall Street Journal reporter Bender debuts with an immersive, blow-by-blow rundown of Donald Trump’s failed reelection campaign. Interweaving fly-on-the-wall accounts of White House meetings with profiles of "Front Row Joes" who traveled across the country to attend Trump rallies, Bender covers the period from Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019 through his second acquittal in February 2021. Along the way, Bender sheds light on internal rivalries over the response to the coronavirus pandemic, documents how cavalier attitudes toward health and safety measures helped spread Covid-19 in the White House, delivers pointed assessments of administration members including Mike Pence ("it was sometimes difficult to tell... where his loyalty ended and his subservience began"), and notes the near-constant flow of leaked information to the press. Throughout, he paints a credible portrait of how a lack of coordination and Trump’s own preference for "chaos as an operating principle" doomed the reelection bid. Though the analysis often feels rote, Bender’s insider access impresses, and he enriches the narrative with a sharp sense of humor, describing Trump’s first debate performance against Joe Biden as a "hurricane of assholery." Political junkies will gobble this one up.