UnPresidented: Politics, pandemics and the race that Trumped all others

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These threats were not mere bloviation: seven hundred soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were in fact summoned to Washington. I enjoyed reading it for the most part, but it is too unbalanced to present to teens as THE authoritative biography of Donald Trump. After the protests began Trump’s barely latent lust for armed conflict surfaced with extraordinary rapidity, with the president instructing governors in the imperative for “overwhelming force” and “domination” over the enemy citizenry and conjuring “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons. Seeing this only covers through July 2018, I'm hoping there will be a followup at the end of 45's term. In this partly memoir-partly reportage book, he recounts the day to day journey of reporting the 2020 United States presidential election.

Written with a young adult audience in mind, the tone and language is one that is pragmatic and clear for any reader, with care taken to keep out any opinion on the matters at hand (which I expect was difficult). It is in the form of extracts from Jon Sopel’s journal of the 2020 Presidential Election, starting about 18 months out and ending as Biden and Harris make their victory speeches. To deny its possible political ramifications is to be blind to expressed fears and frustrations and to underlying, if often unspoken, references to race. It’s a fascinating story, beginning with a hard luck immigration tale, and filled with bold and brassy business tactics, and a family that just doesn’t seem to believe the rules apply to them. It’s too packed with details for this kind of exploration; moreover, the frequent use of large, highlighted excerpts of texts adds a tone of bias, like a tabloid headline.The slow, public killing of George Floyd gave the lie to Trump’s attenuation of American history to a tale of his own pain and glory. It is ironic that, on May 29, just as protests at the killing of George Floyd four days before were spilling out from Minneapolis and spreading nationwide, Trump achieved peak concision with a one-word Tweet that contained what was supposed to be his entire strategy for reelection: “CHINA!

He alone during the whole retreat insisted that battles, which were useless then, should not be fought, and that a new war should not be begun nor the frontiers of Russia crossed. In this gripping political memoir podcast series Guto will take listeners into the rooms where decisions that affected us all are made and shine a light on the inner workings of one of the most turbulent governments we have witnessed in modern history. However, there is not much discussion of his personal life that is not viewed negatively, nor are there any positive discussion of successes as a businessman or as the president.There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50+ pages of references here, too, as Brockenbrough did her work.

Reagan presents, to her co-workers, their mission of replacing the president with a robot version of him, named ROBOTUS, that she created. But it is also America’s id, and, through Trump, this putrid leftover from the unfinished Civil War has now reoccupied the seat of power.The immediate backdrop for this obliteration of history is the catastrophic failure of Trump’s administration to control the spread of the coronavirus. Trump’s boast that he can do whatever he wants will have to be institutionalized, made fully operational, and imposed by state violence.