Books Post-Presidency About The Disgraced, Twice Impeached Florida Retiree Trump

[AndyinPA]

I know more than one person who voted for him that were uncomfortable enough to say that they were, but their reasoning was that he would give them the things they wanted. Policy over morals. They were good with that.

[Luke]

The disgraced, twice-impeached loser is already fuming about Maggie Haberman's* upcoming book. Clogging up the toilet must really piss him off. How sad.

Updated 2 hours ago - Politics & Policy
Trump flushes Maggie Haberman scoop as "fake story"
Oriana Gonzalez

Former President Trump said Thursday that he was "under no obligation" to return White House records to the National Archives and Record Administration at the end of his presidential term.

Driving the news: Trump also denied that he destroyed or flushed "papers and documents down a White House toilet."

Reports show that during his presidency, Trump was known to destroy or restrict access to official presidential records. While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet, per Maggie Haberman's forthcoming book "Confidence Man."

Catch up fast: NARA last month recovered 15 boxes containing information from Trump's time at the White House that he took to Mar-a-Lago instead of handing over to the agency. NARA said also that Trump representatives have informed the agency that "they are continuing to search for additional presidential records that belong to the National Archives." NARA on Wednesday asked the Justice Department to probe former Trump's handlings of White House records.

What they're saying: "The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis," Trump said. "In fact, it was viewed as routine and 'no big deal.'" "In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years," Trump said, but did not specify which rulings allow him to do so. "Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book." He said that some of the information given to NARA would "someday be displayed in the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library."

Reality check: Under the Presidential Records Act, a president is required to immediately turn in presidential records to the national archivist as soon as they leave office. "Removing or concealing government records is a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison," the House Oversight Committee said Thursday.

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America Hardcover – October 4, 2022
by Maggie Haberman (Author)

From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist: a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that moves beyond simplistic caricature, chronicling his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency and his potential comeback.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.

Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.”

That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before. In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.

* Fun aside. Maggie's Dad, Clyde Haberman, who posts on Twitter, is a grizzed NY Times reporter for years and years. In the mid-90s, Clyde was the Tokyo Bureau Chief for the Times. I got to know him quite well, was a young guy working over there and he wrote some stories about what I was doing and was really kind to me. Learned a lot about Japan from him. So it's been extra fun to see how wonderfully Maggie's been doing, he's rightfully proud of her. She's made her share of errors, but considering she's been working in a bomb factory on a moving train, this is a book we're looking forward to.

[Kendra]

Kinda OT, but no idea where it might fit.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/597 ... 93k&rank=1

The Desecrators: Defeating the Cancel Culture Mob and Reclaiming One Nation Under God
by Matt Schlapp, Deal W. Hudson

[Luke]

OMG.

Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir
In this lengthy book, Kushner recounts the time he spent in the White House during his father-in-law’s term.
By Dwight Garner Aug. 17, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

BREAKING HISTORY
A White House Memoir By Jared Kushner 492 pages. Broadside Books. $35.

The United States Secret Service isn’t known for its sense of humor, but when it gave Jared Kushner the code name “mechanic,” was someone betting that he’d call his memoir “Breaking History”? It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents. Kushner writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter. He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world. Jared was a soft touch.

“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in. This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing. “Even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes. And, quoting the former White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell: “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives. Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep. You turn the pages and find, almost at random, colleagues, some of them famous, trying to be kind, uttering things like:

It’s really not fair how the press is beating you up. You made a very positive contribution.
I don’t know how you do this every day on so many topics. That was really hard! You deserve an award for all you’ve done.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. This agreement would not have happened if it wasn’t for Jared.
Jared did an amazing job working with Bob Lighthizer on the incredible USMCA trade deal we signed yesterday.
Jared’s a genius. People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here.
I’ve been in Washington a long time, and I must say, Jared is one of the best lobbyists I’ve ever seen.

A therapist might call these cries for help. “Breaking History” opens with the story of Kushner’s father, the real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who was imprisoned after hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, having the encounter filmed and sending the tape to his sister. He was a good man who did a bad thing, Jared says, and Chris Christie, while serving as the United States attorney for New Jersey, was cruel to prosecute him so mercilessly. There is a flashback to Kushner’s grandparents, Holocaust survivors who settled in New Jersey and did well. There’s a page or two about Kushner’s time at Harvard. He omits the fact that he was admitted after his father pledged $2.5 million to the college. If Kushner can recall a professor or a book that influenced him while in Cambridge, he doesn’t say. Instead, he recalls doing his first real estate deals while there. He moved to New York, and bought and ruined a great newspaper (The New York Observer) by dumbing it down and feting his friends in its pages.

His wooing of Ivanka Trump included a good deal of jet-setting. Kushner briefly broke up with her, he writes, because she wasn’t Jewish. (She would later convert.) Wendi Murdoch, Rupert’s wife, reunited them on Rupert’s yacht. Kushner describes the power scene:

On that Sunday, we were having lunch at Bono’s house in the town of Eze on the French Riviera, when Rupert stepped out to take a call. He came back and whispered in my ear, “They blinked, they agreed to our terms, we have The Wall Street Journal.” After lunch, Billy Joel, who had also been with us on the boat, played the piano while Bono sang with the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof.

With or without you, Bono. Once in the White House, Kushner became Little Jack Horner, placing a thumb in everyone else’s pie, and he wonders why he was disliked. He read Sun Tzu and imagined he was becoming a warrior. It was because he had Trump’s ear, however, that he won nearly every time he locked antlers with a rival. Corey Lewandowski — out. Steve Bannon — out. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who begged Kushner to stop meddling internationally — out. (Kushner cites Tillerson’s “reclusive approach” to foreign policy.) By the end, Tillerson was like a dead animal someone needed to pull a tarpaulin over. Kushner was pleased that the other adults in the room, including the White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the White House counsel Don McGahn and the later chief of staff John Kelly, left or were ejected because they tried, patriotically, to exclude him from meetings he shouldn’t have been in. The fact that he was initially denied security clearance, he writes, was much ado about nothing.

The bulk of “Breaking History” — at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog — goes deeply into the weeds (Kushner, in his acknowledgments, credits a ghostwriter, the speechwriter Brittany Baldwin) on the issues he cared most about, including prison reform, the Covid response and the Middle East, where he had a win with the Abraham Accords. This book ends with Kushner suggesting he was unaware of the events of Jan. 6 until late in the day. He mostly sidesteps talking about spurious claims of election fraud. He seems to have no beliefs beyond carefully managed appearances and the art of the deal. He wants to stay on top of things, this manager, but doesn’t want to get to the bottom of anything.

You finish “Breaking History” wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway. Political wonks will be interested — maybe, to a limited degree — but this material is more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere. He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic. What a queasy-making book to have in your hands. Once someone has happily worked alongside one of the most flagrant and systematic and powerful liars in this country’s history, how can anyone be expected to believe a word they say? It makes a kind of sense that Kushner is likely to remain exiled in Florida. “The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret,” as Cynthia Ozick put it in “The Shawl.” “Everyone had left behind a real life.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/book ... shner.html

[Phoenix520]

Yeah, no. Not this one.

This is the best burn I’ve ever seen in a book review:

Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

[Kendra]

I was amazed at the level of deceit at the department of Justice under Trump. All of that coming out in this new book with Michael Cohen.

[Kriselda Gray]

Yeah, no. Not this one.

This is the best burn I’ve ever seen in a book review:

Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

It's absolutely epic... My sides were hurting by the time I finished laughing

[Kendra]

“In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.”

- Jared Kushner, excerpt from ‘Breaking History,’ a WH Memoir

[RTH10260]

https:// twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1560298726819872770

“In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives bank accounts.”

- Jared Kushner, excerpt from ‘Breaking History,’ a WH Memoir

FIFY

[Kendra]

https:// twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1560298726819872770

“In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives bank accounts.”

- Jared Kushner, excerpt from ‘Breaking History,’ a WH Memoir

FIFY

[Kendra]

In his first interview on his book tour, Jared Kushner weighs in on the search warrant: “The way that he drives his enemies so crazy, they always over-persue him and make mistakes in trying to get him. What’s happening now is the same thing.”

[Luke]

Tim Alberta wrote many great pieces that were much more authentic about T**** and MAGA than JD Vance and others. Tim has a book called American Carnage from 2019, there's an audiobook of it too. Most libraries have it through Libby or Overdrive. It's long, 688 pages and audiobook is almost 25 hours, but it's really well done (about halfway through). It's a lot of what was happening before T**** and how the party was collapsing before him. The RNC convention scene when Felito Cruz got booed off the state (and booed at the Texas delegation breakfast the next day) brought back memories we all lived through and laughed about, but soooo much has happened since. Anyway, for an interesting look back, recommend.

American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump Hardcover – July 16, 2019
by Tim Alberta (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 739 ratings
New York Times' Top Books of 2019 New York Times Bestseller

Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump. The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.

American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?

Loaded with explosive original reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many others—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

[Luke]

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have a new book called The Divider, it's full of juicy crazy. Haven't been paying much attention to these books lately, but this one and Maggie's Confidence Man coming in early October are well-researched and written.





There are many stories from the book running through the media, here's one from WaPo:

Aftermath of 2020 election left Fox News between Trump and the truth
Analysis by Philip Bump National correspondent September 20, 2022 at 5:31 p.m. EDT

There’s an observation in a new book about Donald Trump’s tenure in national politics that is critical to understanding both him and his relationship with Fox News. The book, from the New York Times’s Peter Baker and the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, explores how Trump’s emergence in 2015 flummoxed the network and its then-emperor, Roger Ailes. “What Ailes saw in Trump that he did not see in any other Republican politician of recent years,” Baker and Glasser write, “was someone who connected with the Fox audience even more than Fox did.” This is unquestionably true, as polling would later make clear. Trump’s skill in the 2016 Republican primary was that he spoke the language of the angry right wing as a native. He, like them, was a Fox News fan who found himself lured further to the fringe by sites such as Breitbart. Trump had a regular gig as a contributor to “Fox & Friends” before he announced his candidacy, and his ability to speak to the Fox News audience served him very well in building a core base of political support after he did. For Fox News, though, this was not ideal: Here was a platform larger than theirs, competing for the same audience.

So the network spent the four years of Trump’s presidency mostly echoing and amplifying the antics and rhetoric of the president their base loved. Fox News Republicans became the beating heart of Trump’s support. The play worked pretty well … until Trump lost his reelection bid and demanded that his universe of loyalists pretend he hadn’t. Suddenly the balancing act that Fox News had been managing — keeping Trump supporters happy while not collapsing into outright misinformation — became increasingly wobbly. As Baker and Glasser report, the period immediately after the election forced Fox News executives and stars to choose between what the audience wanted to hear and what it needed to hear. Reality, they write, did not always win that fight. It began when Fox News’s decision desk called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. This was an aggressive call by any standard. No other network joined them, viewing the race as too close to call. The Fox News team was relying heavily on data and assumptions that would later prove to be incorrect or flawed, including data from the Associated Press, which also made an early call. Fox News’s experts predicted on election night that the votes weren’t there for Trump to close his deficit. He almost did. Fox News’s on-air talent wasn’t in a position to debate the nuances of the numbers with the team making the call, but Trump’s campaign staff was. So they started working the phones, seemingly contacting anyone at the network who would pick up. Baker and Glasser report that Fox News anchor Bret Baier was among those hearing from Trump’s team. In an email to higher-ups sent two days after the election, he reportedly wrote: “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.”

“He accused the Decision Desk of ‘holding on for pride,’” Baker and Glasser write, “and added: ‘It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.’” As the authors of the book note, Arizona couldn’t be put “back” into Trump’s column, because it was never there in the first place. In a statement released Tuesday through a Fox News spokesperson, Baier sought to re-contextualize the comments. “In the immediate days following the election, the vote margins in Arizona narrowed significantly and I communicated these changes to our team along with what people on the ground were saying and predicting district by district,” the statement read. “I wanted to analyze at what point (what vote margin) would we have to consider pulling the call for Biden. I also noted that I fully supported our decision desk’s call and would defend it on air.” (This doesn’t conflict with the book’s reporting, as Glasser pointed out in a response sent to The Washington Post.)

But it’s Baker and Glasser’s reporting on Fox executives that’s more condemning about the network’s post-election efforts. For example, they write, early in the morning after the election, the network’s CEO “suggested that Fox should not call any more states until they were officially certified by election authorities,” meaning that the network would not be in the unhappy position of having to tell its audience of Trump fans that their president had both lost and was misleading them about this reality. Other top executives agreed with this strategy, though it was not implemented. Instead, the network reportedly dragged its feet. When other networks called Nevada for Biden, Fox News President Jay Wallace blocked the network from following suit, Baker and Glasser write. After all, with Arizona already going for Biden, adding Nevada to the Democrat’s total would make Fox News the first network in the country to call the election against Trump. Needless to say, this is not how news organizations are supposed to work. If Fox News was confident about its Arizona call, which it was enough to not retract it, it should have similarly followed the lead of its decision desk on calling Nevada and, with it, the election. But the post-election period was fraught for the network, as Baker and Glasser note, with upstart networks unconcerned about repeating Trump’s falsehoods biting at their heels. (In an interview with the New Yorker in November 2020, the CEO of Newsmax admitted flatly that telling Trump’s base what it wanted to hear was good for his network’s business.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... _manual_11

Commonwealth Club of California

From its chaotic beginning to the violent finale, the Trump presidency was filled with moments ranging from the unthinkable to the deadly serious. That has continued until these past several weeks, and the man at the center of all of this could announce he is running for president again. That makes understanding his presidency even more important today.

Veteran journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser chart the ambitious and lasting history of the Trump presidency, drawing on unprecedented access to key players from President Trump himself to cabinet officers, military generals, and more. Based on these exclusive interviews, Baker and Glasser reveal moments both tense and comical, from how close the United States got to nuclear war with North Korea to whether Trump asked Japan’s prime minister to nominate him for a Nobel Prize. They also explore the moral choices confronting those around Trump—how they justified working for him and where they drew their lines.

Join us as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser return to the Club to discuss Donald Trump's presidency and what a second term could mean for the country.

Baker and Glasser photography by Doug Mills.

September 20, 2020

Here's a long interview Peter and Susan did today for the Commonwealth Club of CA.

[Phoenix520]

I didnt know they were married. Susan Glasser kept me sane with her humor throughout his presiduncy.

I’m enjoying this book muchly. It’s very gossipy but that’s ok cuz it’s also more than that.

[Kendra]

I am looking forward to getting a library copy. I might splurge on buying a copy, but trying to resist. Retirement is looming...

[Luke]

At Broward Library, they only had 2 audiobook copies and said it would be 7 weeks, but then suddenly it was available. They must have purchased more copies. Peter and Susan did a great job on their previous book about Bush COS Jim Baker.

[Kendra]

Just checked, I'm 27 on 36 copies.

[Kendra]

Just downloaded my copy and digging in. Yikes!

[Luke]

Requested the Maggie Haberman book CONFIDENCE MAN months and months ago. Voila! Broward Library had the Audiobook ready to go this morning.

Quite a bit of it's been told before, but don't care. I knew Maggie's dad Clyde quite well in Tokyo, he was sort of a Lou Grant type. We've spoken of how proud he is of Maggie. Clyde is on Twitter and has interesting observations.

[Ben-Prime]

Requested the Maggie Haberman book CONFIDENCE MAN months and months ago. Voila! Broward Library had the Audiobook ready to go this morning.

Quite a bit of it's been told before, but don't care. I knew Maggie's dad Clyde quite well in Tokyo, he was sort of a Lou Grant type. We've spoken of how proud he is of Maggie. Clyde is on Twitter and has interesting observations.

When I am next home in Florida on home leave, I'll have to have my brother over for dinner on a Tuesday night and dial in to the Fogbow Zoom Meet so y'all can thank him and my sister-in-law for the Broward Library's good service in this matter.

[Kendra]

Maggie Haberman was just on Deadline WH with for a nice long chat about her new book. Interesting chat with lots of bits of gossip and stuff, worth hunting down.

[Kendra]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-im ... f89f43aa5a

'We Are F**KED’: New Book Reveals How GOP Senators Bailed Out Trump During 1st Impeachment Trial
The ineptitude of Trump’s legal team reportedly forced GOP senators to take matters into their own hands by choreographing his Ukraine trial defense.
Igor Bobic
By
Igor Bobic

[Kendra]

Uh oh. Library just picked up the Cohen book and Haberman's. Which one first?

[p0rtia]

Uh oh. Library just picked up the Cohen book and Haberman's. Which one first?

Cohen!

[Kendra]

Uh oh. Library just picked up the Cohen book and Haberman's. Which one first?

Cohen!

Great minds think alike. Dang, so many quotes even in the forward. Remember how we all loathed him a few years ago?