“Now the disease of Trumpism has consumed the Republican Party and put the entire conservative movement at risk. It has been hijacked by a bellowing, statist billionaire with poor impulse control and a profoundly superficial understanding of the world. The blazing, white-hot embrace of actual, honest-to-God stupidity has been as contagious as small pox and as fatal as Ebola.” (p.6)
Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever doesn’t pull any punches. As a political operative for decades, Rick Wilson knows the political score. He shows how the Republican Party–chiefly Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, Roger Ailes of FOX New–failed to stop Trump early in the 2016 campaign. Wilson provides the flawed logic that eliminated all of Trump’s Republican rivals with the help of donors and FOX News stacking the deck in favor of Trump.
Wilson also gives a penetrating analysis of the strong Evangelical support of Trump: “Being a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core tenets of the Christian faith. I can’t find it in either the Old or New Testament, and I’m not sure which book of the Apocrypha the ‘pussy-grabber’ exception comes in, but as noted earlier, I’m no biblical scholar.” (p 63)
With Paul Manafort flipping and the November Elections looming, life in Trump World is likely to get a lot more dicey. If you’re looking for an insightful and funny book about the Trump Presidency, I urge you to seek out Everything Trump Touches Dies. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction; Everything Trump Touches Dies 1
Part 1 The Road To This Shitshow
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump I
1 Vichy Republicans 17
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump II
2 Furrowed Brows and Deep Concern 45
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump III
3 Running with the Devil 61
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump IV
4 That’s Why You Got Trump 69
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump V
Part 2 Victims Of The Curse
Inside the Oval Office I
5 What We Lost with Trump 83
Inside the Oval Office II
6 The Media 95
Inside the Oval Office III
7 The Trump Base 101
Inside the Oval Office IV
8 Limited Government 125
Inside the Oval Office V
9 The Grown-ups All Die Too 143
Part 3 Surrounded By Villains
Top Secret Intercept I
10 Welcome to Hell 161
Top Secret Intercept II
11 The Trump Family Syndicate 175
Top Secret Intercept III
12 Team Crony 191
Top Secret Intercept IV
13 Clown Princes of the Trump Media 199
Top Secret Intercept V
14 Trump’s Island of Misfit Toys 225
Top Secret Intercept VI
15 The Alt-Reich 249
Part 4 After Trump
16 But Gorsuch 261
17 Trump Is Electoral Poison 269
18 My Party After Trump 289
Epilogue: Post-Trump America 301
Notes 313
Acknowledgments 327
Wilson has been on Bill Maher a few times. One of the few sensible republicans out there.
Steve, I’m impressed with Rick Wilson’s insights into the workings of the Republican Party.
One of the problems I have with a book like this—in fact, with the entire non-Trumpster Republican response of “We really never intended this to happen”—is that Trump IS the very reductio ad absurdum that the Republicans have been seeking ever since Reagan was elected. When you join forces with white nationalists, evangelicals whose sole goal is to preserve a white patriarchal power structure, racists, xenophobes, misogynists, homophobes, climate-change deniers, the stupid, brutish, and ignorant in order them get your tax giveaways to billionaires enacted, you can hardly clutch your pearls when the very quintessence of your base is elected!
/Dismounting soapbox now!
Deb, Rick Wilson claims the Republican Establishment thought they could “control” Trump once he got to Washington, D.C. and they could push their legislative program through easily. Didn’t happen.
True.
What Deb said. She has my vote.
Seriously though, you could say bad things about him all day long and there would still be more to add.
Patti, Rick Wilson calls Trump “the worst President ever.” Plenty of people would agree with that statement.
What? And he gave himself an A+.
Steve, a blatant example of Grade Inflation!
True.
If everything the old goat touches dies then why is Ivanka still around?
And Deb also has my vote. Deb 2020!
Jerry, Ivanka’s businesses have failed. And her husband might be indicted. Not good.
What Deb said. She has my vote too.
Jackie LOVES RIck Wilson. He gets in some wonderful shots in his occasional columns and appearances on MSNBC. She’ll probably read this.
Jeff, there’s a laugh on every page of EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES. Rick Wilson is a snarky writer and he knows where the Republican bodies are buried. Wilson worked on the campaign to defeat Roy Moore in Alabama.
I wish I had time to read all these anti-Trump books, but I’m just about to jump into Woodward’s “Fear” and that’s going to have to do it for now. There’s just too many other things to read. Deb summed up my position on Trump so succinctly that there’s really no more to be said.
Michael, I’m NUMBER 9 in the waiting line for FEAR at my local Library. EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES kept me amused and informed until Bob Woodward’s book becomes available. Deb is almost alway right!
I’m number 648.
Jackie put it on hold, for both the regular and ebook editions. See which comes first.
I have to pick up HOPE NEVER DIES, the Obama/Biden thriller, at the library today.
rough day. see my blog.
I bought a copy of this but haven’t gotten around to it yet – 3 book club books to get thru first.
Not surprisingly, Fear is on backorder. We had several damaged copies but didn’t have to send them back; folks were willing to buy them without a discount.
Beth, our Library wants to buy more copies of FEAR but the book is on back order. Simon & Schuster is printing a million more copies of FEAR!
I think 6 printings before publication
Maggie, I wonder if a movie is in the works…
Jackie tried to comment here before but it didn’t turn up, so I don’t know what she did wrong. Anyway, she decided to buy herself a Kindle copy of this for her birthday.
Jeff, prepare to hear a lot of laughter from Jackie while she’s reading EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES!
I guess I’m a Pollyanna! All I can think of is that he saved us from Hitlery!
Bob, both 2016 Presidential Candidates were flawed.
Trump is unbelievable!
He called Germany and other European countries enemies of the USA, how crazy!
Most people I know are either laughing or crying in their beer when the name is mentioned – and to think that his ancestors were immigrants from Germany, that’s what we call a Treppenwitz (stairs joke).
Wolf, and Trump is killing the U. S. Stock Market with his nutty “trade wars” with the EU and China!