“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