If you’re looking for an excuse this Christmas to escape the mulled wine, the relatives, the stuffed turkey, and especially the mulled relatives stuffed with turkey, then look no further. This year the holiday arrives at the perfect time to prepare for January by catching up with some reading around Russiagate. The New Year will see some big developments as the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. Committees will reform under new leadership and they might even give some encouragement to Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, to reveal a few conclusions from his investigation.
With that in mind, here’s a quick list of books that will get you up to speed long before you finish with the turkey.
The first book is pretty much the standard reading but, if you haven’t read it already, then now is the time. It came out back in 2017 but is still the best introduction to the scandal since it doesn’t just focus on Trump’s relationship with Putin and the Russian oligarchs. Russian Roulette by David Corn and Michael Isikoff lays out the entire mystery within the context of the Russia’s attempts to hack the American democracy. It’s readable, even-handed in that it’s critical of both the Trump campaign and the Obama administration, but also cool headed enough to avoid outrageous claims beyond those it can establish in fact.
Equally recommended and extensive yet managing to cover slightly different territory from the British end is Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and how Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. Guardian investigative journalist, Luke Harding, does a particularly good job of grounding the Steele Dossier, which even after all this time, has not be substantially disproved. It’s also another account that is eminently readable yet able to get into the weeds around the matter of collusion, which is where the interesting revelations are to be found. John le Carré has described it as a “essential reading for anyone who cares for his country” and it’s hard to disagree
A few months ago, another book which might have been added to the very top of this list is Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. Here we are, though, in December and it already feels a little dated. Clearly working from interviews with Gary Cohn, John Dowd, John Porter, and other insiders, it portrays Trump as a man out of his depth and simply incapable of telling the truth. The problem with Woodward’s account – and, indeed, much of Woodward’s output post-Watergate – is that even as it is hard on Trump, it is still a deeply conservative account written by a trusted insider to Beltway politics. Woodward plays it too safe. In the light of Michael Cohen’s conviction and increasing evidence of Donald Trump’s connections to Russia, his assessment that the Steele Dossier is “garbage” begins to sound weak and the book too anachronistic in its take on Trump’s presidency.
Moving beyond the general accounts, you have a few books by some of the actors inside the story.
Omarosa Manigault Newman is one of the few White House insiders who didn’t take the $15,000 a month offered to keep her quiet once she left. The result is Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, a tell-all book that pretty much tells us all that we already knew or suspected about Trump’s White House. It’s light, readable, scandalous, but also incapable of remaining dispassionate. It’s a book written in a moment of scorn and shows that on every page.
More sober yet just as entertaining is Rob Goldstone’s account of the Trump Tower meeting. Full disclosure, I recently interviewed Goldstone for a podcast and that does make it hard for me to locate him inside some grand Russian conspiracy. In Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How An Email Trumped My Life, he tells a story about his life as a publicist and promoter. The combination of celebrity anecdotes and fairly nonsensationalised accounts of the Trump Tower meeting and Trump’s time in Russia provide a surprisingly compelling story. There is no “smocking gun”, to use Trump’s phrase, but Goldstone raises enough doubts to leave you wondering about the lingering smell of cordite.
Further afield and perhaps to be classed as a stocking filler at this stage, we have Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which is where we all began 2018. Published back on 5th January, the book has not aged well. A year later, it still has the virtue of being the first book to really stick the knife into the Trump administration but it’s also been proven to make enough dubious claims that it undermines its moments of solid reporting. It’s a book you might pick up simply because you’ve exhausted the others.
Last and by no means least is the book that I would recommend most highly, though it has nothing to do with Trump but everything to do with how America found itself amenable to a popularist candidate and why the politics of division are now the norm. The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism is written by Steve Kornacki, an MSNBC political analyst, who does an outstanding job at describing how the aggressive stance of a young Newt Gingrich (now in the running to become the new White House Chief of Staff) set the tone for what followed.
Kornacki is particularly excellent walking us through the Bush/Clinton election back in 1992, where the inexperienced candidate from Arkansas was gifted a win by the combination of a mercurial (but quite possibly unhinged) Ross Perot and the moribund incumbent, George H.W. Bush, whose campaign lacked all deftness as it embraced Pat Buchanan’s nativism. If you want to understand how Trump came to have so much traction and why the GOP looks unlikely to change for the better, there’s no better book to read this Christmas. It will explain much that we will see going into the New Year and beyond.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.