The Divider

 

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Double Day, 2022, 652  pp.

My Notes:

Pg. 53:  Fox, by the end of 2017, was attracting 1.5 million day-time viewers and 2.4 million in prime time, way up from the year before and far ahead of MSNBC and CNN; by Trump’s last year in office, Fox would climb to 1.9 million during the day and 3.6 million at night.

Pg. 271:  Immigration had almost always been politically divisive in the US. Since Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, eliminating national origin quotas that favored white people from Northern Europe, 59 million immigrants had moved to the US, and the share of foreign-born Americans more than doubled to nearly 14 percent.  They increasingly came from Latin America and Asia.  A country that was 84 percent white when the law passed was 62 percent white fifty years later.

Pg. 345f:  George Conway, alarmed by Trump’s behavior, tweeted out links to the official criteria for narcissistic personality disorder set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

1.    Has a grandiose sense of self-importance.

2.    Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance beauty, or ideal love.

3.    Believes that he is ‘special’ and unique, and can only be understood by, or associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

4.    Requires excessive admiration.

5.    Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his expectations).

6.    Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends).

7.    Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.

8.    Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him.

9.    Show arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Pg. 557:  In the 2020 election had Trump won a cumulative 76,515 more votes distributed precisely in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin or 102,792 more votes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, he would have flipped enough electoral votes to win a second term.

Pg. 590:  After the hotly contested election of 1876, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded Electoral College votes from three disputed states to give him the presidency, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to clarify procedures, although it did not entirely succeed.

Pg. 652:  If Trump wins the 2024 election he will have only loyalists serving him, no more guardrail appointees.  He will pursue vengeance against his enemies.  He will politicize the courts, the Justice Department, and the military.  He will challenge allies and seek common cause with autocrats.  These are things that he already did and said for all four years of his first term in the presidency.

 

Below from a review, lightly edited:

“His job wasn’t to get things done but to stop certain things from happening, to prevent disaster.” This line from Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s detail-rich history of the Trump administration, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” technically applies to his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. But in truth it describes any of several dozen beleaguered helpmates to the former president, whose propensity for rage kept Washington in a fit of indignation and the White House in a mode of perpetual damage control for the better part of four years. “The Divider” is a story of disasters averted as well as disasters realized.

Squeezing the tumultuous events of the long national fever dream that was the Donald Trump presidency would tax the skills of the nimblest journalist. Yet the husband-and-wife team of Baker and Glasser pull it off with assurance. It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).

Baker, The New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, and Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, are the perfect pair to write this book, with a combined 60 years of Washington reporting experience.  For a book produced so quickly, they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years, including those by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, and Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin.

Apart from the landmark Abraham Accords of 2020, which opened diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab nations, they devote only fleeting attention to Trump’s concrete achievements, of which even critics must concede there were a few. The strength of the pre-Covid economy — for which Trump doesn’t deserve full credit but which still helped millions of voters look past his failings and failures — is little discussed. Trump fans will surely object to the consistently negative judgments about their tribune.

But the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy. To impose order on the chaos, the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia. Former Moscow correspondents and longtime Russia jocks, Baker and Glasser eschew the wilder conspiracy theories that were bandied about in left-wing circles during Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 campaign’s Russia connections.

Instead, “The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.” The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment, which has since been overshadowed by the second.

If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts. Because everyone had different ideas about where to restrain and where to encourage Trump, the White House became a den of “ongoing tribal warfare,” they write — an “Apprentice”-style reality-TV show in which the parties vied to win Trump’s favor and outlast their rivals, even while at times sabotaging the president’s agenda as they saw fit.

The dishy gossip and mocking nicknames the Trumpies coin for one another (Kushner is the “Slim Reaper,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen “Nurse Ratched”) make for amusing reading; they also highlight a dysfunctionality rare for even the Washington freak show. Every chapter, it seems, has a sentence like this: “While Priebus, Bannon and Kushner disliked each other, the one thing they agreed on was they all loathed [Kellyanne] Conway.” Or: “In public, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster were portrayed as fellow members of the Axis of Adults. In private, there was pettiness that at times suggested a middle school cafeteria.”

The backbiting — and the sub rosa efforts to thwart their own president — led to constant personnel turnover, a dreary parade of firings, resignations and defenestrations. Trump would cashier one aide in favor of someone presumably more compliant, only for the new guy to find that Trump was even more willful and heedless of rules than he had dreamed. Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.

Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse. Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.”

They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.”

In this instance, Schiff was talking specifically about Trump’s plans to “compromise our elections,” and his words proved tragically prescient. “The Divider” concludes with a riveting few chapters on Trump’s mad scheming to hold onto power after his November 2020 defeat — resulting in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

In the book’s final passages, we see Trump lurking in exile in Mar-a-Lago like a movie villain, having escaped Washington by the skin of his teeth, defeated but not altogether vanquished. In Hollywood, such endings serve to leave the door open to another installment. But as good as this book is, let’s hope Baker and Glasser won’t be writing a sequel.