Taking full advantage of his post-modern bully pulpit, Trump proceeded to bully us into adjusting to his downgraded version of a new authoritarian post-truth America.
As a nation, we were diminished by, and left vulnerable (almost helpless), to Trump's crude aberrant intransigent and sometimes even vulgar, lying behavior, incompetent policy execution and his Machiavellian machinations.
On these facts most of the books seemed to agree. But how they rationalized their attacks on, or defenses of, Trump's peculiar presidency is what made the staggering universe of Trump books interesting. They also made it necessary for someone to dig deep beneath the pile of underbrush to tell us what was really going on. That is where this Pulitzer Prize winning book comes into the picture.
Having bullied us into submission. Trump then promptly turned the political axis on its head. Insuring that whatever readjustments we made to accommodate him would do little more than further normalize his most cringeworthy behavior, and further egg him on to go even lower.
This book is about "why" and "how" we knowingly made adjustments to our thinking so that it accommodated and "gave a pass to" behaviors in a President we would never tolerate in our own children.
First amongst the "whys" explored here, are the fears the far-right saw prior to Trump's election.
Best articulated in the author's review of Michael Anton's book "The Flight 93 Election." This book for once sets forth these fears straight forwardly and convincingly.
In it, Aton likens those who died in the ill-fated flight 93, to those who voted for Trump.
Both had to make an existential choice under extreme pressure between forms of suicide: Either die preserving conservative wealth, power and honor. Or, by sliding back into the slow-burning cultural side-show of Obama's far left politics.
That is to say, death, either by more crime, drugs, homelessness, dissolution of families, being overrun by Mexican immigrants, defunding the police and limitless government.
Or, by defending what white patriots see as worth saving about this country.
That choice, between electing Trump, or continuing the left agenda was a "no brainer" for the rank-and-file DJT supporter. And apparently also for most white Americans.
With Anton's book at the center of a solar system of discourse in which Trump was the Sun, the author groups his book reviews according to the distance their orbits are from the dark disruptive force at their center.
That distance is measured not only by blind love of, and vicious hatred for, DJT, but also by the heat and sparks emitted from the rhetorical scrums between his attackers and defenders.
Every book reviewed here, attempts to rationalize how and why we Americans caved to Trump's empty tweeter bullying tactics.
The orbits closest to the man himself, Trump's sycophants and insiders, gave no quarter to those who criticized Trump or who failed to make excuses for his many obvious weaknesses, no matter how pathetic or destructive they were to the republic.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
