What do you think?
Rate this book
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever
In Everything Trump Touches Dies, political campaign strategist and commentator Rick Wilson brings his darkly funny humor and biting analysis to the absurdity of American politics in the age of Trump.
Wilson mercilessly exposes the damage Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party he served for decades, and to the conservative movement that has abandoned its principles for the worst President in American history.
No left-winger, Wilson is a lifelong conservative who delivers his withering critique of Trump from the right. A leader of the Never Trump movement, he warns his own party of the political catastrophe that leaves everyone involved with Trump with reputations destroyed and lives in tatters.
Wilson unblinkingly dismantles Trump’s deceptions and the illusions to which his supporters cling, shedding light on the guilty parties who empower and enable Trump in Washington and the news media. He calls out the race-war dead-enders who hitched a ride with Trump, the alt-right basement dwellers who worship him, and the social conservatives who looked the other way.
Everything Trump Touches Dies deftly chronicles the tragicomic Trump story from the early campaign days through the shock of election night, to the inconceivable trainwreck of Trump's first year. Rick Wilson provides not only an insightful analysis of the Trump administration, but also an optimistic path forward for the GOP, the conservative movement, and the country.
Combining insider political analysis, blunt truths, and black humor, Everything Trump Touches Dies is perfect for those on either side of the aisle who need a dose of unvarnished reality, a good laugh, a strong cocktail, and a return to sanity in American politics.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A respected, long-time Republican strategist, ad-maker, and contributor for The Daily Beast, skewers the disease that is destroying the conservative movement and burning down the GOP: Trumpism.
Wilson mercilessly exposes the damage Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party he served for decades, and to the conservative movement that has abandoned its principles for the worst President in American history.
No left-winger, Wilson is a lifelong conservative who delivers his withering critique of Trump from the right. A leader of the Never Trump movement, he warns his own party of the political catastrophe that leaves everyone involved with Trump with reputations destroyed and lives in tatters.
Wilson unblinkingly dismantles Trump’s deceptions and the illusions to which his supporters cling, shedding light on the guilty parties who empower and enable Trump in Washington and the news media. He calls out the race-war dead-enders who hitched a ride with Trump, the alt-right basement dwellers who worship him, and the social conservatives who looked the other way.
Everything Trump Touches Dies deftly chronicles the tragicomic Trump story from the early campaign days through the shock of election night, to the inconceivable trainwreck of Trump's first year. Rick Wilson provides not only an insightful analysis of the Trump administration, but also an optimistic path forward for the GOP, the conservative movement, and the country.
Combining insider political analysis, blunt truths, and black humor, Everything Trump Touches Dies is perfect for those on either side of the aisle who need a dose of unvarnished reality, a good laugh, a strong cocktail, and a return to sanity in American politics.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A respected, long-time Republican strategist, ad-maker, and contributor for The Daily Beast, skewers the disease that is destroying the conservative movement and burning down the GOP: Trumpism.
337 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 7, 2018
About the author
Rick Wilson
2 books117 followersRick Wilson spent 30 years as a Republican ad-makers, political strategist and campaign consultant helping elect conservatives across America. In 2015, Rick was one of the founders of the Never Trump movement. He's a contributor to The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, and The New York Daily News and a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and the networks.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 630 reviews
August 22, 2018
I think I need a new bookshelf: "Books that keep me sane in a crazy world." This one is the first on that shelf.
Make no mistake, Rick Wilson is a conservative Republican strategist. He and I would nod coldly at a party and go talk to others, but man, this guy is someone you don't want on your enemy's list. He describes himself at the beginning as the guy you call in when you need a nasty hit ad on your opponent...he goes for the throat, and he does so gleefully.
From the first sentence to the last, I felt an affinity for his frustration and anger..."If you're like me, the Trump presidency has turned you into a light sleeper."
Wilson sets out the conservative position on "Never Trump," and he makes a convincing argument that #ETTD...He calls the current Republicans who manage to tie themselves in knots to excuse Trump's behavior, "Vichy Republicans." His scorn is clear.
He talks about the candidates Trump demeaned, insulted, on his way to the GOP nomination...he talks about the career politicians who fit one of five descriptions: True Believers, Opportunists, Cowards (FOMT -- fear of a mean tweet, FOTB -- fear of Trump's base, BTP -- But the primaries!) Rationalizers, and Retirees...and the only one to stand up to him is the Senator who's home, dying.
What has the GOP lost, in Wilson's eyes? Only leadership, dignity, truth, facts, vision, optimism, focus, unity...that's all.
Don't think he goes light on Dems: 'Holisitically bad at politics, both on election day, and in the cut-and-thrust of DC. He reminds us we lost 1100 seats in state legislatures. And in OK, that hurts every day.
He calls FOX News the fourth branch of government...and shows how some of them are going down...dying by Trump's touch: Milo, "TrumpBart", Alex Jones, Ann Coulter.
He attacks Trump's Misfit Toys: Bannon, Manafort, Stone, Page, Cohen, Conway, Miller, Sanders, Gorka...think about how many are gone.
He explains the "electoral poison" Trump is turning out to be...yes, the 'base' loves him. But "He does not translate outside the base..." He is proud of his anti-Roy Moore and explains how very carefully they targeted that ad...and it was targeted to educated women who were repelled by Moore's vileness. So, he'll work against GOP candidates, as well as for.
He holds two visions of the GOP -- one a Mad Max world, and one a party that exiles the Nazis, the Alt-Reich, who who's ready to govern like adults.
Wilson is wicked smart...you can see him gleefully creating an attack ad. He uses words as weapons, and he knows all the words. And if there's not a word to express exactly what he wants, he'll make one up.
Wilson and his friends are probably our only hope...maybe they can bring the GOP back to the party my father would recognize.
Make no mistake, Rick Wilson is a conservative Republican strategist. He and I would nod coldly at a party and go talk to others, but man, this guy is someone you don't want on your enemy's list. He describes himself at the beginning as the guy you call in when you need a nasty hit ad on your opponent...he goes for the throat, and he does so gleefully.
From the first sentence to the last, I felt an affinity for his frustration and anger..."If you're like me, the Trump presidency has turned you into a light sleeper."
Wilson sets out the conservative position on "Never Trump," and he makes a convincing argument that #ETTD...He calls the current Republicans who manage to tie themselves in knots to excuse Trump's behavior, "Vichy Republicans." His scorn is clear.
He talks about the candidates Trump demeaned, insulted, on his way to the GOP nomination...he talks about the career politicians who fit one of five descriptions: True Believers, Opportunists, Cowards (FOMT -- fear of a mean tweet, FOTB -- fear of Trump's base, BTP -- But the primaries!) Rationalizers, and Retirees...and the only one to stand up to him is the Senator who's home, dying.
What has the GOP lost, in Wilson's eyes? Only leadership, dignity, truth, facts, vision, optimism, focus, unity...that's all.
Don't think he goes light on Dems: 'Holisitically bad at politics, both on election day, and in the cut-and-thrust of DC. He reminds us we lost 1100 seats in state legislatures. And in OK, that hurts every day.
He calls FOX News the fourth branch of government...and shows how some of them are going down...dying by Trump's touch: Milo, "TrumpBart", Alex Jones, Ann Coulter.
He attacks Trump's Misfit Toys: Bannon, Manafort, Stone, Page, Cohen, Conway, Miller, Sanders, Gorka...think about how many are gone.
He explains the "electoral poison" Trump is turning out to be...yes, the 'base' loves him. But "He does not translate outside the base..." He is proud of his anti-Roy Moore and explains how very carefully they targeted that ad...and it was targeted to educated women who were repelled by Moore's vileness. So, he'll work against GOP candidates, as well as for.
He holds two visions of the GOP -- one a Mad Max world, and one a party that exiles the Nazis, the Alt-Reich, who who's ready to govern like adults.
Wilson is wicked smart...you can see him gleefully creating an attack ad. He uses words as weapons, and he knows all the words. And if there's not a word to express exactly what he wants, he'll make one up.
Wilson and his friends are probably our only hope...maybe they can bring the GOP back to the party my father would recognize.
August 12, 2018
Rick Wilson—the most viciously funny of the Never Trumpers—has no illusions about who he is or what he does. He is a libertarian/conservative making a living as a political consultant, but not the high-minded, high-profile, Steve Schmidt kind of consultant, but rather—in Wilson’s words—a “gleeful hatchet man for the GOP”:
I am the guy you call when it’s time to run the ads that end the campaign, in part because my skin is thick enough to endure the inevitable screeching and rending of garments that come when it’s time to wade into the fight. You call me when you’re in back of the police car outside the shady massage parlor and you have to be on the floor of Congress to vote in 24 hours.. But even though he’s a street fighter by nature, Wilson has his limits:
When Trump slithered down the golden escalator in his eponymous tower in 2015, I felt bile rising in my throat. This guy? This jackass? I was quite sure nothing had changed about his blustering ego, fever-swamp birtherism, and con-artist modus operandi. Given the ideological underpinnings of Trumpism—slurry of barely coherent nationalism, third-world generalissimo swagger, and the worst economic ideas of the 19th century—I recognized he was an existential risk to the country, win or lose.In 2016 Rick Wilson helped Evan McMullin with his independent presidential campaign; in 2017 he crafted the ads for Doug Jone's senate campaign that contributed to Judge Roy Moore’s defeat. These days, you can catch him as a talking head on MSNBC and elsewhere, plugging this book and eviscerating all things Trump.
It will come as no surprise that Wilson, given his background, excels at the art of personal attack. He is good at crafting a cutting witticism, even better at a no-holds-barred comic takedown. But he is worth listening to on many other matters as well: the hypocrisy of the religious right, the wrong-headedness of tariffs, and the myth of voter fraud are a few topics that come immediately to mind.
Still, it is Wilson’s vituperative portraits of the Trump’s enablers and Trumpistas that give Everything Trump Touches Dies its unique charm. There are a lot of these caricatures, and althought they occasionally miss the mark, the best of them linger in the memory.
Here are a few of my favorites:
TED CRUZ
The Faustian bargain Cruz made in his efforts to win over Trump voters has reduced him from Republican Party rock star to something akin to a Trump World house pet: tolerated, occasionally praised, but mostly kept out of sight lest he soil the carpets.
NEWT GINGRICH
As far as ideologies go, the men had nothing in common. Gingrich had one; Trump didn’t. The only similarity in the two men was a chain of broken wedding vows and bitter ex-wives.
MIKE PENCE
Because of Trump’s enormous, delicate ego, Pence has been forced to recalibrate the role of vice president. I missed the part in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution about kissing the presiden’ts ass 24/7, but apparently Pence found it.
SEAN HANNITY
He even spends his evenings on the phone with the president. I can’t help imagining them like a pair of teenage girls on their Princess phones. “You hang up first.” “No, you hang up first.” “Love you.” “Love you more.”
ANN COULTER
Her arc, like that of the so many Trump backers in conservative media, could only ever end in one way: hot, angry tears and a morning-after binge of chain-smoking Marlboro Reds, hammering back indifferent box-wine Chardonnay, and devouring the souls of orphans.
CARTER PAGE
Profoundly disconnected, socially awkward, and reeking of late-stage virginity, he gives off the creepy Uncanny Valley vibe of a rogue, possibly murderous android or of a man with a too-extensive knowledge of human taxidermy and a soundproofed van.
STEPHEN MILLER
As the classic ideological scavenger inside the walls of government, Miller looks the part: the archetypal sneaking little crapweasel who plays the DC game to the hilt, pursuing his agends instead of those that would be good for either his principal or the country. Watching Miller, I am haunted by how little humanity is behind those 32-year-old eyes.
MELANIA
She is equipped with a magnificent resting bitch face in good times and bad, and her smile collapsing into a poker face whenever he turns away from her at White House events is the political equivalent of a fake orgasm, a performance for an audience of one, hoping to rush things along so she can get back to her Peloton.
August 13, 2018
So, this is the first contemporary political book I have ever read (as opposed to historical books on politics, which I have looooong lost count of). It's... fun. It's basically a 300-page rant by Rick Wilson about Trump, which is leavened by the fact that Wilson is actually a rather entertaining ranter -- he's witty, erudite, periodically profane, and really knows his stuff when it comes to politics. I respect the man considerably, even though I'm about ninety degrees to the left of him.
Though perhaps if more Republicans were like Wilson, I wouldn't be.
So it's fun. At the same time, there's very little 'new' here if you follow politics with a more-than-casual eye. It's basically the literary version of a jawboning session with your friends over a pint.
Though perhaps if more Republicans were like Wilson, I wouldn't be.
So it's fun. At the same time, there's very little 'new' here if you follow politics with a more-than-casual eye. It's basically the literary version of a jawboning session with your friends over a pint.
January 22, 2019
I read this book a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I am very busy these days. Therefore, I did not have time yet to write a review but will do so as soon as I can squeeze the time.
Upfront: I found the title confusing. However, I consider this very sarcastic book an ABSOLUTE MUST-READ. If you only read one book about Trump, read this one. And if you have already read numerous books about Trump, make sure you also read this book.
One caveat: The author uses 4-letter words and expresses himself in a very drastic and explicit way. So if you happen to be Catholic, you might have to go to confession after reading this book. :-)
This book deserves more than just a few lines for a review, and I hope that I will be able to write a proper review before my age-related memory loss will prevent me from doing so or before Trump will have managed to create an armageddon.
Upfront: I found the title confusing. However, I consider this very sarcastic book an ABSOLUTE MUST-READ. If you only read one book about Trump, read this one. And if you have already read numerous books about Trump, make sure you also read this book.
One caveat: The author uses 4-letter words and expresses himself in a very drastic and explicit way. So if you happen to be Catholic, you might have to go to confession after reading this book. :-)
This book deserves more than just a few lines for a review, and I hope that I will be able to write a proper review before my age-related memory loss will prevent me from doing so or before Trump will have managed to create an armageddon.
December 17, 2018
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever by Rick Wilson is a book I picked up from the library. Wow, this guy pulls no punches! He is a Republican himself! He knows we Dems have the saying " When they go low, we go high". He is a Republican and their motto is "Kick them even harder when they fall"...so this book was great!
It was like Batman taking on Joker and his gang of idiots...lol! I almost could see the "POW" or "BOOM" after each snarky but appropriate hit! Clever and witty he mopped up tRump and the flimsy excuse for Congress backing he has. The GOP (I call G-Grumpy O-old P-Pricks) gets blasted by the author, and I remind you this is a big wig Republican!
I didn't agree with everything but I enjoyed enough to give home a 4 star on this book for the witt , cleverness, and for standing up to the orange buffoon which no one in the Authoritarian Party (previously known as Republican party) has done!
It was like Batman taking on Joker and his gang of idiots...lol! I almost could see the "POW" or "BOOM" after each snarky but appropriate hit! Clever and witty he mopped up tRump and the flimsy excuse for Congress backing he has. The GOP (I call G-Grumpy O-old P-Pricks) gets blasted by the author, and I remind you this is a big wig Republican!
I didn't agree with everything but I enjoyed enough to give home a 4 star on this book for the witt , cleverness, and for standing up to the orange buffoon which no one in the Authoritarian Party (previously known as Republican party) has done!
August 28, 2018
I've long despised Rick Wilson...
...for his Jeremiah Wright ad against Obama in the 2008 election. I thought who is this craven low life who twists the words of a black preacher, speaking truth to power and makes the first black presidential candidate have to walk a delicate race driven line? Rick Wilson was that man. I am the political opposite of my beloved conservative Republican father and we have argued and agreed and vehemently disagreed my whole life and my dad loved me more than himself, so I have been able to listen across the aisle for the majority of my life. Along comes Trump, an ignorant, reality show host, birther creator, and racist and suddenly my dad and I are on the exactly same side. My father mourned the loss of what his grand ol party had become until the time of his death last year. He shared, unprompted, that he voted for his first Democratic candidate when he checked the box next to Hillary Clinton. He was an og Never Trump-er, so I helped him seek out other Never Trump Republicans he could read and he didn't feel so alone. I found Rick Wilson on our journey and became a fan and cheerleader. I may never forgive him for the Jeremiah Wright ad, but today is today and we got bigger fish to fry and we need all hands on deck. I'm reporting for duty, Mr. Wilson. We'll discuss marginal tax rates after the battle.
...for his Jeremiah Wright ad against Obama in the 2008 election. I thought who is this craven low life who twists the words of a black preacher, speaking truth to power and makes the first black presidential candidate have to walk a delicate race driven line? Rick Wilson was that man. I am the political opposite of my beloved conservative Republican father and we have argued and agreed and vehemently disagreed my whole life and my dad loved me more than himself, so I have been able to listen across the aisle for the majority of my life. Along comes Trump, an ignorant, reality show host, birther creator, and racist and suddenly my dad and I are on the exactly same side. My father mourned the loss of what his grand ol party had become until the time of his death last year. He shared, unprompted, that he voted for his first Democratic candidate when he checked the box next to Hillary Clinton. He was an og Never Trump-er, so I helped him seek out other Never Trump Republicans he could read and he didn't feel so alone. I found Rick Wilson on our journey and became a fan and cheerleader. I may never forgive him for the Jeremiah Wright ad, but today is today and we got bigger fish to fry and we need all hands on deck. I'm reporting for duty, Mr. Wilson. We'll discuss marginal tax rates after the battle.
November 2, 2019
I don’t recall a US president with such a raft of well documented books showing failures in so many areas. To name a few for Trump: how he won- The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election; his appointees - The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington; his management style: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Siege: Trump Under Fire.. this list can go on. For Bush, the credible book-length critiques centered on the war and the most critical Obama material was not well documented. This book is about the long term effect on the people in Trump’s orbit and on the Republican Party. The book is unique because the approach is from the right.
Rick Wilson introduces himself as a partisan campaign strategist. He admits being responsible for saving flawed candidates and producing content free attack ads such as those that birthed the Tea Party. He recognizes how they had a part in paving the way for Trump. He also blames democrats (who are “bad at politics”) for their litmus test (gun rights; abortion) screened candidates. How he targets and messages is demonstrated by his cross over help for the Doug Jones race against Bob Moore. It shows a style not typically used by democrats.
Starting with Reince Prieibus he goes through the litany of people who crashed and burned in Trump’s administration with Steve Bannon, for whom the author has a grudge, getting the most space. He notes the equally spectacular, but not complete upon his publication, falls of Paul Manaforte and Michael Cohen. As I write this, the headlines are full of the most recent victim. Gordon Soudland will now spend more that the $1 million Trump donation, (that purchased his prestigious post) on lawyers who may or may not keep him out of jail.
As a professional political analyst Wilson sees the statistical improbability of winning by feeding the base - the only strategy of the President which has infected all republican candidates. What the base loves is toxic to those outside the base - the majority. One example he uses is a republican mayor in Florida who earned 90% of the African American vote by putting time and energy into serving this constituency. -The President’s giving a nod to the white supremacists in Charlottesville blew up years of his goodwill in an instant.
Wilson’s book differs from those of those by democrats because he is surprised by the conservative’s betrayal of their ideology on small government, debt, adherence to the constitution, “family values” and the ideal of equality. Democrats express surprise only at the speed of and magnitude by which Trump has exposed this hypocrisy. Wilson is also surprised at how quickly the republican infrastructure jumped to support Trump. He notes that when Trump abuses and/or diminishes them on Twitter, at rallies and in general; they swallow it. As I write this, there are rumblings that Mitch McConnell is bargaining a speedy impeachment trial in exchange for Trump laying off his members – particularly those with tight elections in the coming year.
Throughout the book are vignettes, one is a 5 act play of a typical Trump staffer in a cubicle job. He does not know what his job is, but doing it well takes the light from the boss. This short play, does not end well for him. Another theme is wiretapped conversations of Trump and Hannity, which have no substance and do not end.
While there are no laugh out loud lines like a Michael Wolff book, Wilson is very entertaining. On every page there is an apt phrase such as his many ways to descripe Trump fans in the “republican ecosphere”: “air quote conservatives”; “Vichy Republicans”; and supporters of the“Trump jushe”. He sums up the evangelical embrace of Trump (you have to read it) by saying Trump “broke new theological ground”. He explains the difficulty in a conversation with Trumpists : “their rhetoric exists at the shallow end of the rhetorical pool.” There are great descriptions; Ivanka is the “shoe lady” and Jared “The Master of all Portfolios… looks like he was grown in a lab”. You just have to read his takes on Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and the cast of many.
Wilson sees two possible outcomes, one being a "Mad Max future" and the other a “Big Reset”. He is optimistic that the reset is in the offing and has advice for his party. Most if it is good government stuff – policies for the people, transparency, honesty, etc.; building a more diverse party and expelling the racists, lunatics, conspiracy theorists and stopping the fight over the last wars (mainly culture wars).
Even if you have read others of what is becoming a genre, this one, a critique from the right is worth your time.
Rick Wilson introduces himself as a partisan campaign strategist. He admits being responsible for saving flawed candidates and producing content free attack ads such as those that birthed the Tea Party. He recognizes how they had a part in paving the way for Trump. He also blames democrats (who are “bad at politics”) for their litmus test (gun rights; abortion) screened candidates. How he targets and messages is demonstrated by his cross over help for the Doug Jones race against Bob Moore. It shows a style not typically used by democrats.
Starting with Reince Prieibus he goes through the litany of people who crashed and burned in Trump’s administration with Steve Bannon, for whom the author has a grudge, getting the most space. He notes the equally spectacular, but not complete upon his publication, falls of Paul Manaforte and Michael Cohen. As I write this, the headlines are full of the most recent victim. Gordon Soudland will now spend more that the $1 million Trump donation, (that purchased his prestigious post) on lawyers who may or may not keep him out of jail.
As a professional political analyst Wilson sees the statistical improbability of winning by feeding the base - the only strategy of the President which has infected all republican candidates. What the base loves is toxic to those outside the base - the majority. One example he uses is a republican mayor in Florida who earned 90% of the African American vote by putting time and energy into serving this constituency. -The President’s giving a nod to the white supremacists in Charlottesville blew up years of his goodwill in an instant.
Wilson’s book differs from those of those by democrats because he is surprised by the conservative’s betrayal of their ideology on small government, debt, adherence to the constitution, “family values” and the ideal of equality. Democrats express surprise only at the speed of and magnitude by which Trump has exposed this hypocrisy. Wilson is also surprised at how quickly the republican infrastructure jumped to support Trump. He notes that when Trump abuses and/or diminishes them on Twitter, at rallies and in general; they swallow it. As I write this, there are rumblings that Mitch McConnell is bargaining a speedy impeachment trial in exchange for Trump laying off his members – particularly those with tight elections in the coming year.
Throughout the book are vignettes, one is a 5 act play of a typical Trump staffer in a cubicle job. He does not know what his job is, but doing it well takes the light from the boss. This short play, does not end well for him. Another theme is wiretapped conversations of Trump and Hannity, which have no substance and do not end.
While there are no laugh out loud lines like a Michael Wolff book, Wilson is very entertaining. On every page there is an apt phrase such as his many ways to descripe Trump fans in the “republican ecosphere”: “air quote conservatives”; “Vichy Republicans”; and supporters of the“Trump jushe”. He sums up the evangelical embrace of Trump (you have to read it) by saying Trump “broke new theological ground”. He explains the difficulty in a conversation with Trumpists : “their rhetoric exists at the shallow end of the rhetorical pool.” There are great descriptions; Ivanka is the “shoe lady” and Jared “The Master of all Portfolios… looks like he was grown in a lab”. You just have to read his takes on Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and the cast of many.
Wilson sees two possible outcomes, one being a "Mad Max future" and the other a “Big Reset”. He is optimistic that the reset is in the offing and has advice for his party. Most if it is good government stuff – policies for the people, transparency, honesty, etc.; building a more diverse party and expelling the racists, lunatics, conspiracy theorists and stopping the fight over the last wars (mainly culture wars).
Even if you have read others of what is becoming a genre, this one, a critique from the right is worth your time.
August 10, 2018
A hilarious extended exercise in invective by a conservative operative who drew the line at supporting Trump. He takes on anyone and everyone—though the one target he doesn’t aim at much is Russia.
This liberal enjoyed reading it.
This liberal enjoyed reading it.
September 6, 2018
Who is this book even for? It's certainly not Republicans, who even now have a 90% approval rating for their smoothbrained leader. It's not fellow Never Trumpers, for whom he'd be preaching not just to a choir but a backlit, elegantly-placed mirror. No, Wilson's schtick is centered squarely at liberals - and not just any liberals, but decorum-obsessed centrists who can be swayed by the words of someone who approves of everything goddamn thing Trump does but hates the way he does it.
I used to admit a bit of grudging respect for Wilson: he's a ghoul, but his troll game is A1. (Remember that this is the guy who called Trump's supporters "childless losers who masturbate to anime" live on CNN). But if Everything Trump Touches Dies is a troll, it's a painfully overwrought one - full of sideswipes at former colleagues, takedowns of the weakest members of the Trump administration's roster, and appeals to Democrats that if they just got rid of those inconvenient issues like abortion and guns, they too could have the support of the 10% of Republicans who chose political exile over bending the knee. Fucking barf.
I used to admit a bit of grudging respect for Wilson: he's a ghoul, but his troll game is A1. (Remember that this is the guy who called Trump's supporters "childless losers who masturbate to anime" live on CNN). But if Everything Trump Touches Dies is a troll, it's a painfully overwrought one - full of sideswipes at former colleagues, takedowns of the weakest members of the Trump administration's roster, and appeals to Democrats that if they just got rid of those inconvenient issues like abortion and guns, they too could have the support of the 10% of Republicans who chose political exile over bending the knee. Fucking barf.
August 23, 2018
August 22, 2018 – 5.0%
"Did Not Read - scanned through audiobook only"
I bought this yesterday, 22/08/18, thinking it might add something interesting to my limited non-media knowledge of Donald Trump.
I was not impressed with the scan, and this, plus reading the highest rated review on Goodreads, makes this a DNF without even trying.
As an Aussie, I do not think I should be making comments about the President of the USA, adverse or otherwise, in this public forum.
"Did Not Read - scanned through audiobook only"
I bought this yesterday, 22/08/18, thinking it might add something interesting to my limited non-media knowledge of Donald Trump.
I was not impressed with the scan, and this, plus reading the highest rated review on Goodreads, makes this a DNF without even trying.
As an Aussie, I do not think I should be making comments about the President of the USA, adverse or otherwise, in this public forum.
September 16, 2018
I don’t usually write negative reviews. Usually when I invested the time and money, that creates a desire to be optimistic. However, I ended up really disliking this writer. There’s an arrogance in the writer’s personality that is extremely off putting. There’s a fine line between authority and jerk. The writer crosses it. By page 100, all I kept thinking was STFU. And I hate Trump so this difficulty isn’t because of the subject matter. If you’re interested in Trump, you can do far better than this pedantic rant.
September 2, 2018
This was well worth the investment of my time. I'll capture the essence of the book in the following quotes:
"It's an administration that combines astounding incompetence and consistent failure with a pungent combination of arrogance, bullish stupidity, and a relentless, juvenile desire to run a government dedicated not to service, but to offense. The collection of miscreants, nutcases, extremists, and dead-enders around Trump is an extended middle finger to American values, institutions, and anyone, anywhere not sufficiently awed by and obeisant to this president.
"Everything about Donald Trump's presidency and character is a disaster for America. The victories Republicans think they have achieved are transitory and ephemeral and come at the cost of their principles and, probably, their immortal souls. He is a stain on the party, on conservatism, and on this country that won't easily wash out."
I highly recommend this to all Americans. Especially given it's written by a longstanding, faithful, conservative Republican whose only agenda is to protect his party (the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan) and his country.
How far we have come in our disgrace both nationally and internationally. It saddens me, especially this week, when we buried a real American hero, Senator John McCain. A man who did not compromise his values and who fought the "good fight" every day of his life with courage and grace.
"It's an administration that combines astounding incompetence and consistent failure with a pungent combination of arrogance, bullish stupidity, and a relentless, juvenile desire to run a government dedicated not to service, but to offense. The collection of miscreants, nutcases, extremists, and dead-enders around Trump is an extended middle finger to American values, institutions, and anyone, anywhere not sufficiently awed by and obeisant to this president.
"Everything about Donald Trump's presidency and character is a disaster for America. The victories Republicans think they have achieved are transitory and ephemeral and come at the cost of their principles and, probably, their immortal souls. He is a stain on the party, on conservatism, and on this country that won't easily wash out."
I highly recommend this to all Americans. Especially given it's written by a longstanding, faithful, conservative Republican whose only agenda is to protect his party (the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan) and his country.
How far we have come in our disgrace both nationally and internationally. It saddens me, especially this week, when we buried a real American hero, Senator John McCain. A man who did not compromise his values and who fought the "good fight" every day of his life with courage and grace.
September 11, 2018
UPDATE: Today, trump suggested to his friends at Boeing that they rename the plane that keeps crashing. PLEASE JUST VOTE. In 20 Months. PLEASE VOTE
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
My excuse? This was sitting face up on a library table of "new arrivals" right beside Ann Coulter's new book. Assuming I was at the "new in humor for Halloween" table, I picked up this book right beside it after turning Coulter's book face down because I felt lunch coming back up. Anyway, Wilson IS hilarious and you know it when he titles the first section, "The Road to the Shitshow." (Just quoting the book, I don't mean to offend anyone.) Then he goes on about other things/people:
About Trump's Base:
"...I know I'm not supposed to make fun of Trump's base voters, but between their cultish worship of Trump, their abandonment of conservative principles, and their headlong embrace of batshit conspiracies, they make it all too easy."
About Melania:
"...you can see how dead her soul is with every appearance." (I'm starting to think this isn't much of a comedy book by now but really is a Halloween horror story.)
About Trump's Staff:
"The burn rate of the moral, intellectual, and political capitol of the people who joined Team Trump is spectacular by any standard."
About Ann Coulter:
"...tales of whom are whispered in dark rooms to frighten children." See, it's a good thing I turned the cover of her book down, I may have saved many people from nightmares and heart attacks!
About Trump's Ratings:
They "...are somewhere above genital warts and below every other president in modern history, so that's nice." See, there you go, Wilson compliments Trump. So, yes, it's a comedy book with kind things to say about Trump after all!
And another nice note:
"No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child. However, every racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter." How so very sweet.
And the book ends on a nice thought:
"Also, Trump has tiny, tiny hands." Just think how much we, as taxpayers, are saving on Trump's gloves!
Anyway, Wilson delivers punch line after punch line in this howler. I'd have given it more stars but then I realized, finally, this isn't a comedy, Wilson means every word of it. And that's horrifying, perfect Halloween reading. Just think, today is exactly 17 years after 9/11. And look what's going on in the White House, according to Wilson, of course. Thankfully, truth isn't truth.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
My excuse? This was sitting face up on a library table of "new arrivals" right beside Ann Coulter's new book. Assuming I was at the "new in humor for Halloween" table, I picked up this book right beside it after turning Coulter's book face down because I felt lunch coming back up. Anyway, Wilson IS hilarious and you know it when he titles the first section, "The Road to the Shitshow." (Just quoting the book, I don't mean to offend anyone.) Then he goes on about other things/people:
About Trump's Base:
"...I know I'm not supposed to make fun of Trump's base voters, but between their cultish worship of Trump, their abandonment of conservative principles, and their headlong embrace of batshit conspiracies, they make it all too easy."
About Melania:
"...you can see how dead her soul is with every appearance." (I'm starting to think this isn't much of a comedy book by now but really is a Halloween horror story.)
About Trump's Staff:
"The burn rate of the moral, intellectual, and political capitol of the people who joined Team Trump is spectacular by any standard."
About Ann Coulter:
"...tales of whom are whispered in dark rooms to frighten children." See, it's a good thing I turned the cover of her book down, I may have saved many people from nightmares and heart attacks!
About Trump's Ratings:
They "...are somewhere above genital warts and below every other president in modern history, so that's nice." See, there you go, Wilson compliments Trump. So, yes, it's a comedy book with kind things to say about Trump after all!
And another nice note:
"No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child. However, every racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter." How so very sweet.
And the book ends on a nice thought:
"Also, Trump has tiny, tiny hands." Just think how much we, as taxpayers, are saving on Trump's gloves!
Anyway, Wilson delivers punch line after punch line in this howler. I'd have given it more stars but then I realized, finally, this isn't a comedy, Wilson means every word of it. And that's horrifying, perfect Halloween reading. Just think, today is exactly 17 years after 9/11. And look what's going on in the White House, according to Wilson, of course. Thankfully, truth isn't truth.
March 6, 2022
Okie dokie then. My mom bought this book on Audible (sigh) and I had been seeing it in our shared list for months and finally curiosity won out and I tried it. I don't generally read tell-all books, because I have zero interest in monetarily supporting someone who is trying to profit off of an "insider" perspective on drama or scandals or illegal, immoral, unethical, or whatever other type of general shittiness they were a party to but failed to do anything about when it mattered. So you will not see me reading any of those. Not from John Bolton or Michael Cohen or Omarosa or any of the others who want to cash in on their perspective from within the dumpster fire. (Also, there is an entire Listopia list dedicated to Trump tell-alls. There are 248 books on it currently. O_O No other recent president has a list. Just sayin'.)
Anyway... Trump tell-alls = Hard pass. To be fair, I have never and do not ever intend to read any tell-all style books about any administration. History and analysis and investigative journalism are fair game; insider cash-grab books are not.
I was curious about this one though because of who Rick Wilson is... or at least who I thought he was. (And he wasn't actually IN the administration, but was a Republican political "expert".) I really only knew of him through his "never Trump" activism, in the form of some interviews, and a WHOLE LOT of Lincoln Project ads. Well, there's a reason they say you should never meet your heroes. Not that Rick Wilson was ever anywhere close to being a hero of mine, but I really enjoyed the LP ads, and REALLY misjudged Rick Wilson based on them.
Whoops. Well, at least his book disabused me of any mistaken notions of decency in Mr. Wilson. It's OK that I say that. He says so himself. He is, admittedly, not a nice man, and that was my (missed) cue to stop reading. I should have just stopped there, but I was still curious, so I continued, and regret doing so. At one point, after I decided to stop listening to this garbage, I texted my mom and I was like "DID YOU ACTUALLY LIKE THIS??" She said she found it amusing, but... guys, my mom is not really a critical reader. She's not like me, who can and often does side-eye every leaf, she's a "isn't the forest pretty" kind of reader. In other words, I think she enjoyed the snide cattiness of Wilson's anti-Trumpery out of pure anti-Trump sentiment and missed all of Wilson's own brand of shittiness.
-- Sexism? Check.
-- Thinly veiled racism? Check.
(Hint: Using standard sexist and racist dog-whistle terms and then saying that it isn't sexist or racist doesn't actually make it not sexist or racist. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.)
-- Fat-shaming? Check. I'm no fan of Chris Christie, but I did not find the constant commentary about Christie's weight amusing or funny or even witty. One would think that someone as (ahem) creative and intelligent and specifically experienced as POLITICAL STRATEGIST Rick Wilson would be able to think of things OTHER than his weight, body size, or general appearance to criticize. There's no shortage of mistakes or blunders to choose from, after all. Apparently one would be wrong though.
-- Gaslighting? Check. Check. Check.
Here's the thing. I just have this really weird quirk where I dislike when someone is lying to me, or lying about me. And that, friends, is apparently what Rick Wilson built his career on. I made it to the chapter of "unsolicited advice" for Democrats, and... Oof. NOPE.
His "commentary" on Democrats' "gun policy" is framed by his oppositional stance to any gun policy change in general. He is definitively pro-gun. OK, sure, he's allowed to be. But, that, paired with his "Just win, baby" M.O. means that he will use any means to achieve his goal, even if it means completely lying and misrepresenting facts and policy positions he doesn't agree with. He has claimed for years that Democrats want to "take people's guns" (A thing nobody actually wants, and no Democratic administration has even hinted at... but a lie that is still widely believed anyway. Thanks Rick Wilson - way to add to the discussion!) Essentially, he's accused anyone who wants more stringent gun regulations of having the most extreme stance in order to scare people into voting against any type reform as a slippery slope argument. He claims that Democrats just don't understand how baked into American culture guns are and to just give it up already. It's in the Constitution - something that has never been changed or altered in any way since it was handed down personally by a flag-waving Jesus (probably), so it's a moot point. A dead issue. (Pun intended?)
Hmmm... Could it possibly be the decades of propaganda and lies that are actually what's "baked in" regarding gun policy? He mentions that after a school shooting, there's usually some sort of short-lived polling that asks people about gun reform, and then it just... goes away again, showing JUST how important the issue is (ie: not at all).
I found this utterly repulsive. He doesn't seem to care that kids are dying - that's only a momentary blip on a poll questionnaire, and then back to business as usual, status quo, - another victory for accomplishing nothing. Yet somehow wanting to actually prevent more kids from being gunned down in their classrooms is framed as the un-American stance.
Likewise with his comments on "Pro-abortion" advocates, who are just really mean for alienating all of the Evangelicals and "everyone outside of New York City"(??) with all of their "Death to All Babies" t-shirts and... Oh, what's that? That's... not a thing? Huh. Weird. Well still, if Democrats could just not be so RIGID in their demand for the right to control their own bodies by being allowed to remove an unwanted clump of cells, then conservatives would TOTALLY be on board with them, and Democrats could TOTALLY "win". Democrats just need to change their stance just... like a TEENSY tiny bit to like, not want to be able to have bodily autonomy. Simple!
It's so mind-boggling for him to have such a holier than thou tone regarding the Pro-Choice movement (which is NOT "pro-abortion", regardless of how Rick Wilson's lies try to frame it) in the same chapter as he hand-waves away actual live human children being murdered in their classrooms. Though, to be fair, I don't recall that he ever claims to care about the unborn "babies" here either. It's just about how the stance alienates conservatives, so we should change ours to align with theirs, and then Boom! Just win, baby! That's what REALLY matters. The winning.
You cannot fucking make this shit up. Well, apparently Rick Wilson can.
What baffled me the most is that he claimed all of these "Democratic Positions" as though there was some sort of blood pact within the monolithic Democratic party to conform to a singular thought and policy position, with no deviation. Which is... hilarious, given the fact that the Democratic party has so many different factions that often we can't fucking agree on anything enough to get anything actually done. If Rick Wilson was being ingenuous with his advice, THAT would have been it: Align behind a cohesive platform.
But, I mean, this is from the guy whose party did just that and made their singular platform "Whatever Donald Trump says", so maybe we shouldn't take that advice either. Honestly, why he thinks that any Democrat would want to take ANY advice from one of the architects of political discourse that led us to having Donald Trump as president is beyond me. He seemed to know readers would balk, and in that I was entirely predictable, but sometimes we are predictable, and sometimes we're right to be. I will not take advice from a 30-year career political consultant who specializes in attack ads and disingenuous lies, and whose only advice for Democrats boiled down to "Be Republican". No thanks. I'll pass.
Anyway, so I can't really comment on the rest of the book, because that's the point where I Noped out and deleted the audiobook from my phone. Maybe the rest was a delight of wit and brilliant observation and insight.
But I doubt it. That doesn't seem to be in his skillset, and even though he and I agree on Trump being a liar, conman, and criminal, that agreement's not enough to redeem this book for me. And honestly I don't think that there's going to be any revelation at the end of the book that is going to magic us out of the current uber-divisive political climate either. His "unsolicited advice" chapter makes it pretty clear that any advice he'd give on anything would be just more of the same conservative talking points that have led us to right freaking here in the first place.
The only good thing that I can say about this experience is that it's over and I now never have to think about Rick Wilson again.
Anyway... Trump tell-alls = Hard pass. To be fair, I have never and do not ever intend to read any tell-all style books about any administration. History and analysis and investigative journalism are fair game; insider cash-grab books are not.
I was curious about this one though because of who Rick Wilson is... or at least who I thought he was. (And he wasn't actually IN the administration, but was a Republican political "expert".) I really only knew of him through his "never Trump" activism, in the form of some interviews, and a WHOLE LOT of Lincoln Project ads. Well, there's a reason they say you should never meet your heroes. Not that Rick Wilson was ever anywhere close to being a hero of mine, but I really enjoyed the LP ads, and REALLY misjudged Rick Wilson based on them.
Whoops. Well, at least his book disabused me of any mistaken notions of decency in Mr. Wilson. It's OK that I say that. He says so himself. He is, admittedly, not a nice man, and that was my (missed) cue to stop reading. I should have just stopped there, but I was still curious, so I continued, and regret doing so. At one point, after I decided to stop listening to this garbage, I texted my mom and I was like "DID YOU ACTUALLY LIKE THIS??" She said she found it amusing, but... guys, my mom is not really a critical reader. She's not like me, who can and often does side-eye every leaf, she's a "isn't the forest pretty" kind of reader. In other words, I think she enjoyed the snide cattiness of Wilson's anti-Trumpery out of pure anti-Trump sentiment and missed all of Wilson's own brand of shittiness.
-- Sexism? Check.
-- Thinly veiled racism? Check.
(Hint: Using standard sexist and racist dog-whistle terms and then saying that it isn't sexist or racist doesn't actually make it not sexist or racist. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.)
-- Fat-shaming? Check. I'm no fan of Chris Christie, but I did not find the constant commentary about Christie's weight amusing or funny or even witty. One would think that someone as (ahem) creative and intelligent and specifically experienced as POLITICAL STRATEGIST Rick Wilson would be able to think of things OTHER than his weight, body size, or general appearance to criticize. There's no shortage of mistakes or blunders to choose from, after all. Apparently one would be wrong though.
-- Gaslighting? Check. Check. Check.
Here's the thing. I just have this really weird quirk where I dislike when someone is lying to me, or lying about me. And that, friends, is apparently what Rick Wilson built his career on. I made it to the chapter of "unsolicited advice" for Democrats, and... Oof. NOPE.
His "commentary" on Democrats' "gun policy" is framed by his oppositional stance to any gun policy change in general. He is definitively pro-gun. OK, sure, he's allowed to be. But, that, paired with his "Just win, baby" M.O. means that he will use any means to achieve his goal, even if it means completely lying and misrepresenting facts and policy positions he doesn't agree with. He has claimed for years that Democrats want to "take people's guns" (A thing nobody actually wants, and no Democratic administration has even hinted at... but a lie that is still widely believed anyway. Thanks Rick Wilson - way to add to the discussion!) Essentially, he's accused anyone who wants more stringent gun regulations of having the most extreme stance in order to scare people into voting against any type reform as a slippery slope argument. He claims that Democrats just don't understand how baked into American culture guns are and to just give it up already. It's in the Constitution - something that has never been changed or altered in any way since it was handed down personally by a flag-waving Jesus (probably), so it's a moot point. A dead issue. (Pun intended?)
Hmmm... Could it possibly be the decades of propaganda and lies that are actually what's "baked in" regarding gun policy? He mentions that after a school shooting, there's usually some sort of short-lived polling that asks people about gun reform, and then it just... goes away again, showing JUST how important the issue is (ie: not at all).
I found this utterly repulsive. He doesn't seem to care that kids are dying - that's only a momentary blip on a poll questionnaire, and then back to business as usual, status quo, - another victory for accomplishing nothing. Yet somehow wanting to actually prevent more kids from being gunned down in their classrooms is framed as the un-American stance.
Likewise with his comments on "Pro-abortion" advocates, who are just really mean for alienating all of the Evangelicals and "everyone outside of New York City"(??) with all of their "Death to All Babies" t-shirts and... Oh, what's that? That's... not a thing? Huh. Weird. Well still, if Democrats could just not be so RIGID in their demand for the right to control their own bodies by being allowed to remove an unwanted clump of cells, then conservatives would TOTALLY be on board with them, and Democrats could TOTALLY "win". Democrats just need to change their stance just... like a TEENSY tiny bit to like, not want to be able to have bodily autonomy. Simple!
It's so mind-boggling for him to have such a holier than thou tone regarding the Pro-Choice movement (which is NOT "pro-abortion", regardless of how Rick Wilson's lies try to frame it) in the same chapter as he hand-waves away actual live human children being murdered in their classrooms. Though, to be fair, I don't recall that he ever claims to care about the unborn "babies" here either. It's just about how the stance alienates conservatives, so we should change ours to align with theirs, and then Boom! Just win, baby! That's what REALLY matters. The winning.
You cannot fucking make this shit up. Well, apparently Rick Wilson can.
What baffled me the most is that he claimed all of these "Democratic Positions" as though there was some sort of blood pact within the monolithic Democratic party to conform to a singular thought and policy position, with no deviation. Which is... hilarious, given the fact that the Democratic party has so many different factions that often we can't fucking agree on anything enough to get anything actually done. If Rick Wilson was being ingenuous with his advice, THAT would have been it: Align behind a cohesive platform.
But, I mean, this is from the guy whose party did just that and made their singular platform "Whatever Donald Trump says", so maybe we shouldn't take that advice either. Honestly, why he thinks that any Democrat would want to take ANY advice from one of the architects of political discourse that led us to having Donald Trump as president is beyond me. He seemed to know readers would balk, and in that I was entirely predictable, but sometimes we are predictable, and sometimes we're right to be. I will not take advice from a 30-year career political consultant who specializes in attack ads and disingenuous lies, and whose only advice for Democrats boiled down to "Be Republican". No thanks. I'll pass.
Anyway, so I can't really comment on the rest of the book, because that's the point where I Noped out and deleted the audiobook from my phone. Maybe the rest was a delight of wit and brilliant observation and insight.
But I doubt it. That doesn't seem to be in his skillset, and even though he and I agree on Trump being a liar, conman, and criminal, that agreement's not enough to redeem this book for me. And honestly I don't think that there's going to be any revelation at the end of the book that is going to magic us out of the current uber-divisive political climate either. His "unsolicited advice" chapter makes it pretty clear that any advice he'd give on anything would be just more of the same conservative talking points that have led us to right freaking here in the first place.
The only good thing that I can say about this experience is that it's over and I now never have to think about Rick Wilson again.
August 19, 2018
I have very mixed feelings about this book. I enjoy Rick Wilson's appearances on news shows and his column for The Daily Beast. He has a way with words and is unstinting in his condemnation of the current "president."
However, a little vitriol goes a long way. It's one thing to read an article containing it; it's quite another to read a whole book of it. It grew tiresome, especially his constant harping on the "president's" diehard supporters and how a bunch of them are virgins who "couldn't find a woman's clitoris with a GPS and a magnifying glass." First of all, specifying that it would be a woman's clitoris is redundant. Second, it seems like a very puerile insult. Is it a guy thing? Heck if I know.
I also took exception to his constant dismissal of Democrats and their "purity tests." No, we are not all in lockstep with extreme left positions. Some of us are quite pragmatic and understand very well that someone who can win in San Francisco probably can't win in my home state of Indiana. I found it extremely condescending. Perhaps he should talk to my Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, and find out what a pragmatic Democrat is all about and what they can accomplish.
I had to laugh at his praise of presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, for their condemnation of racism...with not one mention of President Obama. Seriously? The first African-American President and you can't find it in your conservative soul to mention his thoughts on racism? Dude.
Having said all that, he does share my contempt for this current administration and the direction it is taking our country. He is a Never Trumper and I appreciate his work on that. Perhaps he should stop with the endless insults. Perhaps he should understand that despite our political differences, plenty of us on the left love our country just as much as he does.
However, a little vitriol goes a long way. It's one thing to read an article containing it; it's quite another to read a whole book of it. It grew tiresome, especially his constant harping on the "president's" diehard supporters and how a bunch of them are virgins who "couldn't find a woman's clitoris with a GPS and a magnifying glass." First of all, specifying that it would be a woman's clitoris is redundant. Second, it seems like a very puerile insult. Is it a guy thing? Heck if I know.
I also took exception to his constant dismissal of Democrats and their "purity tests." No, we are not all in lockstep with extreme left positions. Some of us are quite pragmatic and understand very well that someone who can win in San Francisco probably can't win in my home state of Indiana. I found it extremely condescending. Perhaps he should talk to my Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, and find out what a pragmatic Democrat is all about and what they can accomplish.
I had to laugh at his praise of presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, for their condemnation of racism...with not one mention of President Obama. Seriously? The first African-American President and you can't find it in your conservative soul to mention his thoughts on racism? Dude.
Having said all that, he does share my contempt for this current administration and the direction it is taking our country. He is a Never Trumper and I appreciate his work on that. Perhaps he should stop with the endless insults. Perhaps he should understand that despite our political differences, plenty of us on the left love our country just as much as he does.
September 25, 2019
I actually finished this Audible book late last night for the 2nd time. I love the biting humor that Wilson includes with the overload of facts. I must admit though, that I would NOT have enjoyed this book 1/2 as much were I not using the audio version. Having this read by the biting voice of the author made it much more enjoyable, and easier to absorb the deluge of information. --Jen from Quebec :0)
July 20, 2019
Despite his numerous appearances on CNN, I seriously didn't realize that author Rick Wilson was with the other team. So maybe the book resonated with me even more, knowing that this dyed-in-wool Republican hates Trump ("the Monster") as much as I do.
As an admitted "Never Trumper," Wilson seriously despises the Orange Menace and provides us with a humorous, yet realistic and often grim look at the previous horror-filled years (the book was published in 2018) of the Trump Administration and an even worse possibility of what lies ahead for us as we near 2024. Make no mistake - his unpopular-with-the-GOP views have come at a personal cost to him and his family, who have suffered in numerous ways due to his turning against the despicable demagogue narcissist. Yet he remains true to the theme of How Whatever or Whoever Comes in Contact with Trump He/She/It Eventually Ceases to Exist and Withers Away, either literally or metaphorically. Using wacky chapter headings, all key evildoers merit their own section, as Wilson deftly explains their Trumpian ties. And as the current WH occupant rages on with ugh! -two more years to go - there's not an ideology that Wilson stated then, that isn't still an ongoing shitshow now. One of the themes Wilson discusses at length is racism and the alt-reich's rise under Trump; ironically it's this week's national outrage begun by Dear Leader's latest comments and Tweetstorms (probably to cover up his craptastic association with Satanic spawn Jeffrey Epstein).
While gloom and doom abound, in the end, the author makes a hopeful case for what the GOP needs to do to rid themselves of its Trump alignment -- more importantly, how Republicans need to re-invent themselves and the party before it's too late. Before democracy dies, too.
Wilson is a skillful and funny writer and offers up some good quotes along the way. Here's a powerful one from Ronald Reagan, Mr. Party of Lincoln himself, about the meaning of freedom:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."
As an admitted "Never Trumper," Wilson seriously despises the Orange Menace and provides us with a humorous, yet realistic and often grim look at the previous horror-filled years (the book was published in 2018) of the Trump Administration and an even worse possibility of what lies ahead for us as we near 2024. Make no mistake - his unpopular-with-the-GOP views have come at a personal cost to him and his family, who have suffered in numerous ways due to his turning against the despicable demagogue narcissist. Yet he remains true to the theme of How Whatever or Whoever Comes in Contact with Trump He/She/It Eventually Ceases to Exist and Withers Away, either literally or metaphorically. Using wacky chapter headings, all key evildoers merit their own section, as Wilson deftly explains their Trumpian ties. And as the current WH occupant rages on with ugh! -two more years to go - there's not an ideology that Wilson stated then, that isn't still an ongoing shitshow now. One of the themes Wilson discusses at length is racism and the alt-reich's rise under Trump; ironically it's this week's national outrage begun by Dear Leader's latest comments and Tweetstorms (probably to cover up his craptastic association with Satanic spawn Jeffrey Epstein).
While gloom and doom abound, in the end, the author makes a hopeful case for what the GOP needs to do to rid themselves of its Trump alignment -- more importantly, how Republicans need to re-invent themselves and the party before it's too late. Before democracy dies, too.
Wilson is a skillful and funny writer and offers up some good quotes along the way. Here's a powerful one from Ronald Reagan, Mr. Party of Lincoln himself, about the meaning of freedom:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."
July 9, 2019
While it’s cathartic to read a Never-Trumper making fun of 45* and his cronies, Wilson’s blind spot about the complicity of him and his ilk prevent me from rewarding this book with any more than two stars. He refuses to see Trump as a predictable outcome of years of dog whistling from Republicans, making the ludicrous assertion that no other Republican presidents were the least bit racist—that was just a nasty lie we Democrats told. Apparently, even Nixon was great for African Americans—seriously? And don’t get him started on his patron saint, Ronnie...No, the short-fingered vulgarian is a mere outlier. Also, I cannot ever trust anyone on the right who continues to use terms such as pro-abortion and Democrat party. As soon as His Orangeness is out of office, I know Wilson will be right back to his old (dirty) tricks.
January 24, 2020
My rating of this may be a little bias because I'm definitely not a fan of Trump, and I still can't believe he became the President.
January 22, 2021
No question that Wilson has a way with words, especially of the derogatory kind. But in between the quips, is a serious examination of how Trump has moved the traditional GOP completely off its conservative philosophy roots. He has little respect for the new GOP, a sycophantic oleaginous breed (to quote George Will) that thinks of nothing but collecting as much money for themselves and getting reelected.
They have apparently bought into the Trump way of doing business: borrow as much money as possible then stiff the contractors and workers, default on the loans, skim as much as possible, repeat infinitely. He thought he could do that in office. We have now learned from Rex Tillerson that the legality of a policy was irrelevant. Trump would just fire and replace with someone with fewer scruples. And then call the former names. Tillerson remarked about Trump, "It was challenging for me, coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented Exxon Mobil Corporation, to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn't like to read, doesn't read briefing reports, doesn't like to get into the details of a lot things." Trump bragged about being a non-reader and being undisciplined.
Some of the more juicy quotes:
“Everything about Trump’s opening speech was moral poison to anyone who believed in any part of the American dream. Everything about his nationalist hucksterism smelled like … a knock on the door of authoritarian statism.”
The right is “merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood”.
“There’s an odds-on chance that our grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over guttering fires in the ruins of a radioactive Mad Max-style hellscape.”
One can only hope Wilson is not prescient.
“All the things evangelicals had said for generations that made a candidate anathema were suddenly just fine … 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 … Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues … There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.”
The tax bill was a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.
Trump's far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics. Trump has surrounded himself with Wall Street alumni “who have behaved with weapons-grade venality … and Master of the Dick affects. They were there … only for the tax bill. Nothing else ever mattered to any of them.”
The Trump administration has been “a hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and crony capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious … The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.”
The presidency “hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation, until now”.
Wilson is sure the reason why Trump is so reluctant to release his taxes is that it will reveal numerous instances of "loans" that were really income received from Russian oligarchs through shell companies with no expectation they would ever be paid back. Paul Manafort got in serious trouble for the same shenanigans. It has a name: tax fraud.
The question now (read just after the Capitol insurrection) is whether the thing that dies will be the GOP.
They have apparently bought into the Trump way of doing business: borrow as much money as possible then stiff the contractors and workers, default on the loans, skim as much as possible, repeat infinitely. He thought he could do that in office. We have now learned from Rex Tillerson that the legality of a policy was irrelevant. Trump would just fire and replace with someone with fewer scruples. And then call the former names. Tillerson remarked about Trump, "It was challenging for me, coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented Exxon Mobil Corporation, to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn't like to read, doesn't read briefing reports, doesn't like to get into the details of a lot things." Trump bragged about being a non-reader and being undisciplined.
Some of the more juicy quotes:
“Everything about Trump’s opening speech was moral poison to anyone who believed in any part of the American dream. Everything about his nationalist hucksterism smelled like … a knock on the door of authoritarian statism.”
The right is “merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood”.
“There’s an odds-on chance that our grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over guttering fires in the ruins of a radioactive Mad Max-style hellscape.”
One can only hope Wilson is not prescient.
“All the things evangelicals had said for generations that made a candidate anathema were suddenly just fine … 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 … Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues … There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.”
The tax bill was a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.
Trump's far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics. Trump has surrounded himself with Wall Street alumni “who have behaved with weapons-grade venality … and Master of the Dick affects. They were there … only for the tax bill. Nothing else ever mattered to any of them.”
The Trump administration has been “a hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and crony capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious … The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.”
The presidency “hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation, until now”.
Wilson is sure the reason why Trump is so reluctant to release his taxes is that it will reveal numerous instances of "loans" that were really income received from Russian oligarchs through shell companies with no expectation they would ever be paid back. Paul Manafort got in serious trouble for the same shenanigans. It has a name: tax fraud.
The question now (read just after the Capitol insurrection) is whether the thing that dies will be the GOP.
November 9, 2018
As entertaining as ETTD is, the serious accusations and analyses made by Rick Wilson are aggressive and hard-hitting. Unlike Bob Woodward in "Fear", Wilson is not neutral; rather he is invested deeply in the failure of the Republican Party to distance itself from "the worst President in American history". Therefore, the reader must accept that Wilson deconstructs the demise of the Republicans in their tacit support of Trump with anger and often, with shame.
His writing is fluent, often satirical, and reflective of someone who has been a political strategist for several decades, someone who is cringing at the wilful disregard of dignity, morality, intelligence, and of the abandonment of the rule of law - all values at the heart of the American Republican Party and of American governments of the past. His research is extensive, his experience invaluable as an "insider" - and, yet, the reader does not come away feeling that Wilson is getting his revenge for his isolation from the sycophantic worshippers of an incompetent and particularly dangerous President. In fact, his concluding chapter, before "The Mad Max Outcome", is one of hope for America and for the Republicans. Without humour or the satire found in earlier chapters (or in his last entry), Wilson outlines with precision what the Republican Party must "return to" if it is to repair what has been destroyed during the Trump catastrophe. He writes with intelligence and with "heart" in delineating the goals that must guide the Party and inspire America.
The profiles he presents of Trump's supporters, particularly of his spokespeople and aides, is frightening, particularly those of the alt-right with their racism, anti-Semitism, immorality, and lack of humanity.
One can only hope that the sanity Wilson reveals permeates the minds of those Republicans who can still move to withdraw support from this "shitshow".
His writing is fluent, often satirical, and reflective of someone who has been a political strategist for several decades, someone who is cringing at the wilful disregard of dignity, morality, intelligence, and of the abandonment of the rule of law - all values at the heart of the American Republican Party and of American governments of the past. His research is extensive, his experience invaluable as an "insider" - and, yet, the reader does not come away feeling that Wilson is getting his revenge for his isolation from the sycophantic worshippers of an incompetent and particularly dangerous President. In fact, his concluding chapter, before "The Mad Max Outcome", is one of hope for America and for the Republicans. Without humour or the satire found in earlier chapters (or in his last entry), Wilson outlines with precision what the Republican Party must "return to" if it is to repair what has been destroyed during the Trump catastrophe. He writes with intelligence and with "heart" in delineating the goals that must guide the Party and inspire America.
The profiles he presents of Trump's supporters, particularly of his spokespeople and aides, is frightening, particularly those of the alt-right with their racism, anti-Semitism, immorality, and lack of humanity.
One can only hope that the sanity Wilson reveals permeates the minds of those Republicans who can still move to withdraw support from this "shitshow".
November 15, 2018
Two years into this mess and I'm still struggling to understand how Donald Trump could become the presidential nominee of the Republican party. I'm a lifelong moderate sort of Democrat, but I've know plenty of intelligent, reasonable, compassionate Republicans, and I just can't wrap my brain around how that party could select such a venal, depraved huckster. I thought that perhaps Wilson, a Republican insider, could offer some explanations beyond dark suggestions of endemic racism or vague claims of working class angst. But, nope.
Like all the other writers I've read on the subject, Rick Wilson is repulsed and alarmed by the Trump horror show, but his account does have the merit of being really funny. His portraits of the various crooks and deranged clowns who people Trump's administration are delightfully sharp and vicious. There were a few stories of corruption I'd managed to miss, but not a lot was new. Also, I could have done with a bit less of Wilson preening about his cleverness as a campaign strategist. Still, I did find some comfort in reading about the misery Trump is causing his own party, and Wilson is an entertaining ranter.
Like all the other writers I've read on the subject, Rick Wilson is repulsed and alarmed by the Trump horror show, but his account does have the merit of being really funny. His portraits of the various crooks and deranged clowns who people Trump's administration are delightfully sharp and vicious. There were a few stories of corruption I'd managed to miss, but not a lot was new. Also, I could have done with a bit less of Wilson preening about his cleverness as a campaign strategist. Still, I did find some comfort in reading about the misery Trump is causing his own party, and Wilson is an entertaining ranter.
July 15, 2019
Awesome! Brilliant. Rick Wilson reads this in an appropriately toned down outrage.
You have to remember, he was a Republican Strategist - and probably will be again after the current president is out of office - so to hear him come down so negatively on the current purported conservatives makes him that much more believable.
I read this book in 2019 and Rick added an afterword to sum up events that have occurred in the two years since it's been published.
And he doesn't take it easy on the Democrats, either. There's a chapter where he reads out what the Democratic party has to do/change in order to purge the nation of the scourge of trump and trumpism.
Truly wish Republicans would read this and take it to heart.
You have to remember, he was a Republican Strategist - and probably will be again after the current president is out of office - so to hear him come down so negatively on the current purported conservatives makes him that much more believable.
I read this book in 2019 and Rick added an afterword to sum up events that have occurred in the two years since it's been published.
And he doesn't take it easy on the Democrats, either. There's a chapter where he reads out what the Democratic party has to do/change in order to purge the nation of the scourge of trump and trumpism.
Truly wish Republicans would read this and take it to heart.
August 9, 2018
One of the best books I have read in a long time! Funny and accurate. Highly recommended read/listen.
September 17, 2018
Barely pages into his book, Republican strategist Rick Wilson lays the blame of the Trump phenomenon squarely on the shoulders of the American education system.
“If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it,” he says, echoing a tired, screechy line we’ve heard before from the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson (on flat earthers, same difference) and the Century Foundation. “Given the dumbing-down of the American educational system in the past fifty years, graduating from high school now means you can draw air in and out of your lungs. Schools are long on feelings and short on critical thinking, to say nothing of civics, economics, or reading comprehension.”
This is a battle for another day, but I’d dearly love Mr. Wilson to revisit things like NCLB, the signature law of a president I'm almost certain he supported, which played its own role in this “dumbing down” he’s talking about. And I’d like to draw his attention to his own words about the wealth gap in America, the gap that “has been shrugged off by Republicans for a generation” and which has its own particularly horrible effect on poor public school students. And all those attack ads he did against Obama in 2008? You know, the race against McCain and Sarah Palin, a Trump Beta version?
Or the ad you made attacking Max Cleland in 2002? Where you likened a vote for the Democratic candidate to a vote for Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? You keep treating voters like idiots and then complain later about how voters are idiots, you might want to think carefully about how you come off there, hoss.
Put it another way: We educators you despise so much, we’re fighting this kind of ignorance. You made money off it. Go fuck yourself.
Ok, I got that off my chest.
To the immediate point: Wilson is savage in Everything Trump Touches Dies, and it’s a welcome voice from the right. He’s heavy-handed and hilarious in his smackdowns of everything from Trump’s trade policy, to the fawning “alt-reich” factions bolstering his base to the media’s missteps, to the right-wing noise machine of Fox and Breitbart slinging bullshit in the name of antiestablishmentarianism, to the monstrosity of the 2017 tax bill and botched effort to repeal Obamacare, to the incompetents Trump surrounds himself with, to Trump himself...it’s a 300-plus page fountain of invective brimming over with empirical evidence and self-righteousness.
I had to keep putting it down to catch my breath. Wilson not only highlights and revisits the tortuous epic of Trump’s first fifteen months in office, but he also connects certain dots I was previously unaware of. For example, sure, I rolled my eyes at Trump’s promises to revitalize the coal industry, but I forgot all about the Obama-shouldn’t-be-picking-winners-and-losers shrieks from the right in the face of the Soylyndra affair. The fact that those voices are silent when Trump humps coal barons in Pennsylvania for support doesn’t outrage them equally? Stupid me. Of course not.
Every inchoate, rage-filled Tweet from a Trump supporter is another nail in the coffin of whatever political dialogue we used to have in the ether of cyberspace, and Wilson relies on them heavily to evaluate “the baser,” but he has plenty of his own spleen to pour all over the page in kind. Trump has “shallow, dick-measuring juvenile feuds with everyone who has ever looked at him cross-eyed.” Trump supporters cheering on his infamous “both sides were to blame” comment in the wake of the Charlottesville horror had to be “a paunchy, polo-shirted torch carrier” getting “an erection (they) normally couldn’t achieve without the proximity of (an) anime waifs body pillow.” And on and on. It doesn’t have quite the polish that Matt Taibbi does when firing arrows at Wall Street, but it’s close.
Neither does Wilson spare contempt for prominent voices on the right and in the blogosphere not calling out this nonsense front and center (looking at you, McConnell, Ryan and supposedly sane conservative pro-business media). And if that weren’t enough, among the many, many travesties resulting from Trump’s America, we also have to prepare ourselves for a Trump 2.0 election cycle, filled with “a generation of candidates driven by rage, with Fox-level intellectual constructs...that have all the subtlety and introspection of the Breitbart comments section...They’ve...come to believe that the base, and only the base, matters. They’re looking away from a universe of survey data that show Donald Trump is narrowing the base into a demographic box canyon. There are only so many white dudes over the age of 50 with a high school education or below, and they’re a shrinking pool.”
Dear God. Parker Malloy recently bemoaned how “insufferable” Trump will be as an ex-president. I never even considered what Trump acolytes would do to the election cycle. As if it weren’t polluted enough.
Wilson is going after his own party here, and that alone makes him worth reading. Much like Thomas Frank’s lecturing Democrats in Listen, Liberal, Wilson has some good advice for the GOP, which it damn well better consider before the party completely self-destructs (that it hasn’t already is something I don’t pretend to understand). That he sees it as their responsibility is a line I particularly appreciate. I mean, if I have to hear one more well-fed white male making money off hack columns mutter, “Hey, I never voted for him” and thus letting himself off the hook, I’m going to scream. I myself am a well-fed white male who’s horrified at what the country decided to go with in 2016, and the fact that I didn’t vote for him does not let me off the hook for trying to do some elementary damage control within my sphere of influence.
But the Republicans, undebatably, have a lot of Trump-juice on their hands, and if anyone should be looking in a mirror right now, wondering “Is it me?” it’s them.
“Trump is a problem we’ll be a long time in solving,” he writes towards the end. “The damage to our institutions, our hopes, and our reputation in the world won’t be undone overnight or with a few sweet words. It will take work and commitment from people on the conservative side of the equation to admit and rectify the dangerous flirtation with authoritarian statism Trump represents.”
Yes. God yes. This book offers one perspective on why this happened and what’s to be done about it. There will be others. The more honest dialogue, the better. But I have a particular zest to see more books that do this kind of unfettered, painful soul-searching.
“If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it,” he says, echoing a tired, screechy line we’ve heard before from the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson (on flat earthers, same difference) and the Century Foundation. “Given the dumbing-down of the American educational system in the past fifty years, graduating from high school now means you can draw air in and out of your lungs. Schools are long on feelings and short on critical thinking, to say nothing of civics, economics, or reading comprehension.”
This is a battle for another day, but I’d dearly love Mr. Wilson to revisit things like NCLB, the signature law of a president I'm almost certain he supported, which played its own role in this “dumbing down” he’s talking about. And I’d like to draw his attention to his own words about the wealth gap in America, the gap that “has been shrugged off by Republicans for a generation” and which has its own particularly horrible effect on poor public school students. And all those attack ads he did against Obama in 2008? You know, the race against McCain and Sarah Palin, a Trump Beta version?
Or the ad you made attacking Max Cleland in 2002? Where you likened a vote for the Democratic candidate to a vote for Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? You keep treating voters like idiots and then complain later about how voters are idiots, you might want to think carefully about how you come off there, hoss.
Put it another way: We educators you despise so much, we’re fighting this kind of ignorance. You made money off it. Go fuck yourself.
Ok, I got that off my chest.
To the immediate point: Wilson is savage in Everything Trump Touches Dies, and it’s a welcome voice from the right. He’s heavy-handed and hilarious in his smackdowns of everything from Trump’s trade policy, to the fawning “alt-reich” factions bolstering his base to the media’s missteps, to the right-wing noise machine of Fox and Breitbart slinging bullshit in the name of antiestablishmentarianism, to the monstrosity of the 2017 tax bill and botched effort to repeal Obamacare, to the incompetents Trump surrounds himself with, to Trump himself...it’s a 300-plus page fountain of invective brimming over with empirical evidence and self-righteousness.
I had to keep putting it down to catch my breath. Wilson not only highlights and revisits the tortuous epic of Trump’s first fifteen months in office, but he also connects certain dots I was previously unaware of. For example, sure, I rolled my eyes at Trump’s promises to revitalize the coal industry, but I forgot all about the Obama-shouldn’t-be-picking-winners-and-losers shrieks from the right in the face of the Soylyndra affair. The fact that those voices are silent when Trump humps coal barons in Pennsylvania for support doesn’t outrage them equally? Stupid me. Of course not.
Every inchoate, rage-filled Tweet from a Trump supporter is another nail in the coffin of whatever political dialogue we used to have in the ether of cyberspace, and Wilson relies on them heavily to evaluate “the baser,” but he has plenty of his own spleen to pour all over the page in kind. Trump has “shallow, dick-measuring juvenile feuds with everyone who has ever looked at him cross-eyed.” Trump supporters cheering on his infamous “both sides were to blame” comment in the wake of the Charlottesville horror had to be “a paunchy, polo-shirted torch carrier” getting “an erection (they) normally couldn’t achieve without the proximity of (an) anime waifs body pillow.” And on and on. It doesn’t have quite the polish that Matt Taibbi does when firing arrows at Wall Street, but it’s close.
Neither does Wilson spare contempt for prominent voices on the right and in the blogosphere not calling out this nonsense front and center (looking at you, McConnell, Ryan and supposedly sane conservative pro-business media). And if that weren’t enough, among the many, many travesties resulting from Trump’s America, we also have to prepare ourselves for a Trump 2.0 election cycle, filled with “a generation of candidates driven by rage, with Fox-level intellectual constructs...that have all the subtlety and introspection of the Breitbart comments section...They’ve...come to believe that the base, and only the base, matters. They’re looking away from a universe of survey data that show Donald Trump is narrowing the base into a demographic box canyon. There are only so many white dudes over the age of 50 with a high school education or below, and they’re a shrinking pool.”
Dear God. Parker Malloy recently bemoaned how “insufferable” Trump will be as an ex-president. I never even considered what Trump acolytes would do to the election cycle. As if it weren’t polluted enough.
Wilson is going after his own party here, and that alone makes him worth reading. Much like Thomas Frank’s lecturing Democrats in Listen, Liberal, Wilson has some good advice for the GOP, which it damn well better consider before the party completely self-destructs (that it hasn’t already is something I don’t pretend to understand). That he sees it as their responsibility is a line I particularly appreciate. I mean, if I have to hear one more well-fed white male making money off hack columns mutter, “Hey, I never voted for him” and thus letting himself off the hook, I’m going to scream. I myself am a well-fed white male who’s horrified at what the country decided to go with in 2016, and the fact that I didn’t vote for him does not let me off the hook for trying to do some elementary damage control within my sphere of influence.
But the Republicans, undebatably, have a lot of Trump-juice on their hands, and if anyone should be looking in a mirror right now, wondering “Is it me?” it’s them.
“Trump is a problem we’ll be a long time in solving,” he writes towards the end. “The damage to our institutions, our hopes, and our reputation in the world won’t be undone overnight or with a few sweet words. It will take work and commitment from people on the conservative side of the equation to admit and rectify the dangerous flirtation with authoritarian statism Trump represents.”
Yes. God yes. This book offers one perspective on why this happened and what’s to be done about it. There will be others. The more honest dialogue, the better. But I have a particular zest to see more books that do this kind of unfettered, painful soul-searching.
November 20, 2019
The title of this book becomes more true with every passing day. Wilson could do updates, but what would be the point? They'd be made obsolete by the next scandal before he could get them into print.
Rick does an excellent job reading his own work for the audio version. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Rick does an excellent job reading his own work for the audio version. Thoroughly enjoyable.
August 29, 2018
“The monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel and violent behaviors. This book is, I hope, one of a number of poison darts in the neck of the monster.”
I’ve been enjoying Rick Wilson on Twitter and was looking forward to his first book. He doesn’t disappoint (or pull punches)! As he’s known to say, he guts Trump (“Grandpa Ranty” “President Shithole”) like a fish. So reassuring to have an intelligent, funny (repentant?) guy dissect MAGA (“the sewage tank of nationalist populism”) and Dear Leader. Rick needs to speak out ever more. He should have his own TV show. He’s great with Bill Maher and Don Lemon. Looking forward to his next book, too. I have read up on Trump. Rick really gets him and DC. This is the best account of what the hell happened to us.
“Every oath Trump has ever sworn, every promise he’s made in business, or in his personal life is contingent on his moods, personal beefs, incoherent rages, bizarre conspiracy theories, poor impulse control, horndog nature, and raging venality.”
“The mythology of Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office is rich in Trump-aggrandizing explanations that ignore the enablers, normalizers, media fellators, ideological arsonists, and moral ciphers who make up Washington’s and New York’s political and media culture. They’re the proximate reasons Trump was able to overcome the field of almost a dozen serious Republicans, and Ben Carson.” Rick delightfully singles out and sends up: Priebus, Ryan, Cruz, Christie, Gingrich, Ailes and Murdoch, Pence, CPAC, Lobbyists (“topping from the bottom with Trump”), Major Donors and The Republican Consulting Class.
“Trump has broken some essential political survival mechanism in Republican elected officials, and it’s hard to see how many of them will recover; over and over Republicans have failed a basic political common sense test on Trump. The excuses they make for him are so out of proportion to the reaction he deserves. In the face of incompetence, they display indifference. In the face of corruption, they engage in epic whataboutism. In the face of instability, they blame inexperience.”
Attributed to Andrew Marantz in response to Trump’s claim that he doesn’t have time for TV cuz he “reads documents a lot”: “Reading documents a lot is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates and introspection.”
Trump on stage performs a: “Borscht Belt Mussolini schtick, bellowing, strutting, and doing everything but grabbing his sack”
Trump’s base (“residents of our national shame closet”)“didn’t really care about fiscal conservatism. These were ‘conservatives’ unmoved by arguments about the debt, the deficit, or the constitution. They didn’t really care about reducing the size of government. In the end, they ere just angry at a changing America, a changing economy, and at people who didn’t look or sound like them. Fed by Fox news, talk radio, and a weaponized Facebook feeds custom-designed to engorge their feelings of fury, resentment, and impotence, they were looking a t a world that was evolving socially, technologically, and politically at a Kurzweilian rate.” “the message was ‘I’m going to expand government to fuck over the people you hate.’”
Rick prophesies a rosy future after we’re done with Cadet Bone Spurs and we’ve learned from our mistakes. I’m more cynical about our politics. I think Trump (“the avatar of our worst instincts and darkest desires as a nation”) has changed things for the worse into the future. We are ever more self-absorbed while less well-informed and educated. We want to be entertained above all else and we vote with our emotions. We don’t value expertise. We may have entered post ideological politics for good. Trump is not a conservative. He’s a bomb throwing agent of chaos. An “authoritarian statist” wannabe. He’s a malignant narcissist who cares only about ego-fluffing and enemy-making. He wants to run the country on his own, a co-equal to none. As his crimes and misdemeanors become exposed, he will rage on as his core bleats along. He touched the Republican Party and I believe it died. The Dems will keep on with Nancy, Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie or Elizabeth Warren for president? Four more years for Trump. Can he campaign from prison? We’re f***ed.
I’ve been enjoying Rick Wilson on Twitter and was looking forward to his first book. He doesn’t disappoint (or pull punches)! As he’s known to say, he guts Trump (“Grandpa Ranty” “President Shithole”) like a fish. So reassuring to have an intelligent, funny (repentant?) guy dissect MAGA (“the sewage tank of nationalist populism”) and Dear Leader. Rick needs to speak out ever more. He should have his own TV show. He’s great with Bill Maher and Don Lemon. Looking forward to his next book, too. I have read up on Trump. Rick really gets him and DC. This is the best account of what the hell happened to us.
“Every oath Trump has ever sworn, every promise he’s made in business, or in his personal life is contingent on his moods, personal beefs, incoherent rages, bizarre conspiracy theories, poor impulse control, horndog nature, and raging venality.”
“The mythology of Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office is rich in Trump-aggrandizing explanations that ignore the enablers, normalizers, media fellators, ideological arsonists, and moral ciphers who make up Washington’s and New York’s political and media culture. They’re the proximate reasons Trump was able to overcome the field of almost a dozen serious Republicans, and Ben Carson.” Rick delightfully singles out and sends up: Priebus, Ryan, Cruz, Christie, Gingrich, Ailes and Murdoch, Pence, CPAC, Lobbyists (“topping from the bottom with Trump”), Major Donors and The Republican Consulting Class.
“Trump has broken some essential political survival mechanism in Republican elected officials, and it’s hard to see how many of them will recover; over and over Republicans have failed a basic political common sense test on Trump. The excuses they make for him are so out of proportion to the reaction he deserves. In the face of incompetence, they display indifference. In the face of corruption, they engage in epic whataboutism. In the face of instability, they blame inexperience.”
Attributed to Andrew Marantz in response to Trump’s claim that he doesn’t have time for TV cuz he “reads documents a lot”: “Reading documents a lot is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates and introspection.”
Trump on stage performs a: “Borscht Belt Mussolini schtick, bellowing, strutting, and doing everything but grabbing his sack”
Trump’s base (“residents of our national shame closet”)“didn’t really care about fiscal conservatism. These were ‘conservatives’ unmoved by arguments about the debt, the deficit, or the constitution. They didn’t really care about reducing the size of government. In the end, they ere just angry at a changing America, a changing economy, and at people who didn’t look or sound like them. Fed by Fox news, talk radio, and a weaponized Facebook feeds custom-designed to engorge their feelings of fury, resentment, and impotence, they were looking a t a world that was evolving socially, technologically, and politically at a Kurzweilian rate.” “the message was ‘I’m going to expand government to fuck over the people you hate.’”
Rick prophesies a rosy future after we’re done with Cadet Bone Spurs and we’ve learned from our mistakes. I’m more cynical about our politics. I think Trump (“the avatar of our worst instincts and darkest desires as a nation”) has changed things for the worse into the future. We are ever more self-absorbed while less well-informed and educated. We want to be entertained above all else and we vote with our emotions. We don’t value expertise. We may have entered post ideological politics for good. Trump is not a conservative. He’s a bomb throwing agent of chaos. An “authoritarian statist” wannabe. He’s a malignant narcissist who cares only about ego-fluffing and enemy-making. He wants to run the country on his own, a co-equal to none. As his crimes and misdemeanors become exposed, he will rage on as his core bleats along. He touched the Republican Party and I believe it died. The Dems will keep on with Nancy, Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie or Elizabeth Warren for president? Four more years for Trump. Can he campaign from prison? We’re f***ed.
August 19, 2018
Rick Wilson, long-time Republican strategist and ad-maker (as well as the king of snark), issues an epic beat-down of The Donald and all of his enablers in this scalding, insightful, yet scary book. Wilson is an avowed conservative who is pissed and wants his country and party back.
There are issues where I disagree with Wilson, but at least he is the kind of conservative I respect. He favors fiscal responsibility, smaller government, and greater accountability. He despises the Republican-driven social-issue and culture wars. This book is primarily targeted at his party, but he has choice words for the left as well.
Wilson zeroes in on many topics including the Republican power brokers, Trump family and cronies, right-wing media nuts, Trump's base, alt-right basket cases, and evangelicals. After he is done with them pretty much all that is left is smoking wreckage. But Wilson makes what I believe are solid and reasoned cases for his opinions.
In addition to describing how we got here, he also offers an assessment of how we (particularly his Republican party) can move forward and reclaim our country and our soul. Excellent political commentary and observation for our current times. Can't wait for the sequel!
There are issues where I disagree with Wilson, but at least he is the kind of conservative I respect. He favors fiscal responsibility, smaller government, and greater accountability. He despises the Republican-driven social-issue and culture wars. This book is primarily targeted at his party, but he has choice words for the left as well.
Wilson zeroes in on many topics including the Republican power brokers, Trump family and cronies, right-wing media nuts, Trump's base, alt-right basket cases, and evangelicals. After he is done with them pretty much all that is left is smoking wreckage. But Wilson makes what I believe are solid and reasoned cases for his opinions.
In addition to describing how we got here, he also offers an assessment of how we (particularly his Republican party) can move forward and reclaim our country and our soul. Excellent political commentary and observation for our current times. Can't wait for the sequel!
December 27, 2018
"Who is the more fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?" - Obi Wan Kenobi
I strangely enough don't mean the President of the United States when I invoke this quote, neither as the fool or the one he follows. I instead mean Rick Wilson, the author of the book which is full of gnashing fury and disgust for President Trump as a supposed betrayer of conservative principles. The book is 327 pages of Rick Wilson venting about Donald Trump, as you can probably guess from the title, and how he's completely wrecked the Republican Party which Rick faithfully served for his entire adult life.
I'm not a fan of Donald J. Trump and have made that abundantly clear in my Tweets, Facebook, Blog, and casual conversation. I've even been accused of making him the basis for the supervillain President Omega in my SUPERVILLAINY SAGA comic book fantasy novels. This isn't true but it certainly makes good copy. However, I'm going to say that I think Rick Wilson's tirades in this book, however entertaining, are also kind of sad.
Rick Wilson basically spends a lot of the book explaining how the GOP sacrificed its integrity to support Trump and fell over backwards seeking his support. The problem is that if everyone around you and in your circle of conservative friends has reversed course then did they have any integrity to sacrifice? Even during the book, Rick admits the many many times the GOP criticized Obama for doing something Trump does but never quite makes the connection that the objections were never based on anything more than "their side vs. our side."
Indeed, by the time I was halfway through the book, Rick comes off as a terrible fool for the fact he seems to have been unable to separate the stated intentions of the GOP from their actual activities. Basically, for a brilliant Washington Insider, he seemed completely shocked that politicians on his side lied and were hypocrites. If you didn't have that down before you went to work in Washington D.C. then maybe you had no business being there in the first place.
Still, the book is funny and informative even if it makes a lot of assumptions. If nothing else, it gives a good collection of names and political careers of those the Trump administration lifted up before spitting out. But at the end of the day, however much I like the man I call Der Cheeto, the description in this book is the man who is head of a party of lying backstabbing hypocrites not the man who turned them into it.
6/10
I strangely enough don't mean the President of the United States when I invoke this quote, neither as the fool or the one he follows. I instead mean Rick Wilson, the author of the book which is full of gnashing fury and disgust for President Trump as a supposed betrayer of conservative principles. The book is 327 pages of Rick Wilson venting about Donald Trump, as you can probably guess from the title, and how he's completely wrecked the Republican Party which Rick faithfully served for his entire adult life.
I'm not a fan of Donald J. Trump and have made that abundantly clear in my Tweets, Facebook, Blog, and casual conversation. I've even been accused of making him the basis for the supervillain President Omega in my SUPERVILLAINY SAGA comic book fantasy novels. This isn't true but it certainly makes good copy. However, I'm going to say that I think Rick Wilson's tirades in this book, however entertaining, are also kind of sad.
Rick Wilson basically spends a lot of the book explaining how the GOP sacrificed its integrity to support Trump and fell over backwards seeking his support. The problem is that if everyone around you and in your circle of conservative friends has reversed course then did they have any integrity to sacrifice? Even during the book, Rick admits the many many times the GOP criticized Obama for doing something Trump does but never quite makes the connection that the objections were never based on anything more than "their side vs. our side."
Indeed, by the time I was halfway through the book, Rick comes off as a terrible fool for the fact he seems to have been unable to separate the stated intentions of the GOP from their actual activities. Basically, for a brilliant Washington Insider, he seemed completely shocked that politicians on his side lied and were hypocrites. If you didn't have that down before you went to work in Washington D.C. then maybe you had no business being there in the first place.
Still, the book is funny and informative even if it makes a lot of assumptions. If nothing else, it gives a good collection of names and political careers of those the Trump administration lifted up before spitting out. But at the end of the day, however much I like the man I call Der Cheeto, the description in this book is the man who is head of a party of lying backstabbing hypocrites not the man who turned them into it.
6/10
October 17, 2018
Yes, yes. I am reading many books that only confirm my own biases. This one excels at stressing the points that I believe define our president. He is a man without ideology who has surrounded himself with misfit toys, advisors who either have no credentials for offering advice or have their own agenda to conquer and see Trump as their tool to get their scheme accomplished. Rick Wilson is intelligent, witty and a Never-Trump Republican. It is refreshing to read the words of a Republican that manage to define a common good. I believe in the common good. I believe that a conservative thinker can seek the common good just as can a liberal thinker. Wilson’s book reminds us that our current political environment has deteriorated to the point that reasonable people cannot share disagreements and work for a solution that supports the common good. Trump sets a very strange tone, one void of ideology and morals, that does not help at all. Read this book to laugh; read this book to cry. Let it motivate you to never let what happened in 2016 happen again. Conservative or liberal, our country deserves good governance guided by a moral leader.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 630 reviews