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Jessica

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Jessica’s profound-effect shelf

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash

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Jessica is Currently Reading

Jessica is currently reading

The Boleyn Secret

by Alison Weir

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Feb 25, 2026 07:38PM

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The Red Winter

by Cameron Sullivan

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"I’ll be honest, I’m not totally sure what’s going on here." — Mar 01, 2026 06:54PM

Feb 23, 2026 06:17PM

Jessica is currently reading

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House

by Jonathan Allen

bookshelves: american-history, audiobooks, election-mania, favorites, non-fiction, reviews, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in April 2025

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Jessica said: " The 2024 Presidential Election is over, and the campaign memoir cycle has begun. The third and (probably) final book in Jonathan Allen's and Amie Parnes' Trump Trilogy, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House is the most brisk and least The 2024 Presidential Election is over, and the campaign memoir cycle has begun. The third and (probably) final book in Jonathan Allen's and Amie Parnes' Trump Trilogy, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House is the most brisk and least bloated of the pair's books so far. Both Lucky and Shattered (and HRC, their reporting on Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State) are informative and well-written, but also padded out with long, winding passages about the finer details of campaign strategizing and unnecessarily long (and somewhat unbelievable) internal monologues. Starting as late in the process as they did, with the disastrous June 2024 debate rather than the primary campaign season as usual, much of that bloat has been cut, mostly for the better. (I say mostly because--well, we'll get to that in a moment.)

A lot has changed since Lucky. Joe Biden is no longer the folksy underdog hero of the Resistance but a narcissistic villain who caused all this mess in the first place. Kamala Harris isn't a cynical opportunist and untalented politician that Biden was peer-pressured into picking for VP, but a good-hearted, hard-working woman who would have shined brighter than everyone if only that dastardly Biden hadn't taken advantage of her good nature. The progressives are nowhere to be found. If Bernie, AOC, or Elizabeth Warren were mentioned at any point, I didn't notice. Allen and Parnes are over the progressive movement, and I'm willing to bet most people reading this are too.

But no one out of this cast of characters is more starkly different from their past portrayal than Donald Trump. Lucky went all-in on Trump being the living embodiment of Satan, waxing poetic about his racism and sexism and xenophobia, a symbol of the moral decay at the heart of America. Now, Trump is just another mainstream Republican, only with better showmanship and a surprising resilience against adversity. Little time is spent on his lawsuits or mean tweets, or even the infamous January 6th capitol riot. Instead, more focus is given to Trump's new and improved team, headlined by the hyper-competent Susie Wiles and her odd-couple work husband, Chris LaCivita. The pair manage the incredible feat of keeping Trump in line while fending off attempts at sabotage from the likes of Corey Lewandowski. Even JD Vance is treated with surprisingly little disdain. But the biggest reason why Team Trump was able to make a comeback was because of the man in charge: Trump himself had changed since 2020, and we see a much less impetuous and more strategic version of the returning president here.

Speaking of former presidents, Obama is much the same as last time here: cool, aloof, and losing influence. He, along with Nancy Pelosi, correctly predicted Kamala's loss, but is nevertheless shown as the guy willing to hide behind George Clooney rather than get his own hands dirty. Lucky ended by musing that a morose Obama must have been crushed to see the strength of Trump's turnout, knowing that his dream of hope and change was disproven by all of Trump's -isms. Allen and Parnes are less sentimental this time around: wild though 2024 may have been, this election is not painted in the same apocalyptic terms, and Trump's gains with both minority and Gen Z voters (a much more noteworthy development than what the authors acknowledge, if we're being honest) has driven a hole through the white supremacy argument that dominated the 2020 election news cycle.

Fight is undoubtedly gripping, but there's surprisingly little new information here for anyone who wasn't already following the news cycle. (It turns out Lindy Li was telling the truth in all those interviews, with nearly everything she said confirmed by this book.) What's more telling are the things Allen and Parnes chose to leave out or downplay. Nancy Pelosi's role in pushing out Biden is minimized, with no mention of her personally pressuring or threatening him to withdraw from the race (something which is allegedly confirmed to have happened by the authors of other election books coming out soon). The writers paint Harris' loss as the result of Biden insisting that there be "no daylight" between the two of them, ignoring how Harris had almost no policy proposals, gave remarkably few interviews and, when she did finally agree to sit down with an interviewer or two, could hardly spit out a sentence. No mention is made of Doug Emhoff's many personal scandals, including domestic violence accusations from an ex-girlfriend. And despite their attempts at fairness, Allen and Parnes still fall back on a number of liberal sanctimonies: admitting that Harris was only chosen as VP because of her race and gender but then acting outraged when she was dubbed a "DEI candidate," clutching their pearls over a C-list comedian's dumb joke about Puerto Rico, and ignoring the unmistakable sound of laughter from the crowd at Trump's jokes during a black journalists' convention. This is the type of eye-rolling bias that turns off half the audience, and is part of the culture that ultimately led to voters catapulting Trump back into the White House.

But the biggest cognitive dissonance is over none other than President Biden. Allen and Parnes devote the first several chapters to covering Biden's cognitive decline, not sugar-coating any of it, yet never seem to fully make the connection to what this really means. Biden's decision to run again, and his stubborn refusal to get off the ticket until the last possible moment are portrayed as the malice of a narcissist. But if this man was not cognitively sound enough to remember when his beloved son died, or needed tape on the floor indicating the path he needed to walk, or forgot that the lawmaker whose memorial he was attending was dead, then can he really be held responsible for this decision? And if he can't, then who should? The writers dance around the role that Biden's family and closest advisors, all in love with their new lives in the White House and unwilling to give it up, played in both running the country and trying to cover up Biden's condition. They were the ones insisting that he run again, to the point where they let Biden go out on stage during the June debate and humiliate himself before the rest of the world. If Biden was truly this far gone--and Allen and Parnes clearly believe he was--then this was an act of elder abuse on an unprecedented scale, and to blame Trump's victory on Biden is to blame the victim. This is the real scandal that journalists are failing to face. The president was compromised, the press covered it up (I don't recall Allen and Parnes having much to say about it prior to the debate either, for that matter), and the people closest to him cruelly manipulated him for their own fame and fortune. ...more "

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— Feb 25, 2026 07:37PM

Aug 28, 2025 10:24PM · see review

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Jessica’s Quotes

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

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“But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

tags: hurt, salvation

1360 likes

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: attributed-no-source, human-nature, humor, infinity, philosophy, science, stupidity, universe

148533 likes

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

tags: life

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“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

tags: darkness, drive-out, hate, inspirational, light, love, peace

78439 likes

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