Mr. Trump's Wild Ride

August 20, 2018
Mistakes, malignancies, and some real achievements emerge from the chaos in this rollicking, perceptive history of President Trump’s first year in office. Garrett (The Enduring Revolution) observes the Trump administration from his perch as CBS News’s White House correspondent, devoting chapters to the warp-speed staff turnovers, uproars over immigration policy and NFL anthem kneelers, and diplomatic U-turns that changed Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from trash-talking enemies into buddies. Drawing on his own encounters with the president, Garrett paints a sharp portrait of Trump’s domineering personality. He also explores the president’s hidden, fitful processes of governance as they spectacularly fail, as in the collapse of health-care initiatives in Congress, and sometimes work, as in the smooth passage of the “transformative” tax cut bill. Although he allows that covering Trump left him “physically exhausted and mentally traumatized” after the firing of FBI director James Comey, Garrett’s assessment of Trump manages the difficult task of being both hard-hitting and even-handed, as well as smartly entertaining. (Trump’s deregulatory program, he writes, “has not so much drained the swamp as stocked it with pro-business piranha.”) The result is one of the best accounts yet of Trump’s impact.