Lucky For Trump, Most Of His Supporters Don't Read Books

Don't pass out, but Trump was lying in the 30 second clip above. He didn't get 46% of Hispanic voters; he got 28%. And he didn't win among the highly educated. Only 36% of college graduates voted for him. However, he was telling the truth about the poorly educated. A full third of his vote came from people whose education went no further than high school-- or less. And non-college whites made up the bulk of his supporters-- 63%. These are not people who read-- let alone comprehend-- books... just like Trump himself. So I guess they won't be reading John Bolton's (tell all?) book, which is nearly finished and will be out long before 2020 voting begins. Will Bolton testify at the Trump impeachment trial in the Senate before that? That's probably going to be up to Moscow Mitch, so my guess is no. Will he testify before the House Intel Committee. Schiff seems to be leaning towards subpoenaing him now-- although he's been going back and forth on this. Unless the Senate does, Schiff should. I don't think waiting for his book to come out is what anyone wants or needs.

Meanwhile, Ashley Parker did an advance review for the Washington Post yesterday of her colleagues, Philip Rucker's and Carol Leonnig's hot new book, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing Of America. Parker makes it clear that the book portrays Trump as erratic and "at times dangerously uninformed." Is that news to anyone? The book comes out January 21. "President Trump," wrote Parker, "reveals himself as woefully uninformed about the basics of geography, incorrectly telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 'It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.' He toys with awarding himself the Medal of Freedom... Trump does not seem to grasp the fundamental history surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor. 'Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?' Trump asks his then-chief of staff John Kelly, as the men prepare to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which commemorates the December 1941 Japanese surprise attack in the Pacific that pulled the United States into World War II." They tell the story, which has been out there already of how, when The Mooch asked Trumpanzee, "Are you an act?" the illegitimate "president" responded, "I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it."

The NY Times review suggests the title is "savvy marketing. It’s possible to imagine both Donald J. Trump’s detractors and his admirers eagerly grasping a copy. The admirers will not make it past the table of contents. Among the chapter titles: 'Unhinged,' 'Shocking the Conscience,' 'Paranoia and Pandemonium' and 'Scare-a-Thon.' This verbiage makes Rucker and Leonnig’s book sound like one more enraged polemic. It isn’t. They’re meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date. It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It’s as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass."

From the Penguin-Random House preview that they're using to promote pre-sales of the book:

"I alone can fix it." So went Donald J. Trump’s march to the presidency on July 21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet over the subsequent years, as he has undertaken the actual work of the commander in chief, it has been hard to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal, investigation, and constant bluster. It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for one of pure and uninhibited chaos, but there were patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the Trump administration is loyalty-- not to the country, but to the president himself-- and Trump’s North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy.

Leonnig and Rucker, with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., tell of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. Relying on scores of exclusive new interviews with some of the most senior members of the Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses, the authors reveal the forty-fifth president up close, taking readers inside Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as well as the president’s own haphazard but ultimately successful legal defense. Here for the first time certain officials who have felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president or to divulge what they witnessed in a position of trust tell the truth for the benefit of history.

This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement-- but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.