OPINION:
EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES: A REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST GETS REAL ABOUT THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER
By Rick Wilson
Free Press, $27, 327 pages
Just when you think you’ve finally had it with Donald Trump, the rabid ravings of his critics make him seem calm and reasonable by comparison.
That, I hasten to add, is no small feat. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Those whom the Donald would destroy he first makes mad. The man has a gift for so getting under the skins of his foes that he drives them absolutely bonkers. So much so that they very often end up sounding and acting like clumsier, more hateful versions of their own descriptions of the man they love to hate. To adjust the lyrics of an old song, anything he can do they can do worse. Time and again, they do.
You would probably have to go back as far as Franklin Roosevelt — a much more polished demagogue but one who played at least as freely with the facts as the current occupant of the White House — to find another president who so raised the blood pressure and lowered the sanity level of his opponents.
Years after FDR was dead and buried, I have vivid childhood memories of otherwise benevolent relatives like my dear paternal grandmother raving about Roosevelt as if he had been the anti-Christ. Only in her 80s did she finally conclude that, while she still didn’t like it, the New Deal had probably been a necessary inoculation against an infinitely worse social revolution.
In that respect, and no other, political pundit and self-described “Republican Strategist” Rick Wilson reminds me a lot of my grandmother although there is no guarantee that, like her, he may calm down a bit by the time he hits 80. Time and again in the fast-moving but hastily-stitched-together pages of “Everything Trump Touches Dies” one comes across sentences that are either bad jokes or serious symptoms of PTF (Paranoid Trump Fixation). You need look no further than the book’s opening lines:
“If you’re like me, the Trump presidency has turned you into a light sleeper,” Mr. Wilson declares. “Admit it. Some nights, when the world is quiet but your mind is racing, you check Twitter to see if he’s started a nuclear war. Each morning, strung out from the fever dreams of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon performing a nude interpretive dance of Stephen Miller’s ’Triumph of the Wall,’ you wake up wondering if today’s the day he’s seen wandering naked on the White House lawn screaming at the clouds.”
“Come on,” he concludes. “You know you’ve done it.” Which, of course, most of us with less fevered imaginations — and perhaps less of an obsession with public nudity — almost certainly have not.
Even when he wants to be taken seriously and has valid points to make, Mr. Wilson is his own worst enemy. Time and again, he tries to build a serious case against Donald Trump only to knock it down with his own Trumpian cheap shots. Consider this rather grandiose passage that ends not with a bang but a simper.
“That Donald Trump isn’t a conservative and is a Republican only as a flag of convenience was just part of my objection. Quite ironically for a cold-hearted, expedient political operative, I felt Trump lacked the moral and personal character to be the leader of the free world, to make the most consequential decisions, and to hold the lives and security of millions of Americans in his hands. His tiny, tiny lemur-paw hands.”
On and on it goes. We are told — with no supporting evidence — that “The [2016] election was shaped and manipulated by Russian intelligence operations altering the American political landscape, an endgame in the long twilight struggle.” Part of it, he adds, was the fault of mainstream media, despite their overwhelmingly pro-Clinton bias.
“Hypnotized by a celebrity con man vomiting out Steve Bannon’s spittle-flecked, nationalist message to the furious and febrile, Trump received virtually unlimited media coverage. GOP primary voters killed off a field of good men and accomplished leaders one by one in favor of Trump.” Here, Mr. Wilson may be onto something, even if it isn’t a point he wants to make.
One of the keys to Donald Trump’s successful run for the nomination was the tabloid-style mega-coverage he received from liberal media giants who thought they were clearing the field of serious opponents to Hillary Clinton and setting up an easily beatable, crude clown as the Republican nominee.
The result seems to have given them, and Mr. Wilson, a collective nervous breakdown.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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