Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on.
I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in which I did most of it having been essentially shut down by technical problems(?) in early 2017. Out of sight, out of mind.
There’s also the matter of my 24-48 Rule regarding Trump himself. It was hilarious but odd to me during the campaign and afterwards that so many smart observers raced to react instantly to whatever Trump did or said and then explain to us with great confidence what it all meant. They were always wrong. The ground is now littered with the careers of those who were smarter than Trump, better persons than Trump, and insider shrewd in every area where he was a bumbling loudmouth newcomer. I learned quickly not to offer explanations right away but give even the most provocative Trump events a full day (24 hrs) or two (48 hrs)) to marinate and start exhibiting their unfailingly Machiavellian consequences. Contrary to Facebook conventions, I know, but patience has served well there since the inauguration in particular.
Some things, like the big picture of Trump and what he was doing with the arc of his political life, required more than 24-48 hours of course. So I gave them 24 months from when he started running in earnest. Now I’ve concluded that the blog diaries represent a revealing slice of what the hell was going on in 2016 and 2017. They’re very different from all those other books, which are full of a lot of writing and quotes and bullet points and blaring headlines. Maybe right about a lot of things but very much after the fact. In Rē Trump is an account from when it was all actually going down.
My book is full of pictures and rock videos (not all Stones, either) and prizefights and partially dressed women and jokes at everyone’s expense, including my own AND Trump’s. There’s actual writing too, as well as reference to things you might not expect, like the antikythera device, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, bad words, the nature of reality, Ted Knight’s greatest role, the Inland Taipan, the Brutalist School of modern architecture, and a big chunk of horselaugh observations about the politics of Y2000.
Availability and price? Right now and for free. There’s no way to get this into print or even to Kindle with so much electronic content. It is absolutely an Internet book and an Internet experience. So I give it away with no regrets in hopes some of you might enjoy it. Here’s how you access it.
Personally , I would not begin with Part 6 but Part 1. Consider it an impressionistic prelude to what would come. A contextual explanation of what Trump tied into that created a new breed of voter. We have always been a people who have a romance of themselves, no matter what slings and arrows are hurled at us. Movies, music, heroic stories, ideas of freedom, have always been intrinsic to that sense of romance. We have always understood, regardless of what the elites say, that violence in the movies and music have always been figurative, symbolic, cathartic, and necessary. What did Trump connect to? A concatenation of government-imposed force and sufferings. He became in his gold-tinted life an apotheosis of what one man could do if he wasn’t Harvard and Harvard Law but a free spirit turned loose.
[It worked. All these years later, he turned out to be an astonishingly successful President. The romantic sense was not wrong. Doomed maybe to constant persecution, but he turned out to be as brave as his supporters had hoped.]
IN RĒ TRUMP
Part 6 — The Trump Term in Office
From Instapunk Rules:
Part 5 (Jan 27, 2016 <– > Feb 16, 2015)
Part 4 (May 6, 2016 <– > Jan 27, 2016)
Part 3 (Nov 12, 2016 <– > May 13, 2016)
Part 2 (Mar 17, 2016 <– > Dec 31, 2016)
Part 1 (Dec 13, 2016 <– > Mar 24, 2016)
REMEMBER TO USE THE “SMALL BACK BUTTON” TO TOGGLE BETWEEN THE BLOG ENTRY AND THE LINKED POSTS.
I’ll be adding this to my other Internet book offerings at my writing website Laird Ink very shortly. Plenty there to look at besides this.