I’ve said it many times before, and it remains true today: If Donald Trump were up against anyone other than the people he’s up against, he’d be in trouble. As it is, the president’s opponents (or enemies, depending on how they classify themselves) are his greatest asset.
The professional pearl-clutching class has engaged their fainting couches too often in fits of faux outrage that their screams and protestations now fall on ears that aren’t deaf, they’re indifferent.
When Brian Ross of ABC News “reported” former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was prepared to testify Trump had ordered him to make contact with the Russians during the campaign, it was greeted as a bombshell; a smoking gun. It turned out it was AFTER the election, which is a perfectly normal part of a presidential transition and, most importantly (and embarrassingly for ABC News) would make it impossible to collude to “steal” the election unless they’d developed a time machine.
When the Wall Street Journal “reported” Special Counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Trump’s bank records from Deutsche Bank, all presses were stopped…then the “update” came, and all the air was, once again, let out of the balloon.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but most people don’t pay attention, and they rarely read the corrections.
But every once in a while, you get the opportunity to see how the sausage is made (something you never want to do in real life, by the way), and you see the “chaos,” as it is called, actually has some order to it.
Such is the case with the new book “Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story Of His Rise To The Presidency” by former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager David Bossie. They were there, from the start and through it all, on the inside.
That’s what makes “Let Trump Be Trump” more interesting than the other post-mortems already written by others and those coming soon. It’s as close as we’re likely to get to a “What Happened” from the winning side.
If you wondered how a billionaire real estate developer ended up the 45th President of the United States, there are plenty of people willing to tell you Trump won because he ran against Hillary Rodham Clinton and her 747 full of baggage. There is truth to that, she was a once-in-a-generation-awful candidate, but there’s a lot more to winning the White House than running against lying pantsuit.
“Let Trump Be Trump” is a quick read – too quick in some parts. There are parts of everything you remember, but not enough of some of them. The New Hampshire primary win, for example, was a pivotal make-or-break moment where, after a second-place finish in Iowa, was as important as any moment in the campaign. Yet this crucial comeback gets only casual mention in the book, more of an afterthought than a tide-turner, with only a couple of paragraphs about how it came to be. There should have been more on this win, especially considering its importance.
Given more ink is the Access Hollywood tape. The moment that was the death-blow of all the media-proclaimed death-blows gets its own chapter, called “The Hurricane,” and much more. It’s an interesting look inside an event almost everyone involved in the campaign thought would be the end, and how they survived it all.
Overall the book gives the reader a peek inside how Donald Trump won. It would’ve been better had it delved deeper into some of the details, but it is written by the people who were in the room at the time and not filtered through leaks and second-hand anecdotes. That sets it apart from other books on 2016.
Lewandowski and Bossie put a lot on the page but seem to leave some things on the table. But no book will ever be the definitive book on a campaign. These firsthand accounts may be as close as the general public will ever get. Amid an ever-growing list of false stories, anonymous sources, and fake news, you wouldn’t be alone if you find yourself wondering why President Trump does some of the things he does in the White House. This book will give you insights, if only a few, into how he works. After all, you can’t know why someone does what they do if you don’t know how they got there in the first place, and Corey and David, more than almost anyone else, helped Donald Trump get there.