A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

With so many books out about Trump and more to come, he will soon be competing with Hitler, Napoleon, Jesus, and Alexander the Great for the most number of publications in print to appear about a single individual. I will leave it up to others to decide which one he should most likely be compared to. Until now I felt that the two books written by Michael Wolff were the best overall presentation of Donald J. Trump and his administration whose presidency has already altered the fabric of that office forever - or at least until everyone on the face of this planet today has passed away along with an additional three generations to follow. (Assuming we still have one given the denial of Climate Change and Science that currently emanates from the WH.) Having already read far more than I ever expected to regarding The Donald as well as Javanka, I still decided to purchase this book based upon its authorship. Rucker and Leonnig have made multiple appearances on MSNBC and have never disappointed. With the publication of A VERY STABLE GENIUS they have only added to their collective and individual reputations. Given the length of this book - well over 400 pages - and a recent promise by its authors that there will probably be more "Epilogues" to come it is a most difficult task to pick and choose what sectors of this book to talk about or emphasize. Even with its lavish depth, Trump's "reptilian" ability (in the words of one critic) to protect himself and hide key information one way or another makes it almost impossible to fully penetrate the veil of secrecy that surrounds him despite the best efforts of the aforementioned two authors. Tax information has still been withheld; exact specificity of monetary loan sources remains obscure; what was said in private meetings with Putin is still unknown; the Mueller Report was so tarnished prior to its official release by Trump's latest henchman - William Barr - that its focus still expounds the falsehood that he "was totally exonerated"; etc., etc. In an attempt not to duplicate what others have already stated, I shall present my own summary analysis of Trump and his Presidency based upon what I read in AVSG in addition to my own observations of these past three+ years. At the outset I will say that it is not a pleasant task. Diving into a full latrine is a fair comparison. Indeed. While reading AVSG, there were times when I laughed, cried, cursed, and just plain wanted to scream. Its authors have exposed what is already known, thought to be known, unknown, and unknowing. However, they have brought a clarity and depth to their expose which is astounding. Just consider the sheer number of interviews! This book is a "hot potato". Hopefully, it should give one pause and make one think before "flying off the handle". The rhetoric and language used during commentator debating says it all. Now for some particulars: The title of this book is a direct quote from the mouth of its subject - Donald J. Trump. Yet anyone who has to call himself that, and more than once, is the exact opposite. Trump is neither "stable" nor a "genius", unless you put the word "evil" before the latter. His constant temper tantrums, quixotic decisions, perpetual paranoia, and willful lying put the "lie" to that first word. According to those in the know, Trump was a poor student. He has demanded that his college transcript be kept secret or he'll sue (something he constantly threatens which also is indicative of instability). Trump gives the impression that, because he went to the Wharton School of Business, he holds some kind of business degree. He doesn't! Trump possesses a degree in economics and anthropology (of all things) which he probably took to fulfill his science requirement. He is fundamentally uninformed and impaired when it comes to basic history, geography, and culture. This is clearly delineated in this book. The subject of nepotism is delved into. The crudity that exists in the WH with the "F" word being the most frequently used is highlighted. No surprise there given what Trump says on his various campaigns. LOYALTY above all else is always being considered, questioned, tested, and criticized. There is even an entire chapter titled "Loyalty and Truth" which deals with the likes of M. Cohen, W. Barr, M. Mulvaney, R. Mueller, et al. Like the others, this may sound familiar but with more detail. The chapter titled "Axis of Enablers" is especially enticing. It clearly shows how Trump can be manipulated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. I cannot remember what office they were elected to. Mitch McConnell is another story. He has run defense for Trump as if he were an entire football team protecting a quarterback. He and Barr are the perfect present day Cardinal Richelieu for Trump's Louis XIII. Twenty-five chapters, an Epilogue, and 16 detailed pages in small print constitute the End Notes which are highly informative in their own right. All in all, for now, this book in my opinion is the crowning achievement for the literary tsunami that continues to flood the publishing market involving the 45th President of the United States.

The three years since Donald Trump took office have been difficult, to say the least. The US has never had a President so ill-suited for public office, so devoid of talent, and so narcissistic as Donald Trump, and observing his guilty progress and the accompanying damage to the nation and the world has been painful for concerned patriots. The immediate reaction for most decent-minded folk is to turn away and shield our eyes from the ghastliness, but that only abets Trump and his minions, here and abroad, in their ongoing work of destruction. Fortunately we have some able chroniclers, and among the best are the authors of A Very Stable Genius, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, respectively the White House bureau chief and a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, both Pulitzer Prize winners and both determined to ferret out in detail the truly miserable events of the last three years. A Very Stable Genius is meticulously detailed and documented, relying on interviews from dozens of officials and other eye witnesses. It is not a polemic, it is a rigorous work of history which will be an invaluable reference in the future. It is chronological in scope, beginning the day after the 2016 election and continuing to the impeachment inquiry that began in the fall of 2019. I suspect most readers of A Very Stable Genius, like me, are already familiar with the basic details of Trump's reign of errors, but Rucker and Leonnig have done an outstanding job of digging out the odd details and giving new life to old accounts. Their account of the notorious Pentagon meeting between Trump and military leaders attempting to educate him on world realities in July 2017 has been given a lot of publicity, but let me assure you that no second hand reporting does justice to what really happened that dark day in "the Tank." I was already well aware of Trump's basic ignorance, but I was shocked to read Rucker and Leonnig's tales of his lack of understanding of the US Constitution, of his complaining of how unfair it was that US companies were not allowed to pay bribes, and of his cluelessness on a visit to Pearl Harbor. I gained new respect for some of the honorable men and women who did their best to serve Trump, like James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, until they were rudely dismissed in favor of more pliant and less able replacements. In the early days of 2020 America is well into yet another election season. While it is a truism that "the stakes have never been higher," there's no other way to describe how important the next weeks and months will be in our history. Rucker and Leonnig's account underlines that importance, and all concerned Americans should read it and keep it close at hand.

Good book. This is the second I've read from these authors. Full of interesting stories and facts about the very damaged DJT. Easy to read and is well researched.

I've been saturating myself in Crazy Trump books and MSNBC commentary to combat what I overhear on my husband's Fox News as I cook dinner. I hear it all, keep my own counsel and hide my subversive books in my Kindle to keep my 49-year-old marriage as healthy as it can be with our polarized political viewpoints. This book helped me put everything back into a sequence. Like many of us, I fly from crisis to crisis, soaking up the days news and assessing the opinions of the talking heads, and making the best sense of these days of turmoil, lies and corruption. I keep trying to comprehend how the elegantly simple plan of government I mastered in 5th grade in Mrs. Hill's class never was taught to that vacuous blond boy in his exclusive, expensive schools. And then I figured it out. We know he doesn't read. From this book and others, I know now that he doesn't listen. To anyone. For anyone who hasn't been actively keeping up, someone who listens with one ear to the news and with the other to someone who wears a red cap, read this book before the election, please. This is what really has been going on. One unbelievably crass or stupid or illegal thing after another. It's all building up and if this horrible piling up of political sins doesn't stop soon, the roof of our government will crash down on us. Read this. Get your facts straight. After all the falsehoods, obfuscations, evasions, lies and damned lies we have been exposed to for the last three years, get the straight truth from two excellent journalists who know they could be saving the world by carefully laying out one truth after another. Read it all and take a stand. Blondie probably can't stand up to this kind of scrutiny if you are paying attention. KL

I see no reason to not give this book five stars. If "A Very Stable Genius" had shortcomings, I didn't stop long enough to focus on them. I was pulled into an unlikely horror story about a New York City mob boss who found himself sitting behind the desk at the most important job in the land for which, by the way, he was woefully unqualified. This book is fiction, right? Wait! What? It is not fiction. This is Reality TV and the story is being told in real time, as it happens. The Trump Reality Show is in Season Four, Episode two, ten to go, and if this show gets renewed in November, Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig will have to write a sequel to this book. "A Very Stable Genius" was the latest in a series of books I've read about Donald J. Trump. Rucker and Leonnig are two trustworthy and well-respected journalists who spent years researching for this book, and they have written an excellent narrative telling the real life story of the New York City real estate developer who, against all odds, became the leader of the free world. Unlike "A Warning" by Anonymous, who also tells a similar story, Mr. Rucker and Ms. Leonnig have the courage to come forward without hiding their identity to show us the truth, if we are willing to accept it. From reading so many books about Trump, I knew much of what was in "A Very Stable Genius" but not to the detail that Rucker and Leonning included. There were two events that I did not know: 1) Top advisers who where concerned about how much No. 45 didn't know about world affairs staged an intervention by giving him a PowerPoint presentation at the Pentagon with military generals present. The results were disastrous with Trump having a temper tantrum and calling the military leaders "a bunch of dopes and babies." 2) A trip to Hawaii revealed how little our 45th president knew about Pearl Harbor and that day of infamy, December 7, 1941. He may be a stable genius--his words--but he is ignorant about many things a sixth grader should know. If you give any thought to the above two examples--just two of hundreds if not thousands--it's not difficult to see how this book could qualify for the "horror" section in the Library. It makes sense to me that most of their sources for the story want to remain anonymous. Have you seen what the boss does to those who speak the truth while revealing their identifies? Does Lt. Col. Vindman sound familiar? He was just one person who stood tall to witness truth to power and he was vilified by the mob. I highly recommend this book if you want to know the real Donald J. Trump and the uncomfortable truth that is left in his wake.

I read the Washington Post, New York Times, and many other publications (including many conservative publications) daily. Much of what is contained in the book was not news to me but the authors were really able to flesh out the stories. It is obvious that even though many of their sources did not want to be identified, they were able to give many first-hand accounts of conversations with each other and with the president. Unlike the book by Anonymous a month or so ago, which pretty much recounted only stories that had already been reported in the news, I thought Rucker and Leonnig did a very good job of getting deeper into the goings on around and in this White House. Definitely worth the read but very disturbing. It's obvious that as Trump breaks down each guardrail and the Republican party fails to stand up for Constitutional governance, we are in deep trouble. Trump is the epitome of "give him an inch and he'll take a mile" and no one in his party is brave enough to call him out for his abuses of power. We are entering a week when we are expecting debate in the Senate about abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the Iowa caucases, the State of the Union address to Congress, and the the foregone conclusion of acquittal because Republicans have 53 votes and don't care about the indisputable facts. We are in trouble as a Constitutional republic and a nation, folks, and our democracy is at risk. Everyone needs to be on their guard Our country is worth more than Trump! Our only chance is to take him down in November.

So, I am about halfway through "A Very Stable Genius." This is first-class super-knowledgeable political reporting and political history. (I say that as a published historian) Of all the books that have come out since "Fury" a year ago, this is going to be the book serious political historians look at as "first hand history" 50 years from now (assuming the democratic constitutional republic was saved and the fascist theocracy wasn't able to burn university libraries in the late 2020s - I'm not kidding about that, go back and look at photos of Germany in the 1930s). People complain that it's "not sourced," but it is - if you know how to do "forensic historical reading." If it's a statement with quotes around it and there's a name mentioned within the paragraph, that's the source. If there are no quotes, but there are several names mentioned as having been present, one of them is the source. If you've been paying attention to personnel changes in TrumpWorld, you can get a pretty good idea of who - who's no longer in TrumpWorld? I would rank this book as a combination of "All The President's Men" and "The Final Days." If I was able to vote on the Pulitzer for "long-term political reporting" this would be the one I would vote for. I bought and read "Fury" and "Fear" and this is the book you want. They take all the crapola that has driven you nuts daily and put it into chronological order so it makes sense, and the cumulative effect... Well, I've only been reading it a chapter at a time, with "decompression" in between. It's amazing to read the whole history of the past three years, organized like a real history book. It's all sooooo much worse than we all think it is.

I just finished reading the new book, A Very Stable Genius which is another book about Trump that proves he is obviously not what the title says. (The 400-page text not the cartoon book of the same name.) It’s a well written book and had I not already read almost all the information presented in other books, like Anonymous, I would have found it interesting. As it was, I often found myself nodding off over very detailed accounts of Trumps tantrums and misconduct. One thing that came through more clearly in this book perhaps, is how absolutely terrible Trump is to the people who work for him. He calls people in the middle of the night to scream at them, belittles them and makes comments about their looks in front of others, talks badly and makes fun of whoever isn’t in the room. He doesn’t have the guts to fire people face to face, he either does it by tweet or has someone else do it. He listens to gossip and disciplines people by screaming at them in front of others without giving them a chance to defend themselves. If someone does something that gets positive attention from the press, he isn’t happy, he is jealous and starts belittling that person. His treatment of Homeland Security head, Kirstjen Nielsen, was horrific. He constantly talked about her looks and height and made fun of her, even in serious meetings. He screamed and cussed at her in front of others and even whipped his supporters up to a frenzy about her not being tough enough on the border and when he fired her, he withdrew the security protection she had because of death threats from Trump supporters. Trump loved humiliating people that worked for him once he decided to get rid of them or they decided to leave. Several cabinet members actually resigned, Trump would tell them to wait a few days and help transition someone else into the position, then as soon as they left, he’d tweet out that he fired them, so it would look like he called the shots. He has had more turnover of cabinet members and other top personnel than any other president and it’s no wonder. I don’t know how anyone can keep working in such a hostile, chaotic environment. From a publicized excerpt I guess I was expecting more about Trumps actual ignorance of things like the constitution, the law, history, geography, foreign relations, human relations and just about every other topic. We have all heard things like Trump not knowing he was the president of Puerto Rico, that India does share a border with China, and Utah doesn’t share a border with Mexico. I was hoping for a roundup of stupid things Trump has said and done. People really need to have it brought to their attention just how ignorant Trump is. I guess I’ll have to write that book. The other thing that all these books about Trump have in common and which makes me incredibly upset, is all the people who are willing to whisper to authors about Trumps mental instability and the chaos and his unfitness for office, but that these people are not willing to be patriots and actually come forward to Congress and tell what they know under oath. That is truly disgusting. Put your country before your party or your private interests. So, if you haven’t read one of these books about Trumps incompetence and the horrifying chaos in the White House this book would be a good one to read. It is meticulously backed up with references and footnotes, about a quarter of the book is devoted to that. It is well written and edited. But if you have read other Trump expose' books you can skip this one.

It’s impossible to know how much of this book contains a solid factual basis, but even if only 5% is true, the presidency of Donald Trump is a grotesque aberration in the politics of the USA. As a read, it is compelling and hard to put down. It is a mesmerising litany of the ghastliness of one human being unfettered by conventional restraints on behaviour.

Well-written, detailed read that has provided a fill-in on the goings on of the current administration. The further I read, the more saddened I became. The US will no longer be a country of high values that is respected worldwide. Truth, ethics and morality no longer matter and are outrightly mocked. The rejection of clear evidence in the current impeachment trial leaves one to wonder how easily it is for former respected officials to follow the leadership of a narcissistic sociopath who has shown that he is solely self-serving. Does no one have the courage to uphold truth, honour and dignity?

To to form shows Trunk as a someone who has no idea about the day lower & middle class family. He has no moral compass and went into the Presidency like he could do anything and have no consequences for his behaviour. He was told years ago by a lawyer to deny, deny and deny, even if they put the evidence under his nose, keep denying and he has done this so many times.

An amazing report.

Edifiant, consternant, inimaginable. A rire ou à pleurer, selon votre goût pour le second degré. La lecture permet de toucher du doigt les limites de la démocratie...