Hugh Hewitt is a host with the Salem Radio Network, an MSNBC host and NBC News analyst, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a law professor at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.
We are going to have to wait a long time for anyone to approach Donald Trump with, say, the detachment and scholarship that Robert Caro has brought to his study of Lyndon Johnson. Caro published his first volume, “The Path to Power,” in 1982, nearly a decade after LBJ died, and about 35 years later the biographer is still at work, on a fifth volume. So it will be with Trump — as it is with all men and women who change history. We will have to wait until we get the end of the story and have access to all the primary sources. We also will need a biographer with the talent and dedication to find the “figure under the carpet,” as Leon Edel described the biographer’s task. The many Trump books along the way should be regarded more or less as source material. They should be graded on how useful they will be to the ultimate project, and of course on the trustworthiness of their contents.
[Ronald Kessler’s “The Secrets of the FBI”]
Ronald Kessler’s new book, “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game,” is trustworthy, and, in an unusual twist these days, it’s favorable to the president. “Because of the liberal bias of the mainstream media,” Kessler writes in a poker tell as obvious as any ever seen, “many of Trump’s achievements are either underplayed or not reported at all.” Kessler doesn’t underplay them, and overstates some, but gets almost everything down — good and bad — of Season One of the Trump presidency. Among Trump’s triumphs, Kessler points to the two most significant: the seating of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, and the massive tax cut and tax reform bill. Kessler also got Trump to sit down for an interview on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, a conversation that shows the president confident and comfortable in his role.
I checked with one of Kessler’s sources, who is quoted quite liberally, and discovered that indeed the source spent time with the author. The source hadn’t read the book yet but the voice he projects in the pages sounds right to me. Thus, Kessler’s note-taking or tape-recording seems reliable, which is an odd but increasingly necessary assessment to include in a book review, but we are in an era when facts and sources are sometimes elusive. Kessler’s book seems to me professional and ethical, a workmanlike, useful contribution to the accumulating pile of source material on this presidency (beginning of course with the tweets. All of them. Pity Trump’s Caro).
“The Trump White House,” by Ronald Kessler (Crown Forum)
Kessler, a former reporter for The Washington Post and a former chief Washington correspondent for the conservative news site Newsmax, has published 21 books. For this one, he interviewed the major players in the 2016-17 season: Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and others. “The Trump White House” deserves a careful reading as a chronicle of what went on inside Trump World in 2017.