The Trump Book Club

Gee oh gee oh gee, how exactly does one conflate the good vibe of The Season with the nasty old Scroogey Scrooge vibe of our Pouty POTUS? The Trump Book List, offered here for all those who get that stocking stuffer gift certificate to a bookstore. It’s the Holiday Hit List for the Hyper-informed! Presented in no particular order:

Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. With a title taken from Twitler’s Threat at the UN for North Korea, Wolff got the party started with his juicy, controversial insider look of the first year of Trumpistan. Called onto a journalistic carpet for including some stuff that seemed too incredible even for Trump, there’s plenty in here that was accurate and chewable. Wolff leaned heavily on Steve Bannon, who was pretty darn chatty at the time, and this connection gave Wolff’s book some serious gravitas. It also got Steve canned. Reading it now, it all seems so long ago, that summer of ’17, topped off by the craziness of Charlottesville.

Unhinged by Omarosa. Don’t write this one off as pure tabloid fluff. It’s not. Omarosa is a smart woman, and one of the very few members of Cult 45 that has been to the white hot core of MAGA Madness, then slowly, steadily awakened, escaped and lived to tell the tale. The first half is pretty ho-hum, but the second half is a chronicle of her year as a White House staffer, and she fires up plenty of fun inside info about the Doddering Dotard. Yes, she compares the Trump of The Apprentice years to the President, and, yes, she concludes that he’s losing it. Losing it bigly.

Russian Roulette by Corn and Isikoff. A remarkable piece of journalism by two men who’ve been on this beat for years. Told in a straightforward, chronological way, they do a terrific job of laying out the story of this highly complex and mind-boggling conspiracy to install a working asset of Putin in the White House.

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger. More masterful journalism and somewhat overlooked, this is the one that digs real deep into the numerous connections between Trump and various Russian oligarchs. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated in the 90s, we here in America lazily thought, OK, fine, and good riddance. As it turned out, what that political development eventually did was unleash a plague of Slavic locusts upon an unsuspecting planet—The Plague of The Billionaire Oligarchs. And they is one nasty bunch of bad boys.