The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the American Story

President Trump and his supporters come across as nearly cartoonish villains in this vehement screed. Likening Trump to Batman nemesis the Joker, Reid (Fracture), host of MSNBC’s AM Joy, flays the president as a corrupt liar, a monstrous xenophobe (“there was no cruelty he wouldn’t visit on the teeming masses of brown and non-Christian aliens”), a puppet of Fox News, “a potential threat to national security, acting on behalf of a foreign power,” and an “autocrat” whose “appetite for destruction and revenge was only growing” and who wants “to bond the U. S. to Russia [and] North Korea.” She dismisses Trump administration initiatives as merely efforts toward pandering to the bigotry of insecure white reactionaries. Reid takes further swipes at Trump’s voters, who “bonded around the ritualized pain inflicted on the brown, the foreign and the poor” and “enjoyed seeing them suffer”; at Trump adviser Stephen Miller (she repeats comments by an anonymous White House staffer likening Miller to members of Hitler’s SS); and at Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, “a favorite of Russian state media.” Reid’s indictment of Trump’s misdeeds, from sleazy business deals to Russia collusion allegations, is a sketchy rehash. There’s plenty of red meat for Trump haters here, but not much substantive or nuanced analysis. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, William Morris Endeavor. (June)