If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). “He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisors with a cast of enablers who…saw their mission as telling the president yes.” Readers as dismayed as the authors should read one or two anti-Trump diatribes-as one of the best, this one will do nicely-and then swear off the genre and get to work.Ī significant, deeply reported portrait of the madness that continues to grip the White House. Eventually, they adapted. “Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained,” write the authors in a highly depressing, meticulously documented chronicle. He hated to be contradicted and publicly reviled those who irritated him, from personal assistants to elderly statesmen and generals, and he fired advisers with abandon. Aides quickly recognized that listening to others at conferences bored him, and he refused to read briefing materials. Trump knows little history or geography and has no interest in learning. He admires dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and expresses contempt for democratically elected European leaders. When officials explain that an order-e.g., to “shut down” the border to keep out immigrants -would force them to break the law, his response was that he would pardon them. As president, the authors amply demonstrate, he still feels his word is law. Trump made the rules, and those who didn’t measure up were berated, humiliated, and dismissed no one questioned his authority.
Marching through these pages is the same loose cannon who delighted audiences on The Apprentice. However, “unflattering” does not describe this portrait of Trump “horrific” would be a better fit. Sadly, it’s entirely familiar. Bush, and Barack Obama were happy to reveal unflattering details. Two Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalists deliver an almost day-to-day chronicle of the first three years of the Donald Trump presidency, and it’s a wild ride.ĭisparaging accounts of presidents remain a publishing staple, and many close to Bill Clinton, George W.