Review by Doug Gibson
"The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America," By Bill O'Reilly, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2019. (Amazon link here).
This is a book that has unfortunately aged too quickly in the nine months since its release. That's not O'Reilly's fault. President Trump's life is so volatile than any book that has not captured 2020, the feeble impeachment trial Democrats launched with popguns against the President, followed by Covid-19, followed by the current rallies and riots, is out of date.
Nevertheless, using his familiar narrative style, mixed with exclusive interviews he got with President Trump, and others -- particularly Donald Trump Jr. -- O'Reilly gets inside the mind of Donald Trump to some extent.
Some insights into Trump's life:
-- Trump was both a talented athlete and "rambunctious" teen, rambunctious enough that his father placed him in a military school.
-- Trump has very few close friends. He's very reluctant to trust people. However, he's very amenable, probably more than the average pol, to work with a political rival in order to accomplish a policy. In that sense he is a pragmatic leader.
-- Trump differs from his late father, Fred, a very successful businessman also, in that the son -- besides craving success in business -- also sought fame and global recognition. Donald Trump Jr. mentions that his grandfather, Fred Trump, was content to just live quietly in Queens. Trump sought, as O'Reilly the New Yorker notes, to be bigger than Joe Namath.
-- Trump is a supportive, but not hands-on father. He's not big on compliments. He sees things pretty clearly; one is either a winner in a conflict, or a loser.
-- Donald Trump will never admit he is wrong, Donald Trump Jr. told O'Reilly. The son has learned that when his father begins to initiate small talk in a conversation with his children, it's a signal that he knows he is wrong.
-- O'Reilly writes that Trump's short-lived embrace of the discredited "birther" conspiracy against President Barack Obama was designed to lock in support of conservatives and Republicans who despised Obama.
This underscores something that has baffled many people regarding Trump. How does he embrace positions despised by elite media and political opinions, as well as the millions of "social media privates and corporals" who follow the elite, and be successful?
O'Reilly says that Trump's huge success with "The Apprentice" (I admit here I never watched an episode), provided Trump with the training he needed to run his unconventional 2016 campaign.
He understood, far more than his hapless GOP opponents, and Hillary Clinton, how alienated and frustrated many Americans were after the Wall Street corruption of 2008 crashed the economy, followed soon after by the badly botched Obamacare roll out.
In an irony perhaps only Trump is capable of pulling off, he connected with high-school educated, working- and middle-class voters, many of whom had regularly voted Democrats. He was perceptive enough to see that these voters -- so many in the Rust Belt and other swing states -- were up for grabs.
Unlike a Mitt Romney, for example, Trump understood that criticizing immigration policy was a more effective talking point with these new voters, or re-energized voters, than extolling the virtues of the Chamber of Commerce.
Clinton did not try to connect with these voters. As O'Reilly notes, she helped Trump enormously by referring to them as a "basket of deplorables."
Another important insight into Trump is that he will go with his instincts. He's done that all his life. Writes O'Reilly: "Donald Trump is not going to change. He will not modify his behavior, stop tweeting, or begin wearing jeans. He will stay the way he is until the grave."
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We live in a vicious political environment today. Social media has perfected the cancellation of individuals, and candidacies. Look how quickly Michael Bloomberg was taken out by Elizabeth Warren, who castigated him for alleged sexism. Although Bloomberg did not realize it, his campaign was kaput after 30 or so minutes of his first debate.
So, how does Trump survive in this environment? About a month before the 2016 vote he was caught on tape boasting loudly about sexually harassing women. Yet he defeated Hillary Clinton.
O'Reilly believes that Trump survived because we are jaded with all the political "scandals." He also believes people were turned off by perceived hypocrisy from disapproving pols. Hence many decided to overlook it, and gave Trump a pass.
Trump has survived too many "scandals" to count during his first term, as well as a partisan impeachment effort. Right now just about every poll says he will lose this November, just like most polls were saying four years ago. They may be right. Who knows? In the era of Trump, consistency and certainty are more rare.
I think the secret to Trump's success, and his political survival, is that he has placed the elite media, and much of establishment politics, into a bubble that constantly talks to itself, and its millions of progressive acolytes.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. have moved --- in the minds of one half of the nation --- from the usual impartiality of its news departments to becoming news reporters of "The Resistance." Media have abandoned a long-time promise, sometimes broken admittedly, of disinterest. They are against Trump; all the time. Within this bubble, a guy who lives in said bubble, like Bloomberg, can be easily crushed when he upsets the bubble. There is no fallback for a Bloomberg. Trump's base has no use for him.
But Trump thrives outside the bubble.
Back to the aforementioned elite media (I'm not talking about local media, which has its own unique issues). They will never regain the trust or respect of "the other "deplorable" half." And frankly, I don't think they care. After Trump, their economic survival will depend on feeding "news reports" to progressives, with correspondents such as Jim Acosta, and finding a never-ending supply of pedigreed Washington policy insiders to criticize conservatives; as unnamed sources, of course.
This is not my favorite Bill O'Reilly book. I prefer the informative, narrative style history books he co-writes with Martin Dugard. But he does a passable job of deciphering Trump, an often amoral man who nevertheless has proven himself a far stronger advocate for traditional social conservative values than the previous three Republican presidential candidates. Another irony; Trump's full of them.
The book underscores this truth. The 2020 election is not really between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The latter is a long-time Democratic Party man who arguably appears to be bordering on senility. Biden backed into the nomination. Donald Trump just had a rally in Tulsa as I write this. In the cautious era of Covid-19, it didn't fill the arena, but I'd wager it was watched on TV and via streaming by several million.
Joe Biden right now couldn't fill the "banquet room at the Blue-View Motel," or garner 500 streaming viewers.
This November's election is between the magnetism of Trump and the influence of the elite media and political establishment. Both are powerful. Both have a lot of sway. We'll see who wins. Another irony is that whatever the result, life will go on for all of us, pretty much the same.
