Content area
Full Text
The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution Roger Stone Skyhorse Publishing, 2017
This book is about arguably the roughest but most consequential presidential election in American history. Its readers might well visualize a prize fight in which the author, Roger Stone, is the second sitting in a corner of the ring ministering to a heavyweight slugger who incongruously mixes brute strength with finesse and comes back to the corner after each round bloodied but eager to press on. The fight is indeed an epic battle, pitting a man of indomitable energy against a hydra-headed opponent representing several Establishments capable of showering him with blows in a slugfest that continues long after the bout is officially over. (In this analogy, Hillary Clinton is "hydra-headed" when seen in combination with the vast and varied forces Donald Trump challenged.)
Even though Stone's champion won the first bout by winning the 2016 presidential election, the conflict will continue without interruption, seemingly as a matter of politics and personalities, but fundamentally because so much is at stake. What Donald Trump has set out to do is nothing less than change the direction of a civilization. His giant themes - stopping the uncontrolled immigration, rebuilding an economy that had been hollowed out of its jobs and industry, desisting from interventions that try to make an intractable world over into America's image, speaking up against the thousand taboos of "politically correct" ideological conformity, and bringing attention to how little credence the mainstream press deserves - called up a well-spring of support from millions of Americans who have long remained quiet as a "silent majority," but also threw down the gauntlet to forces of incalculable strength.
[One hundred days of Trump's presidency have now passed since this review was written, and some of his strongest supporters have become disturbed over his apparent deviation from the positions he took during the campaign on the giant themes referred to above, especially in the areas of a non-interventionist foreign policy and the question of mass illegal immigration. The situation can change rapidly, but for a time Trump's supporters are in something of "suspended animation" as they wait to see whether the deviations are more apparent than real - and whether, in...