Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency

If you think some of our recent politians are bad read this and be thankful you don't live in America

Interesting to read lots of juicy bits of gossip about the final Trump campaign. However, many of them had been revealed in the pre-publication publicity, so the impact was reduced. I was still glued to the page for most of the book, but curiously I could not wade through the verbatim quotes of Trump speaking. His stream-of-consciousness verbiage is interesting - for the first minute or so, but then becomes really boring. It makes me wonder why his adoring fanbase can listen to his rambling monologues that last hours. Then at the end of the book, I realised that the author had to befriend Trump in order to get material for his book. So did the authors of the other 2 Trump books coming out now. It dawned on me that these authors have a weird symbiotic relationship with Trump. They lambast him for his terrible actions, but they are making money off it. They could have gone in harder on Trump. I'd like to have seen interviews, not just with Trump insiders, but with Trump victims, e.g. intimidated election officials and Capitol Hil police officers, to show the real harm Trump and Trumpism and why it needs to be decisively defeated.

So, we come to Michael Wolff's final book of the Trump Presidency. An utter debacle of an Administration from literally Day One to the end. Wolff's books are unapologetically gossipy and funny. A counterweight to some of the drier books about the subject (Bob Woodward for instance.). Both types of book are important however. In this tome the answer to the question "Did Trump REALLY think he won the election?" is answered. An unequivocal yes. After being abandoned by anyone with any sense in the final weeks of his Presidency he is left with a group of advisers and hangers on even more deluded than he is. In fact by the end Trump comes across as the sensible one at times, so untethered from reality are some of them. Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are particularly guilty of feeding Trump their insane conspiracy theories. The utterly misguided belief until the very end that Mike Pence may still overturn the election, is almost laugh out loud funny. And Trumps attempts to assemble a team of lawyers to fight his second impeachment IS laugh out loud funny. But what is not funny is the wholesale attempt to over ride Democracy and the Rule of Law. If Trump had a VP more pliable than Pence was in the end it is no overstatement to say American Democracy itself would have been at stake in January 2021. Wolf does brilliantly to mix the high farce and utter seriousness of those tumultuous weeks from election night, to January 6th, and beyond.

'Or, as Trump aides, as confounded as any by the Oval Office crowds, ado, and unlikely characters, often put it, the Star Wars bar scene.' p10. There are many more examples at least as bad.Try this p167 (just to prove I have read that far.) 'But curiously,the very fact that the Trump gambit was not going to succeed, that the election challenge had failed to advance and that all the checks against it had become only more formidable - and now, with the second-most-important person in the Republican partry and the most powerful Republican on the Hill standing against it - only made it easier to support.'Woolff's style is so in need of a good editor. The above sentence is typical of the book, and grates. There are insights but it could have been so much more readable. Reads as though when a sentence wasn't coming together he stuck in some punctuation, rather than revise. This book was about making money for author and publisher - not about enlightenment. Rushed to get in the market early, and it shows.

It is incredible but the lack of an Index is a mayor drawback.

How incredible that an autocratic, mentally deranged and very dangerous person could aspire to the title of the most powerful man in the World. In modern times so many have forgotten the Second World War and how it came about. Michael Wolf gives an at once entertaining and alarming intimate picture of the ending of Trump’s presidency and the birth, perhaps largely due to Rudolph Giuliani, of the stolen election myth disaster now threatening the very roots of western democracy. The very fact that the book is so compelling and entertaining illustrates the danger of the Trump phenomenon, and also all the other autocratic governments and tendencies all over the globe. The human race has hypnotised itself through television and democracy has been corrupted by social media and it is this aspect of 'entertainment’ that has us all transfixed like frightened or unconscious rabbits in the oncoming headlights of global disaster

This book is the very definition of unputdownable. Writing and production alike were rushed and it shows. Lots of technical stuff is simply taken as read and the huge list of characters can be baffling. But these are minor quibbles. Wolff provides a rollercoaster ride through the utter mayhem of November-January. He highlights the eccentricity of Trump’s worldview, the freak show of his entourage and the enigma of his seemingly invincible popularity. The ending cannot help but leave the reader gloomy about the future of US democracy, which the Trump phenomenon has shown to be deeply vulnerable.

i agree with a previous reviewer. interesting content, poorly delivered. it really needs a decent, and, indeed, it must be said, without doubt - all things taken into consideration and with the benefit of having read it, although i can imagine that others may differ - a rigorous proof reader to go over it and redraft, making the changes that the initial drafting should have made, had it been properly proofed......that exemplifies the sort of style this book is written in....irritating.

Sorprendido por lo bien escrito que está el libro y la serie de datos y perspectiva que da sobre los últimos días de Trump como presidente de los Estados Unidos de America.

It's a testament to the author that, even knowing how the story was going to end, he kept me turning the pages (well, screens) to see what was coming next.

Michael Wolff’s book “Landslide” is a tour de force revealing and detailing life inside the WH with President Trump. It appears that, because of the huge success of his prior book “Fire and Fury,” the various aides, assistants, lawyers and handlers who were around Trump were finally able, and motivated, to tell their side of the craziness and chaos which was their daily life while they managed to stay there. And it’s a scary picture, to say the least.The book describes in quotes and vivid scenes a president who was not really interested in doing the work necessary or required to steer the government. There was often no one in charge; there were meetings with no agenda or purpose, other than to listen to the president wax about whatever was on his mind, not often actual business; and the main objective, every day, was to give the president what he wanted to hear, slanted in the way he wanted it, irrespective of facts or truth. And so often, he just bashed and insulted people, often persons in his very presence, or on TV, or wherever, he just emoted insults and berating and neglected the country’s business.It is telling that not until late the night of January 6, 2021, did Trump realize that the insurrection on capitol hill that day was not such a good thing for him.Much of the book recounts Trump’s complaints about his lawyers and others who did not serve him well, or who were incompetent or did not get the results he wanted. That all major law firms would not go near him is not part of his awareness. The author even got an interview with Trump, which constitutes the last chapter in the book. Wolff gives it to us verbatim, and Trump is so enveloped in election fraud, without having any facts, figures or sense of reality—it is staggering how deeply buried he is in this proven lie, that the election was stolen.Be prepared for Wolff’s writing style, in which every sentence must necessarily have multiple commas, semi-colons, parentheses, dashes and run on sentences. But the detail, the inside views, the constant movement of scene and event, and the absurdity of “the wrong man for the job” as Woodward concluded, make this must reading, and extremely interesting reading.

The depths of Donald Trump -- devious, self-serving, emotionally fragile, delusional -- are well and truly plumbed in this book. My only complaints are that the writing is much too elliptical (convoluted) and the cast of characters is so immense.

... and they let Wolff back in. It's a roller coaster of a book because it makes your guts churn. I couldn't read it in one hit because it was so intense and bonkers.The universe dodged a bullet; this is the story of that bullet.