Readers may already be familiar with much of the ground covered in I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s riveting 578-page exposé of what The Washington Post reporters contextualize in the book’s subtitle as Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. Bookended by Trump’s twin impeachments, Leonnig and Rucker take readers inside of the Trump regime to reveal what was going on behind the scenes during the pandemic, Black Lives Matter uprisings, the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection.
Leonnig and Rucker not only add behind-the-curtain details to previously reported public incidents, but they incisively expose the faction fight playing out in private between high level military officers and Trumpsters.
Like Rage, the 2020 book by fellow Washington Post scribe Bob Woodward, I Alone Can Fix It is an exemplar of the notion that “journalism is the first rough draft of history,” a quote attributed to the Post’s late publisher, Phil Graham. Like Leonnig and Rucker’s first collaboration, 2020’s A Very Stable Genius, their second book’s title also cheekily pokes fun at Trump, ironically using a quote from his 2016 Republican National Convention acceptance speech to lampoon the egomaniacal yet wildly incompetent former President.
Leonnig, the Post’s national investigative reporter, and Rucker, the paper’s senior Washington correspondent, constructed their detailed, daily account from “hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 140 sources, including the senior-most Trump Administration officials, career government officials, friends,” and with the ex-President himself at Mar-a-Lago. Throughout, sources including Nancy Pelosi question the former President’s soundness of mind.
With their wide-ranging access, Leonnig and Rucker take us behind closed doors, revealing—for instance, the reaction of the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator to Trump’s suggestion about injecting bleach on April 23, 2020.
“After the news conference ended, [Dr. Deborah] Birx unloaded on Trump’s aides,” according to I Alone Can Fix It. “She was screaming, crazed.”
The book also details Trump’s use of force against protesters on June 1, 2020, when “a half hour before [Washington’s] 7 p.m. curfew, federal police in riot gear fired gas canisters, flash-bang shells, and exploding munitions that released rubber pellets to force largely peaceful demonstrators out of [Lafayette Square, across from the White House]. They struck protesters with batons and slammed into them with their shields. They sought to rush them by riding at them on horseback.”
Marvin Joseph
Carol Leonnig
The next day, in The Atlantic, ex-Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen denounced Trump’s “disdain for the rights of peaceful protest” that also “risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces” at Lafayette Square. On June 3, Marine Corps General Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, fired a broadside against the president he’d served in the same magazine’s pages.
That day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper also repudiated the Lafayette Square spectacle at a Pentagon press conference, insisting on Defense Department fealty to the Constitution. Later that morning, Esper attended an Oval Office meeting with Trump when “The nuclear bomb exploded. ‘You betrayed me!’ Trump screamed . . . . ‘You’re fucking weak! What is this shit? I make the decisions on the Insurrection Act. I’m the President, not you . . . and you’re not the fucking President!’ Trump continued his open-mouthed roar. ‘You took away my authority!’ ”
Despite witnessing Trump’s dressing down of Esper, in a June 10 National Defense University commencement address, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley delivered a public mea culpa for “creat[ing] the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Days later, according to I Alone Can Fix It, a “furious” Trump told Milley, “Apologies are a sign of weakness.”
With their fly-on-the-wall coverage, Leonnig and Rucker not only add behind-the-curtain details to previously reported public incidents, but they incisively expose the faction fight playing out in private between high level military officers and Trumpsters.
Melina Mara
Philip Rucker
Following the presidential election, I Alone Can Fix It chronicles the President’s decision to axe Esper and replace him with Chris Miller, one of the ensuing “Trump loyalists . . . installed in senior roles at the Pentagon.”
The book names alleged ultra-conservative co-conspirators, including Michael Ledeen, Ezra Cohen, and Tony Tata. Later, Miller and Lieutenant General Charles Flynn—brother of Trump’s disgraced National Security adviser Mike Flynn—seem implicated in the foot dragging that delayed deployment of National Guardsmen to the besieged Capitol on January 6. The commander-in-chief, too, dawdled while the U.S. Capitol was ransacked.
Instead of fixing the “American carnage” Trump ranted about in his 2017 inaugural speech, his bleak vision became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, the putschist-in-chief and his followers are propagating another “big lie,” that he’ll be “reinstated” as President this month.
And the worst domestic fascistic threat to U.S. democracy since American Firster/flyboy Charles Lindbergh was presented the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Herman Goering on the Fuehrer’s behalf in 1938 is, instead of a jailbird, free as a bird to plot the restoration of his crown.