In my meanderings through the Internet, I discovered Greg Olear’s blog. He is wise, insightful, always informative. In his most recent post, Greg announces a new book.
He writes:
Two months or so ago, it occurred to me that I should write a new Trump book: or, to be more accurate, that I should distill the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve produced about Donald Trump and his despotic plans for a second term, organize them into a coherent narrative, and produce a book-length argument for why this corrupt and hateful human being should never again set foot in the Oval Office—and what ugly future we should expect if he does.
The result is Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do if Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, which is, as of today, available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon, with an audiobook in the works, via Four Sticks Press. (Later this week, it will be available for bookstores to order directly, via Ingram Spark.)
As with Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, which came out six years ago this month, Rough Beast is a short, easy-to-consume volume intended for readers who are not in the know, to alert them to the danger. It is, as I write in the sub-sub-title, “An Urgent Appeal to Independents, Undecideds, Fiscal Republicans, Third Party People, Voters Who ‘Don’t Like Politics,’ and the Biden-Hating Left.”
The most important—and, if Trump wins, the last—election in U.S. history is six short months away, and the polls show a dead heat. Rough Beast is my attempt to help the good guys prevail.
Rough Beast: Introduction, Slouching Towards Dictatorship by Greg Olear
Greg Olear
Donald Trump’s term in office can be summed up in four words: pandemic, protest, impeachment, and insurrection. He left the White House with 392,428 Americans dead of a plague he exacerbated; with Washington recovering from a coup attempt he instigated; with the economy teetering towards recession; with our standing around the world at its lowest point in a century; and with the U.S. an additional $8 trillion in debt. He had, by far, the lowest average presidential approval rating since Gallop started keeping track in 1938, and was widely reviled abroad. Four of the five largest protests in the history of the country happened on his watch. He was impeached twice. He could have been impeached a third time, in 2019, after the release of the Mueller Report—which, contrary to what Trump and the mendacious Bill Barr told us, did not exonerate him. Even his much-ballyhooed campaign promises fell flat: He failed to build the wall, and he failed to drain the swamp. He did, however, watch a lot of television and play a lot of golf.
In the various presidential surveys taken since Donald left office, historians have consistently ranked Trump dead last, behind even the contemptible white supremacist Andrew Johnson and the hapless James Buchanan. This is not recency bias. By any metric, Trump was a catastrophic failure: corrupt, sociopathic, cruel, venal, disruptive, artless, dumb, and pathologically inept—a terrible president and an even worse human being. He threw paper towels at hurricane victims! He called veterans of our armed forces “suckers and losers!” He invited the Taliban to Camp David! He banked $2.4 billion in emoluments during his four years in office! He characterized the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people!” He nominated an(other) alleged sexual assailant to the Supreme Court! He sat on his ass watching TV as his besiegers stormed the Capitol! He humped a flag! And that’s just off the top of my head.
We have never had a monster like this in the White House. No one comes close. That the country managed to survive four years of Trump suggests that Otto von Bismarck was on to something when he remarked that God seems to have a special providence for the United States of America. With Donald, we dodged a big orange bullet.
In a word, we were spared.
And yet as I write this, Donald John Trump is the presumptive nominee of one of our two major political parties. Only two individuals have a legitimate chance at winning the White House in November—I’ll talk about the myth of third parties and the perils of voting for the nihilistic likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Chapter 9—and Trump is one of them. And he’s not just that political party’s nominee. Donald Trump has subverted the entire GOP, purged it of the disloyal, and taken total command. He installed his daughter-in-law—Lara Trump, desecrator of Tom Petty’s memory and wife of Eric Trump (Donald’s son who ripped off his own cancer charity)— as co-chair at the RNC, and changed the organization’s rules there so that the lion’s share of donations will be used to cover his mounting legal bills. As I explore further in Chapter 8, the conventional, old-school Republicans of yesteryear have either retired, lost, died, or kissed the ring. Don’t be fooled by the cute elephant logo. Whatever the branding, this is no longer the Party of Lincoln. There is no GOP anymore, only MAGA. It is an entire party built around a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions.
If the polls are to believed, that demagogue has a coin flip’s chance of retaking the White House. Like, this might actually happen! People in my family are going to vote for him. People in your family are probably going to vote for him, too. And if, God forbid, he succeeds, there are—as I explain in Chapter 7—a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025. The threat is real. The situation is dire.
This isn’t me, a known “TRUMP HATER,” trying to frame the narrative to make Donald look bad. All of what I’m saying here is objectively true, as this book will make abundantly clear. As the kids say: #Facts…
Description
Who is the real Donald Trump? A serial liar with long ties to both organized crime and the Kremlin. A corrupt demagogue whom most historians consider the worst U.S. president of all time. And, most urgently, a vengeful wannabe dictator whose re-election would end American democracy. In this short and necessary volume, Dirty Rubles author Greg Olear presents the facts about FPOTUS: who he is, what he plans to do, and why the country cannot survive a second Trump term. Donald Trump is a Rough Beast. America is slouching towards dictatorship.
Table of Contents
- Trump is a serial liar
- Trump is a lifelong criminal and a longtime Kremlin stooge
- Trump is corrupt
- Trump was an awful president
- Trump wants to be a dictator
- The far right wants a dictator—a Red Caesar
- Project 2025 is a despotic roadmap for Trump’s second term
- The old GOP is dead and gone
- Voting for a third party candidate helps re-elect Trump
- Life of the real Donald Trump
Please open the link to finish reading Greg’s summary of the book.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Greetings.
Saw enough from the YT clips from 1st trip post inauguration to Saudi Arabia.
TY for sharing.
Garry
The disconnect between the policies most Americans favor and those that are implemented by elected “leaders” is nearly complete. The U.S. is not a functioning democracy.
The U.S. is not a functioning democracy.
Agreed.
I agree with all the points, & in my own small way, try to make them in comments on news articles & conversation with voters who dislike both candidates (pointless to try to reach hard-core T-ers). I’m wondering if the book is going to reach the intended audience so clearly delineated in the sub-sub-title. Are people in those groups likely to come across this? I hope it’s promoted effectively.
I don’t think this book is trying to convince anyone who’s firmly committed to T – they live in a different reality. There are people who believe reports claiming B has diminished capacity (he doesn’t) & isn’t competent to be president, &/or that he’s responsible for tanking the economy (it isn’t). Others dislike both candidates & plan either to register a “protest vote” for Kennedy or just stay home. Those are the people who need to be reached, that anything T did would be far worse. I hope they can be exposed to the ideas in this book.
see your point
I have never met a person who once liked or disliked Trump and has changed his or her mind. Not saying they don’t exist but I’ve never met a specimen in the wild.
Meant this to respond to Roy above.
Except those people who at one time worked for him. THEY, former Trumpanzees, mostly DESPISE him. They call him, flat out, a charlatan, and idiot. They say things like, “He has the mental capacity of a five-year-old.”
In this case, familiarity really does breed contempt. Get close to this lowlife, and you’ll see just what a breathtakingly putrid POS he is.
While I find everything O’lear says about Trump entirely believable, I find his dismissive attitude toward Andrew Johnson a bit lacking. Simply saying he was a white supremacist places him squarely within the mindset of everybody from Lincoln himself to the entire British Empire and the rising German Empire. Johnson was certainly not a worthy president. His attempted prosecution of Lincoln’s 10% plan was blind to the riots that began to erupt in the post-war conquered south. He succumbed to the plantation ethos represented by the former confederates, in awe of these powerful people he once feared as an East Tennessee Unionist. He failed to understand that the war had created a new breed of oligarch, that line of industrialists who had made the steel that had won the unity Lincoln craved so much. In this last failure, he shared something with the otherwise exemplary and forward-looking Thad Stephens. He failed in the same way US Grant failed, and every statesman afterward until Roosevelt (that damned cowboy).
Reducing Trump to the class of Johnson is just historically lazy, and throwing in James Buchanan is just as bad. Buchanan undoubtedly slow walked reaction to the secession of the deep south, aiding and abetting the rebellion of the South Carolinian aristocracy, which had been avoided in the Nashville Convention in 1850. Buchanan sat in history at the perfect place to be the one to keep the nation out of the catastrophic path is was on, but he strategically dithered. In this way, Buchanan more closely resembles the modern jurist like Cannon and Alito, whose intentions are very transparent as they try to keep Trump from the adjudication he so richly deserves.
The reason Trump is so much worse than any previous potential president is that he is aligned, as Olear correctly points out, with foreign interests counter to our own. The reason for his purging of republicans from the now Trump Party is that his experience with the party he inherited felt at least marginally obliged to appear to act legally. If elected, Trump will lose no time in dismantling American Democratic institutions. There has never been a president yet but Trump who openly stated that he wanted to destroy government. Reagan may have said it, but Trump is it.
So Olear needs to understand that no matter how bad we have been when it comes to leadership, we have never had a person like Trump will be. If Trump ran against Johnson in 2024, I would have to vote for Johnson.
The billionaires who are bankrolling Trump don’t care about his threat to democracy — in fact, those billionaires and corporations see democracy as a threat to them because democracy allows mere ordinary citizens to tax them and to force them to produce products that do what they are intended to do and that don’t harm people or the environment.
But, there is an important aspect to Trump that billionaires haven’t considered:
BILLIONAIRES BEWARE!
Hey, billionaires — have you been counting how many Russian billionaires have been clumsy enough to fall out of windows stories above the street? Hmmm.
And what about those Russian billionaires and millionaires who have just sort of…well…disappeared from the public view?
America’s billionaires and millionaires need to pause and think what can happen to them if a Putin wanna-be like Trump gains the absolute power he craves to control everything from Congress to the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department to weaponize them against anybody who even merely irks him?
So, Billionaires — Beware of open windows if Trump gets power. If he wants what you’ve got, he’ll take it. If he takes a dislike to you, you disappear.
One of the first things that Putin did when he took power was to call a meeting with the Yeltsin-created oligarchs to announce that from then on, Putin would get his vig, or bad things would happen to them. Then, according to imprisoned dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, Putin had a prominent oligarch arrested on fake gun charges to make his point. (The police stopped the guy’s car, threw a bag with a gun into the back seat, and then arrested him for possession of it.)
If he becomes President again, there will be many things to fear about Trump. One area he will get right is opposing the illegal use of identitarian quotas favored by wokesters like Diane Ravitch. Perhaps she and her groupie commenters would like their future medical care to be provided by unqualified physicians who only made it into medical school because of their immutable characteristics. From the article: “”UCLA still produces some very good graduates,” one professor said. “But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
No need to be so rude to Diane.
But this is a disturbing story.
correct! No need to be rude. But what is happening to medical school admission is very dangerous. Feel afraid….they are doing this for law school admissions, too.
outside of disgruntled professors and a decline in the US News ranking, what evidence of failure was shown in this article? Maybe the article is correct, but it does not concern itself with results. Where are the declines in healthcare caused by unqualified med school candidates? Not in this article.
All I will say to you is “stay healthy”! I won’t even consider seeing a physician below the age of 40 at this point. I have worked in healthcare my whole life and I have seen the decline.
I’ve had some excellent young doctors recently. Although I’m getting so old that maybe they’re over 40 and I just think that’s young.
Leaks by admissions committees are very rare. Can’t think of another example. And the quantitative case is made by the shelf exam failure rates. Democracy below argues that shelf exams have zero importance, but I’m very skeptical about that. Even if they are flawed, they surely have some function and some relation to what they are testing, and dramatic aggregate statistical trends are not meaningless.
I think that some of what this author perceives as administrative incompetence and “wokness” is actually the collision of two opposing views of education. One view sees education as chiefly a process of standing at the door and keeping out incompetence, the other sees education as an attempt to solve the societal problem of a shortage of skill set people.
Even when Traitor Trump is gone, and I mean really gone for good, the extreme right is still going to want a red dictator to rule the United States without term limits, like Putrid Putin in Russia and Crooked Kim in North Korea.
The Chicken Little article about UCLA med school comes from a right-wing “news” site that trades in gross exaggeration and from a young “reporter” who has termed himself “anti woke” and who – most likely – has little to no understanding testing.
The article bemoans UCLA’s med school’s national ranking in US News World Report and standardized test scores – especially “shelf” exams – as if these things are highly important, and mostly, they are not.
As one doctor put it, reflecting on her med school experience with shelf exams and her clinical work and her real world medical career, the shelf exams are not tied well to the curricula. The doc noted that they
“don’t match what you learn on the clerkship. In those clerkships, you’re really taught about the surgical approaches and skills, but the exams don’t test that. So the exams are much harder because your brain on the clerkship is thinking in a surgical manner and your brain on the test has to think in an internal medicine manner—and they’re very different…I spent so much time studying very, very tiny little details that I felt were critically important, that in the end no one uses for patient care—or they’re not as important as I thought they would be.”
Or, to put it another way,
“I certainly made mistakes in studying far too much and getting far too anxious and losing sight of kind of that bigger picture, which is that we’re learning to take care of humans. And so we often err on the side of knowing all the science and less of the humanities and the human side.”
Maybe there are some here who think that the human side just isn’t very important. Apparently anti woke “reporter” thinks that way, and so do some of the docs at UCLA med school.
Sad.
By the way, in another national ranking of med schools in the United States, UCLA was #7.
And, in yet another ranking of the best medical schools in the WORLD, UCLA was ranked #12.
Anyone who takes the Washington Free Beacon “report” at face value is as likely “anti woke” as the “reporter” who prepared it.
thanks. That was my reaction to the article.
What are you quoting?
Even if you can make a case that shelf exams are not that important, you truly don’t think it’s notable that failure rates on those exams have risen to as much as ten times the national average among some cohorts at a top medical school since the new dean of admissions was hired?
Flerp, I think the Free Beacon article is sensationalism.
Apparently, you do not.
Not much of a response.
other than Olear’s dismissive and overly simplistic evaluation of Presidents Johnson and Buchanan (everyone was a white supremacist in 1850, and Buchanan was conspiratorial, not hapless), I liked this article. How the country just passed over the Muller report like it was Taylor Swift’s latest personal crisis is beyond my understanding.
“everyone was a white supremacist in 1850”
For example, the abolitionist Francis Gage translated Sojourner Truth’s
“Ain’t I a Woman” speech into Southern African-American Vernacular English before publishing it so it would “sound authentic.” Truth, nee Isabella Baumfree, grew up in New York speaking Dutch as her first language. And Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, said this at Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, during the debates with Douglas:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
We need folks like you, Roy–actual historians–to continually set the record straight. Unless the Reichwing in this country gets its way and all real history goes down the Memory Hole.
BTW, the phrase “to continually set the record straight” is a good example of why we sometimes need to use the split infinitive in English, which is not freaking Latin. T.S. Eliot thought split infinitives just fine, and Henry Fowler agrees with me that it is sometimes necessary to prevent awkwardness. With these two authorities at my side, I can rest easily. LOL.
where the heck to strategically place a word in an infinitive phrase so you won’t create some weird sentences run together is a thing I have a problem with.
There I have split and infinitive, ended a sentence with a preposition, and totally destroyed the run-on. Sentence.
I split infinitives and end sentences with prepositions as often as I can.
It’s not even a sentence. It’s a subordinate clause pretending to be a sentence. It’s not a run-on. Might I suggest this?
But where the heck am I to strategically place a word in an infinitive I don’t want to create some weird, ungrammatical sentence a thing I have a problem with
How much of this nonsense up with which are we going to have to put?
lol
Lenny:
“How much of this nonsense up with which are we going to have to put?”How much of this nonsense up with which are we going to have to put?”
Should read:
How much of this nonsense up with which are we going to have to constantly put?
Somebody’s always gotta be a wisea$$!😂
How much of this nonsense must we suffer?
However, way, way, way back in the 1980s, I was putting rules into 6-12 grammar and composition textbooks that it was OK to end sentences with prepositions (and particles) and begin them with coordinating conjunctions. I even managed to amend the rule on split infinitives to follow Fowler: avoid them EXCEPT when the resulting corrected sentence would sound awkward. Eliot was right about the split infinitive. The folks who wrote the first English grammars (I have a collection of these) based their work on the Latin grammars they were already familiar with, and in Latin, ofc, the infinitive is a single word, and splitting it would be absof-inglutely impossible. Of course, we should make every child learn Latin the way we used to. Every year, K-10, with Greek in 11 and 12. To most people, this would be a lot more useful than is, say, high-school Trigonometry.
However, all that said, it’s extremely important to have grammar and usage rules, ofc, in order to keep writers of grammar and usage textbooks employed. We grammarians are known TO BRAVELY GO up against changing languages with all the effectiveness of ____-ing into the wind.
”And that’s the way it is.”
As we move toward browsers that work as AI Chatbots, it’s important that results be curated for the reputation and accuracy of the sources used, with ratings attached as footnotes. Clearly, a statement (a “truth,” they call them) from Donald Trump, Jr’s Truth Social Feed is not going to have the same veracity as, say, a statement from the Library of Congress’s American Memory site online.