A Page Burner

I rarely re-read books. I rarely have enough time -- or so I tell myself that -- to read a book once, why on Earth would I go back and re-read it again?

I re-read Catcher in the Rye, a book I'm sure I was forced to read in high school or as a very stoned freshman in college. I hated it then. And hated it even more the second time.

I re-read Dracula. Actually the first time I "read" it was as an audiobook when I was commuting 106.73 miles a day back and forth between Culver City and Y&R's flagship office in lovely Irvine, where one can indulge his or her choice of 159 different restaurant chains. Dracula was even better in book form. 

Keep in mind I am incredibly uninterested with anything to do with vampires, bloodsucking and 19th century Gothic horror. It's just not my bag. And yet, because of the writing, the intrigue and the pacing of the story, I found myself picturing the whole thing in my head. 

Oddly enough, just like a movie.

And so, I picked up David Frum's Trumpocracy off the shelf. I had read the book a couple of years earlier when I started digging into the Trump rabbit hole of misery. And as of late I have become a fan of Frum as well as his appearances on the nightly newscasts.

This might sound like heresy, but I enjoy listening to centrist Republican conservatives more than I do the standard liberal pundits, whose talking points I know by heart. 

There are several GOP Never Trumpers who merit your time including: Max Boot, Charlie Sykes, Jennifer Rubin, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and even Anthony Scaramucci. 

That's right, the Mooch.

He is surprisingly cogent, articulate and intelligent. I may not agree with him on many policy issues, but then again there are some that I do. It's no wonder he didn't last long in the Trump White House.

Perhaps that's the benefit of hindsight, because I cursed the Mooch when he was named to Director of Communications and found him smarmy and slippery. I looked forward to mocking him with many, many gumba-types memes.

It was with that sharpened sense of hindsight that made Trumpocracy such a fast and informative re-read. You see, Frum's book came out in 2017, at the birth of Trump regime. In 2021, we can now see how prescient David Frum was.

In chapter after chapter, he correctly predicts cabinet turnover, presidential overreach, legal entanglements  and even an impending national crisis that would test the administration to its breaking point.

In short the book is a post-mortem on the shittiest, shiftiest, lyingest douchewaffle to ever pick up a bible and swear an oath the Constitution.

I loved it.