Post reporter's book shows Trump as own worst enemy
Reading Greg Miller’s gripping new account of President Trump’s entanglement in the Russia investigation, it’s striking just how many of the president’s difficulties have been self-created. Trump sees enemies everywhere around him; he should look in the mirror.
As the book’s ironic title makes clear, Trump has been “The Apprentice” in the White House. New to government, buoyed by sycophantic supporters and his own overweening ego, Trump made mistake after mistake: He turned little problems into big ones; he thought he could misstate, manipulate and escape detection. But, again and again, he failed.
Did Russia have a hand in shaping this unlikely story? Miller wisely leaves that judgment to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But readers of this tale of hubris may recall the judgment made about Napoleon’s execution of a French nobleman in 1804: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.”
Miller is a Washington Post colleague, and this book draws on reporting by him and many others at the newspaper, so I’m hardly an unbiased reader. It displays what makes us proud to be Post journalists. You won’t find jaw-dropping quotations, as in Bob Woodward’s recent book. It is simply a reporter’s meticulously crafted narrative of how this implausible presidency unfolded — and how much of Trump’s difficulty has been his own doing.
Miller recounts a chain of error that begins during the campaign. When Trump visits the Post in March 2016, he’s eager to disclose his hastily assembled team of foreign-policy advisers. All were virtually unknown, but two later became very famous indeed: Carter Page, an obscure economist who it turned out had been investigated by the FBI about his 2013 contacts with a Russian spy; and George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying about his 2016 contacts with people with connections to the Russian government.
How did these figures get on Trump’s list of advisers? Why were they so eager during the campaign to talk with Russian contacts? Like so much else in the Trump-Russia story, it’s a mystery.
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