Wicked Game review: a fascinating but flawed memoir by Trump's jailed associate

[Judi Lynn]

Rick Gates, the campaign deputy who pleaded guilty to lying and conspiracy, excels on Trump and the GOP but protests too much on Russia

Lloyd Green
Sat 24 Oct 2020 01.00 EDT

Under a title which calls to mind Chris Isaak’s hit song from 1989, the former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates offers an interesting mixture of vignettes and dish, an effort to rewrite the history of 2016 before the 2020 election is over. Wicked Game is surprisingly readable and will leave process junkies with plenty to chew on.

Making sausage is seldom pretty. The book reminds us that even after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, with his win in the Indiana primary on 3 May 2016, the convention was more than two months away. Trump’s opponents had plenty of time to organize one last challenge.

Convention fights are rare – but possible. In 1980, Ted Kennedy mounted an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He lost. Four years before, Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Gerald Ford. In helping the president push back, Paul Manafort won his spurs.

As a rookie candidate, Trump never recognized that he could be displaced. But Manafort and Gates did. Catapulted into the Trump campaign by the businessman Tom Barrack and the profane prankster Roger Stone, they took names and put down a prospective revolt before the convention got going. In the primaries, letting Trump be Trump worked. Nailing down the nomination required different skills. Patience and attention to detail mattered.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/24/wicked-game-review-rick-gates-trump-republicans-russia