I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year by Leonnig, Carol; Rucker, Philip - 2021

2021. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Donald J. Trump As New As New. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. Gift quality. About the book: Ten weeks after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump hosted two reporters from The Washington Post at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion, club and base of operation. He told them that before COVID-19 came to the U.S. he had been assured of reelection. "If George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president," Trump told them, "I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me." That straight-faced assertion, as recounted by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, came from a man who had never scored above 46% in the Gallup Poll in his first three years in office. And the two reporters note that simple fact in their new book on Trump's last year in office: I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year. They might have added that Trump's full four-year average of approval in the Gallup was 41%, 4 points lower than any other president since polling began. And in the weeks since their work went to press, we have also seen C-SPAN release a survey of 142 historians who rated Trump three slots from the bottom among all presidents in history. Yet here was Trump in March, sitting in his cavernous lobby with reporters who had already written one highly critical account of his presidency (A Very Stable Genius), which he had denounced as "a work of fiction." Having refused interview requests for that previous book, Trump was "quick to agree to our request this time," according to the authors. "He sought to curate history." By haranguing all who will listen, in interviews and rally rants, Trump is still demonstrating his abiding and preternatural confidence in his own persuasiveness. But as a curator of his own story, Trump has his work cut out for him. In addition to this much-anticipated Rucker-Leonnig sequel, bookstores are stocking a widely discussed account of events that followed the 2020 election by Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal and a third "tell-all" volume about the final days of Trump's term from magazine writer Michael Wolff. Trump has apparently done all he could to drive home his version of events. Rucker and Leonnig report their one-hour appointment with him stretched to 2 1/2 as Trump continued to insist he had actually won the election, a performance they largely replay in the epilogue to I Alone Can Fix It. Trump expresses profound disappointment with key Republican figures, including Sen. John McCain ("a bad guy") and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell ("I don't think he's smart enough"). Even some of his own team let him down, in Trump's estimation, including Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr and the three members of the U.S. Supreme Court he nominated. Trump was especially upset with Brett Kavanaugh, his second nominee to the high court, "suggesting that [the justice] should have tried to intervene in the election [result] as payback for the president standing by his nomination in 2018 in the face of sexual assault allegations," the authors write.--NPR