欧宝娱乐

I generally enjoy Rick Wilson's take on the world, and I'm consistently entertained by his profane snipes at Trump on Twitter, so I was looking forward to this one more than most political books. Unfortunately for Wilson, and I'm sure many others whose "timely" books got completely undermined by the pandemic, the justifiable dominance of the coronavirus over every 2020 news cycle took some of the punch out of the points the book was written to make. In my case, I also spent a long time waiting for library hold on this, and I didn't manage to finish it before the election, which dulled it some more, so it was a bit harder to finish than anticipated.

Wilson did manage to include a chapter referencing the pandemic, which gives a bit of additional perspective without changing the core of the book. Many of the points/lessons/instructions here were dwarfed, or made entirely moot, by the coronavirus pandemic and Trump's god-awful response to it, but the irony is that without the pandemic I might have dismissed a lot of what Wilson has to say about the electorate 鈥� especially about the moderate middle, and the scope for bending a meaningful number of them away from Trump. Wilson also identified new disasters to fear from a second Trump administration that I hadn't considered before 鈥� one, the prospect of judicial mayhem for years to come, and the other, the specter of the Trump family rooting themselves in to power as some kind of imperial family well into the future 鈥� but I'm not sure that without the pandemic, enough people would have realized or acted on the risk. Wilson's campaign mantra for the Democrats throughout the book is play to the moderates, forget about socialism, and make the campaign all about dumping Trump. As it happened, I'm not sure the Democrats really did the first, and the second was practically a default simply because the most consistent chant amongst the pro-trump crowds was to equate Democratic rule with socialism. As for the last, I don't really think that the Democrats did enough of making everything about Trump, but I do think they would have done much less without the pandemic. Without the Democrats really having to try much, 2020 was all about Trump and his handling of the virus in particular, which in the end seems to be what pushed enough numbers of people out to the polls to give the margin to Biden.聽

It's hard to judge a book like this given the unusual environment in which it came out, but it was an OK read 鈥� nothing spectacular, but the circumstances of 2020 changed the reading of it so much it's hard to know how I would have reacted to it under other circumstances. I will say that the other election-season book I read this year was How Trump Stole 2020 by Greg Palast, which lost none of its import, and in fact gained some, out of the events of 2020. Palast also does a better job of addressing the racism of the Trump machine, which gets tangential treatment in Wilson's book, not the deep dive it deserves.