American resistance The inside story of how the deep state saved the nation

White House officials' struggle to restrain President Trump is saluted in this insightful study from podcast host Rothkopf (Traitor). Among numerous battles to "keep a dangerous, unhinged, ill-prepared president and his closest allies from doing irreparable damage," Rothkopf documents Department of Homeland Security officials' efforts to defang Trump's ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries; Defense Secretary James Mattis's success in talking Trump down during late-night phone calls in which he threatened such "wildly irresponsible actions" as an attack on North Korea; and Vice President Mike Pence's certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. This is a saga of bureaucratic strategizing at its most byzantine, filled with evocative vignettes: " didn't know enough to know what to do to keep us from protecting the elections," recalls a member of an informal election-security group. "It was just another thing he was pissed about, because it had some connection to Russia." Rothkopf's anti-Trump animus is not always fair, as when he blames Trump for right-wing vaccine skepticism, and his laudatory portrayal of Deep Staters doesn't fully consider the role self-interest played in some of their actions. Still, this is one of the most revealing and disturbing accounts of Trump's presidency yet published. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management. (Nov.)

A revealing book about how government professionals--the so-called "deep state"--kept the Trump administration from wreaking even more havoc than it did. While bound to be taken in some circles as an apology for Democrats, this close-up report of the chaotic Trump presidency is a solid, well-reported record of applied American patriotism. From numerous interviews as well as evidence already publicly available, political scientist Rothkopf, author of Traitor: A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, among other books, builds an unchallengeable case that a host of government officials "worked together to keep a dangerous, unhinged, ill-prepared president and his closest allies from doing irreparable damage to the United States, its people, our allies, and to the planet as a whole." It's the best work yet on how federal employees, military as well as civilian, helped preserve democracy from the "dark state" during the gravest constitutional peril the U.S. has faced since 1860. As with the Watergate crisis, whose full story took a half-century to be known, the history of the Trump presidency will remain incomplete for decades. Yet while this can't be a full treatment, Rothkopf adds useful texture as well as new, sometimes striking, details to what's already known about how Republican, Democratic, and nonpartisan officials worked in the shadows to limit damage from the Trump administration's incompetence and corruption. In the most striking chapter, the author offers astonishing new evidence about how senior military officers, such as James Mattis and Mark Milley, accepted orders but slow-walked them to uselessness to prevent the corruption of both the military command structure and its ethos at the hands of amateurs, opportunists, and what witnesses termed "morons" and "cowards." Rothkopf also rescues the reputations of some officials, such as Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of homeland security, while further lowering those of White House advisers Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner. A searing yet optimistic account of how true constitutional patriots preserved American democracy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.