Carol Leonnig, On Donald Trump's Calamitous Final Year in Office

The barrage of books on Donald Trump continues. The Guardian newspaper counts as many as 4,500 tomes about the megalomaniac former US president, including nearly 20 that Trump claims to have written himself. In just the past few weeks, the huge opus of extended works on Trump has grown by three. Michael Wolf released Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.  Michael Bender, the senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published a crisp and compelling account of the 2020 campaign from the perspective of Trump World called Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. And Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker have offered I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, which completes their chronicle of the Trump Presidency that began with A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, in which they examined the first three years of Trump’s term. (The authors spoke with Tom about the updated edition of that book on the February 26, 2021 Midday show.) Tom is taking a pass on the new Michael Wolf book. But he spoke with Mike Bender a couple of weeks ago about his experience in Trump World. And today, he welcomes back to Midday Carol Leonnig, to talk about this latest book that she and Philip Rucker have contributed to this vast oeuvre.   Leonnig and Rucker’s books on the mercurial and self-obsessed 45th President are invaluable for the depth of their reporting, their thoroughness, and their first-rate analysis of one of the most divisive and unique figures in American politics. I Alone Can Fix It takes us behind the scenes of Trump’s astonishingly inept handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, his losing effort to win a second term, his bungling of the Republican party’s attempt to retain control of Congress, his second impeachment, and his culpability in the insurrection at the Capital that left several people dead, scores of police officers and rioters injured, and a country torn apart by partisanship that has wandered into a whole new realm of untruth and malicious fabrication. Carol Leonnig joined Tom earlier this week, speaking on our digital line from Washington, D.C.. Because their conversation was pre-recorded, we’re not able to take any calls or on-line comments.Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.