The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

 Tim Alberta starts  The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory on the worst day of his life. While he was being interviewed on the Christian Broadcasting Network about his prior book, American Carnage, his father dropped dead. Dick Alberta was an evangelical pastor and as Tim stands in the funeral receiving line with his brothers, parishioners - people who have literally known Tim all his life - take the opportunity to berate him for criticizing Rush Limbaugh. This, and a nasty letter sent after Tim's eulogy calls out the politicization of religion, inspired his next book. It's a bit more of an insider's view of evangelicalism's takeover by right wing politics than Kristen du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne and it's clear that Alberta holds a deep Christian faith. While he discusses religious figures like Jerry Fallwell Sr. (more interested in power) and Jr. (more interested in money) who don't follow the path, he focuses on ministers and theologians who are being pushed out because they don't preach right-wing politics. Their story has been neglected, and Alberta also points out that the loudest, most prejudiced voices often belong to people who are also doing many of the congregation's good works. However, I don't believe that they're as small of a minority as Alberta states (or perhaps wants to believe). If they truly were only a "vocal" 15-20% of their sects, could they have so completely taken over their churches?

American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

I've mentioned before that I prefer retrospective rather than current political analysis, and usually from historians rather than reporters. Reporters give the what; historians give the why and how and often paths to the future. Although he's a reporter, Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump is a long view of the years from 2008 through 2018, understandably focusing on the time from the 2016 Presidential campaign onward. Looking back, I once again wondered whether Trump could have been stopped or whether he was inevitable. 

Alberta starts with the election President Obama and then moves to the election of the ungovernable and uninterested in governing Tea Party faction of the Republican party. Those chapters highlight the infighting among party factions and told the origin stories of current power players (as well as reminding us of once prominent rabble rousers who have faded into the background). Alberta picks immigration as a theme for this section of the book, showing how politicians on both sides of the aisle considered it an important issue even if they differed on the mechanics.

Once Donald Trump came on the scene, that went by the wayside. His anti-immigrant populism made any neutral let alone positive commentary on immigrants anathema. But when he came down the escalator in 2015, could anyone have imagined him not only becoming President but remaking an entire party in his bellicose and bigoted image? I'd like to say I had a hint (when he declared I was on a project with three guys who all thought he'd be a good president and wondering why anyone would be liberal...ignoring the fact that they were siting with a single, professional, graduate-educate, 40-something woman who chose to live inside a city), but I never thought it was likely. And that may have been the problem with his primary challengers. None of them thought he could possibly win and, combined with his unusual strategy, failed to cut him off. Alberta also mentions miscalculations by Hillary Clinton and her campaign, but doesn't mention misogyny as a potential contributory factor.

Once Trump was in the White House, the rest of the Republican party saw the hold he had on a pivotal segment of the population and (for the most part) cravenly became Trump supporters. We can say it started with white Evangelicals flocking to his campaign (attracted by power rather than theology as outlined in Kristen Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne), but as Alberta points out in his epilogue, even politicians like Paul Ryan, who retired rather than continue working with Trump and who think of themselves as different, are forever branded as Trump Republicans.

Alberta's book ends in January 2019 and came out later that year so we don't see the impeachment trials, the electoral defeat, or the insurrection. Or the how Trump is inexplicably the front-runner in the 2024 primaries. And this is why, although I found Alberta's book interesting and thought-provoking, I still prefer a historian's view. He added the why and how to the what, but no hints as to how to fix the problem.

Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind

I'm still trying to understand how the religious right came to embrace everything I was taught that Jesus was against. Ill treatment of others (particularly the needy), violence, and power for power's sake. Sarah Posner covers much of the same ground as Kristin DuMez's Jesus and John Wayne which in turn builds on Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God. Posner is a reporter and takes a different track than the two historians, looking less at history and including anti-democratic movements in Brazil and Eastern Europe to show how our current political climate is not unique. 

Here, Right Matters

 I usually don't read recent or as-it-happened political books (I made an exception for A Higher Ground because James Comey was my Trial Advocacy professor), but reserved Here, Right Matters after hearing  an interview with Alexander Vindman. I remember listening to his testimony and seeing the pictures of him entering the hearing room with his identical twin Eugene, also a Lt. Colonel, in their dress uniforms. He came across as honest and earnest, a professional who was doing his job and doing what he believed was right for his country. 

As a writer, he's engaging and surprisingly funny in the book he wisely made more of a memoir than a political tome. Born in the USSR, his and Eugene's earliest memories are of an abusive foster home where they lived while their mother was in hospice care, and within two years they, along with their father (an engineer), older brother, and maternal grandmother, were refugees in Brooklyn. I don't feel like he exactly glossed over how hard life must have been for his family, but he doesn't dwell on it. He mentions his father's initial job as a manual laborer while he studied for the Civil Service exam and the long days his father worked once he was hired by the water department, but he focuses on the mischief he and Eugene got into as the black sheep of the extended family - daredevils who were intelligent but didn't apply themselves to what didn't interest them and who fed off each others's schemes and energy. He initially joined ROTC to emulate his older brother (Leonid Vindman served in the Army Reserves), but found his passion while serving, first in Korea, then in Afghanistan (where he earned a Purple Heart), and eventually using his language skills as a member of the National Security Council. 

There, in a job usually taken by someone of much higher rank, he sat in on a routine phone call between Donald Trump and the recently elected president of Ukraine. When Trump asked for a "favor," Vindman reported this to the NSC's ethics officer (coincidentally his twin) and through the proper channels. From that point on, he started to experience professional slights, apparently orchestrated from the highest echelons and aided by an office mate with whom he had a mutual dislike and distrust. We know the public side of this story, so other than pointing out that his mid-level position allowed him to avoid recognition until shortly before his hearing, he focuses on how this affected him and his family. His father, like many Russian emigres, was a strong Trump supporter and his daughter, while not old enough to understand the politics was old enough to be affected by the upheaval. Tacitly admitting that his former boss, Dr. Fiona Hill, was right in considering him a bit naive when it comes to politics, he relies on his wife Rachel and his twin (whom he calls his inner voice) to help him realize that his best course is to retire from the Army. Now a free agent (in his words), he's forging a path to continue his service as a civilian.

Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

 I remember Watergate, but I don't remember Spiro Agnew. Unlike Nixon's crimes, Agnew's were, well, blatant and ordinary. He was a somewhat obscure local official who spent most of his time shaking down developers for bribes. After somehow ending up as the Governor of Maryland, he was picked to be Nixon's 1968 running mate. Like the most recent ex-president, he was crude, combative, and feuded with the press - and a segment of the public loved him for it. Based on the 2018 podcast, Bag Man provide just enough background to explain how, in 1973, we had both a President and Vice-President under investigation for serious crimes. How did we survive the crisis? Three Assistant US Attorneys, Barney Skolnik, Tim Bake, and Ron Liebman, and US Attorney George Beall (the brother of Maryland's then junior Senator) stood up to pressure from Nixon and quietly put together a case that forced Agnew to plead guilty and resign. He didn't go quietly (the last few chapters chronicle months spent slowly winding down his VP office and transitioning to brokering unsavory deals with foreign governments), but he went. He died in 1996, essentially a footnote to history. The attorneys who prosecuted him also escaped fame, each spending several more years working for the Justice Department before moving into private practice (George Beall died in 2017). While Agnew can stay obscure, Beall, Skolnik, Blake, and Liebman deserve to be better known. Their job wasn't glamorous (and parts of the Bag Man are a bit dry because there's only so much you can do to make a financial investigation interesting - trust me, I know), but it's not an exaggeration to say that they may have saved our democracy.

A Higher Loyalty

I have to compensate for two types of bias in my review of A Higher Loyalty.  The first is political, and the fallout of the 2016 Presidential election.  The second is more personal - how does the book compare to my 22-year-old memories of my Trial Advocacy professor?  I've never read, let alone tried to review, a book by someone I knew, albeit slightly.  Because of that, I'm going to break my review down into parts.


Comey's writing style is engaging and highly descriptive, showing an affinity for the language which meshes with my memories of his classes.  As a professor, he emphasized preparation (which indirectly led to my Jack McCoy moment) and using your questions to make the witness comfortable enough to use his vernacular.  He makes those priorities obvious in the chapters on his early career as a prosecutor.  I found them engrossing, particularly the mob trials (which he also used as classroom examples) and the prosecution of Martha Stewart, but readers who aren't lawyers and don't read legal thrillers might not agree.

He also uses a bit of self-deprecating humor to counter an earnestness that verges on self-righteousness.  That's important as he segues into his years as Assistant Attorney General and FBI Director.  Comments about being the "FBI giraffe" and the tight quarters in the Situation Room humanize a man who clearly believes in the American system and the rule of law.  Without that, these chapters might come across as a bit too self serving.  I assume that anyone who writes a memoir has a healthy ego, but Comey's writing style and flashes of humor prevent these chapters from coming across as self-aggrandizing.

Now, about the emails...  I've spent the last 19 months thinking that the FBI mishandled the "October Surprise."  Not just because of my political views, but because I've spent most of my career doing document review.  When I heard, less than 2 weeks before the election, that there were thousands of new emails to be reviewed, my first thought was "de-duping."  Document review programs have gotten much better at de-duping in the 15 years since I moved from hard copy to electronic review - good enough that de-duping (along with predictive coding) has affected my job security.  Comey writes he was told that there was no way to review all of the newly found emails before the election.  My belief (which I think is supported by the fact that the *FBI* did review them all in under a week) is that he received bad information.  Most of the emails were duplicates, and the rest were fully reviewed within a few days.  I've found that partners and associates who either haven't done document review in years or who've always had project attorneys to handle the grunt work don't have a good grasp of the mechanics of electronic review.  My experience has been with associates who don't understand the limitations of the review systems, but I can easily see how the top few levels of the FBI legal team, who probably hadn't done document review since they slogged through a warehouse full of bankers' boxes in the late 20th Century, wouldn't know how good review programs are at de-duping data sets and how an experienced reviewer can separate the relevant an non-relevant documents with a few good keyword searches.  Keeping that in mind, I can understand Comey's reasoning, but I still think he made the wrong decision.

This leads us to Donald Trump.  Press reviews focused on Comey's description of Trump's hair and spray tan, but that's not particularly important.  I was more struck by Comey's comparison of Donald Trump to the mobsters who filled the headlines in the 1980s (and my Friday night viewing while in law school) - so much so that I flashed back to Trial Advocacy and Comey's cadences as he switched between the his prosecution voice and that of his mobster witness.   Except that he's less disciplined, firing (executing) people with little thought about the repercussions.  That mix of ruthlessness and thought-free "decision" making combined with avarice and more than a dash of incompetence scares me.  I think it scares James Comey as well, and reading A Higher Loyalty I think he feels some responsibility.  I just don't know how much.

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign Ever

I remember watching Donald Trump's 2015 interview with Katy Tur, and thinking, "Now I know what this reminds me of.  She's Lizzy Bennet dealing with an incoherent Lady Catherine DeBourgh!" The truth was even weirder, with Tur trying to make sense of his word salad on a 500-day cross-country odyssey which started by chance.  NBC assigned Tur that interview because she was available - based at the time in London, she was in New York because she had a few free days and Make-a-Wish arranged a tour through the NBC News studios with a reporter.  "It'll be a few weeks of following Trump, and then he'll drop out.  Or he'll win and you'll be the White House correspondent."  But there was no way he could win, right?

Well, he did, and no matter how confused or horrified Tur was during the campaign, she always thought there was a chance.  So did I, by the way.  A few days after Trump announced his candidacy with paid extras cheering him on, I jumped back into the temp pool.  I shared an office with three men, all of whom though he'd be a decent President although perhaps he wouldn't get along with Angela Merkel.  Granted one was the angriest, most bitter person I've ever met and another one daily spouted conspiracy theories so outlandish that even with 30+ years of urban legend research he amazed me.  Still, it gave me pause.  I, however, didn't have a close-up view of the vitriol and venom.  I saw clips of the rallies; Tur saw a pleasant woman who'd 30 minutes earlier helped her style her hair  shouting and cheering for people to beat up the press corps.  Cameras didn't show the shirts saying "Trump that Bitch" (and other, cruder variations) or "Hillary should have married OJ" (did they realize that meant they wish Hillary Clinton had been violently hacked to death in the 90s?).  They didn't show Trump, after weeks of ignoring her questions (therefore putting her job in jeopardy) forcing a kiss on Tur before an appearance on *Morning Joe*.  The media briefly reported that Tur needed the Secret Service had to escort Tur out of an event because the candidate had incited the crowd to attack her, but not how most of the press corps had security to protect them from the crowds.  We saw the misogyny but not the Trump staffer who, after telling Tur about his wife and kids asked, "So where can I meet 30-year-old women?"

Horrifying as the campaign could be, Tur managed to find humor and camaraderie in the insanity.  Throughout the book, she keeps a sense of humor, a feeling of "Is this real?" and at least once the desire to mutate into a flying creature (it makes sense in context).  Behind the media glare, there's junk food, hookups and breakups, disorientation, friendships, and nights spent looking for something funny and non-political to watch while trying to fall asleep.  On November 7, Tur spent the evening watching with dread as the concession party turned into a victory celebration.  She turned down the White House assignment in favor of general political reporting and fill-in anchor spots, and her career is definitely on the way up. I wish her well, and hope she also finds time to write more books.