Publishers Weekly
08/23/2021
Pulitzer winner Johnston (It’s Even Worse Than You Think) delivers a damning portrait of how “Donald Trump, his extended family, and his cronies... used his presidency to get richer, to set up lucrative future opportunities, and to escape their own financial quagmires.” Alleging that Trump’s modus operandi is to “promise the moon, the sky, and the stars, and then deliver rocks and sand, if that,” Johnston documents the stiffing of contractors and business partners; the suspicious awarding of tax breaks, building permits, and other “goodies” to Trump Organization development projects in the Dominican Republic and India; and the surreptitious overcharging of supporters who thought they were making one-time contributions to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Most of the details are well-known to followers of the news, but Johnston weaves them into a cogent account of endemic corruption within the Trump Organization and the Trump administration, and he unearths a handful of new and telling episodes, including the story of how Trump got thrown out of New York City mayor Abe Beame’s office in 1977 for physically threatening Beame over the Commodore Hotel project. The result is a devastating roundup of malfeasance. Agent: Alice Martell, the Martell Agency. (Oct.)
Booklist
"Refreshing. . . . Rather than simply tsk-tsking about Trump’s abuses, Johnston offers common-sense solutions for bringing transparency and integrity back to politics and government."
The Washington Post - James Kwak
Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston. . . . The Big Cheat is a guided tour of the Trump circus in 18 colorful vignettes. . . . A good book, full of old-fashioned reporting based on original sources and primary documents, colorfully written and convincingly argued.
Eugene Weekly
"We know more than ever why Trump should not have been president and why he or any of his minions cannot be president of this democracy again. Johnston’s book is filled with amazing research."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-08-17
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime Trump-watcher delivers enough charges to fuel a few hundred indictments.
Johnstonopens with a scenario of desperation: In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, great numbers of low-income, poorly informed Americans longed for a savior who “would relieve their financial crisis.” What they got was a “master con artist” who would “cheat them out of what they had, all the while telling them that he was really their friend and helper.” Step 1: Destroy the notion of objective truth. Step 2: Send up a smokescreen of lies. Step 3: Loot the people’s treasury, self-dealing while leaving scraps for other financial predators. Johnston assembles a case that’s full of news and startling incidents. In one, a 29-year-old Trump assaults outgoing New York Mayor Abe Beame to strong-arm a sweetheart deal; though police officers escorted him from Beame’s office, he got what he demanded. The behavioral pattern with the most staying power is not violence, however, but cheating: overstating assets, engaging in phony accounting, not paying taxes. With the power of the presidency, Trump—who, Johnston reminds us, is the only president past or present at the center of a felony investigation—opened the nation’s coffers to his fellow grifters, engaging in “the kind of borrowing that made Trump infamous—money you borrow but never pay back in full and perhaps not at all.” Those fellow grifters are legion, but at the top of the list are daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, poster children “who illustrate the need for strict ethics training and for equally strict enforcement of laws against misusing public office.” Trump’s sole accomplishment, by Johnston’s account, was the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, because it “testifies to his incompetence” while shining a light on would-be dictators waiting in the wings.
True believers won’t be swayed, but those inclined to despise Trump and Trumpism will find ample reinforcement.
