The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington

by Alexander Nazaryan, Robert Fass (Read by)

Overview

An engrossing look at the Trump cabinet: the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making.


Donald Trump promised a return to national greatness, but each day of his presidency seems to bring a new crisis, a deepening sense of national unease. Why, and how, has he failed his supporters? And how has he, on occasion, bested his detractors?



The Best People takes complete measure of the Trump administration, to grasp with clarity the president and his intentions, and how those intentions are being carried out-or subverted-by the people he has hired.



Alexander Nazaryan argues that the "assault on the administrative state" promised by Steve Bannon in early 2017 never came. What the American people got instead was Wilbur Ross hauling his tennis pro to confirmation hearing preparations; Scott Pruitt running away from rattlesnakes; Reince Priebus enduring insults from junior White House staffers.



And yet, bungling as Trump's cabinet members have been, they have managed to either damage or arrest many of the gears that make government run. They have given away public lands to oil companies and allowed corporate lobbyists to make decisions about what is best for the American people, and have done it all while flying on private jets and dining at the finest restaurants, at taxpayers' expense.



Meticulously reported and enthrallingly told, The Best People takes readers inside the federal government under Trump's control, a government assailed by the very people charged to lead it, a government awash in confusion and corruption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781549125874
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Edition description:	Library Edition
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)

About the Author

Alexander Nazaryan is the Washington National Affairs correspondent for Yahoo. A former Newsweek staff writer, Nazaryan has written on politics, books and culture for the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the New Criterion, Salon, and many other publications.

Table of Contents

Prologue: "Get the Hell Out of Here Now" vii

Preface: The End of Something xv

Introduction: The Best People xx

Part 1 The Siege 1

1 The Accidental Victor 3

2 "I Wipe My Ass with Their Thing" 13

3 The Strongest Men of the Party 36

4 Free Commercials 55

5 Alligators and Lily Pads 66

6 "Kind of a Rough Start" 77

7 The Shitshow Strategy 94

8 Better People 107

Part 2 The Occupation 121

9 Turbulence 123

10 Fellow Travelers 134

11 The Possum 150

12 The Cowboy 175

13 Attendant Lords 197

14 Advancing God's Kingdom 213

Conclusion: Some People 227

Acknowledgments 233

A Note on Sources and Reporting Methods 235

Index 259

Editorial Reviews

04/22/2019

The Trump Administration is wallowing in the swamp instead of draining it, according to this partisan exposé. Yahoo News correspondent Nazaryan decries the corruption, incompetence, and misrule of President Trump’s cabinet-level appointments, calling them a “low-class orgy of first-class kleptocrats.” Much of the book rehashes their venality: Cabinet secretaries Tom Price (Health), Ryan Zinke (Interior), and Steve Mnuchin (Treasury) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money for dubious junkets on private jets and military aircraft; HUD chief Ben Carson dropped $31,000 on office furniture; EPA administrator Scott Pruitt overspent lavishly on bodyguards and armored SUVs, then had government employees help him with personal errands. Nazaryan’s graver argument is that the administration has crippled government agencies by undermining bureau experts, staffing them with ex-lobbyists and subordinating them to industries they oversee, all to advance the Republican deregulatory agenda. In keeping with the overall outraged tone, he treats every axed regulation as equally problematic without considering their relative importance or the controversies surrounding them; this is more a blanket condemnation than a nuanced consideration of each case. Readers seeking a substantive politicohistorical analysis of the administration’s effects might prefer Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, but furious left-leaning readers seeking Trump-related schadenfreude will thrill to this takedown. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"An essential exposé of the first two years of the Trump administration.... the first to fully capture just how dysfunctional - and destructive - Trump's executive branch has turned out to be."—The Washington Post

"Alexander Nazaryan offers a field guide to the black lagoon of Trumpworld."
—The Guardian

"[The] most authoritative look at the Trump cabinet, period."—AOL Build

"A fascinating read."—Charlie Sykes, "The Bulwark" podcast

"Nazaryan shows clearly how Donald Trump, with his 'intentionally nonlinear presidency,' established a Cabinet consisting of crucially inexperienced individuals in public service, each remarkably unqualified to assume key pivotal decision-making roles in politics ... Nazaryan provides glaring examples of the rampant conflicts of interests and ethical red flags... A fresh spin on a dire situation .... A dizzying, tragicomic crash course in contemporary political incapacities."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
A disheartening portrait of the alternately incompetent and corrupt Cabinet of the current administration.

In his scathing critique, Yahoo News national affairs correspondent Nazaryan (co-author: Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, 2019, etc.) shows clearly how Donald Trump, with his "intentionally nonlinear presidency," established a Cabinet consisting of crucially inexperienced individuals in public service, each remarkably unqualified to assume key pivotal decision-making roles in politics. In an assembly both "overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly old," each member was lauded for their elite status and financial worth and, to the author, "wealth that was tacky and vulgar, wealth desperate for recognition, wealth that could only have been an insult to the average citizens whose tribune Trump vowed to be in Washington." Nazaryan provides glaring examples of the rampant conflicts of interests and ethical red flags by meticulously detailing the head-scratching nomination hearings of Betsy DeVos, a fundamentalist conservative Christian with a skewed view of an education official's priorities; Steve Mnuchin, secretary of the Treasury, who filed false financial asset disclosures upon his appointment; Rick Perry, the Department of Energy secretary who was blatantly unsure of what his position actually governed; wealthy investor-cum-commerce secretary Wilbur Ross; and Department of Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson, who lacked any governmental or federal agency experience whatsoever. While this type of bureaucratic runaway train is not news to political watchdogs, the author manages to put a fresh spin on a dire situation with snarky humor and wince-inducing facts, though his intense contempt at times borders on unnecessary mudslinging. While he also identifies countless other impurities infiltrating the political stream—Priebus, Pruitt, Spicer, Bannon et al.—thankfully, he balances these out by documenting how imprudence and circumstance caught up to the pack and an incremental exodus ensued. Many others surprisingly remain in power, and Nazaryan is pleased to call out the remaining political "backbenchers of public and private life" whose tenures continue to crumble beneath the weight of unmet expectations.

A dizzying, tragicomic crash course in contemporary political incapacities.

Kirkus Reviews