Timothy J Lynch

It was a young Abraham Lincoln’s prediction that the United States ‘must live through all time, or die by suicide’. Nick Bryant wants us to believe the latter is coming true. America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable. This time, we are reaching an ‘extreme polarization … 250 years in the making … a second civil war’. Rather than the hysteria for and against Donald Trump being an aberration, ‘the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today,’ Bryant argues, ‘are in fact a core part of America’s story’. It has been on this path since 1776; Trump is less a waypoint than a destination.

The United States is entering an important phase. By this time next year, with most presidential candidates declared, we will know whether the republic is post-Trump and returning to ‘normalcy’ or approaching peak-Trump and moving toward some sort of civil discord. I predict the former. The midterm elections in November 2022 revealed a nation grasping for the centre. The extremes of left and right did poorly. I expect this trend to continue through November 2024. So, for centrists, some New Year reasons to be cheerful. 

I was once subjected to a lecture by a Dublin taxi driver ‘on the extensive inequities of the Central Intelligence Agency’. Its every atrocity, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, was relayed to me. It was an object lesson in the popular contempt in which the CIA has been held since its founding in the 1940s.

In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.

The Trump presidency (2017–21) has generated more books across its four years than most presidencies have across eight. It is ironic that an avowedly anti-intellectual president, who advertises his dislike of reading, has had such a profound impact on political literature. These two books – Landslide and Peril – will likely remain the most read of that growing collection. As their titles suggest, each is a chronicle of the chaos that consumed the United States during and after the 2020 election campaign.

Because the United States was born in a revolution against Great Britain, the relationship between them, as the child decisively supplanted the parent, has remained key to world history for more than two centuries. Indeed, the ‘unspecialing’ of this relationship in recent decades, argues Ian Buruma, represents a psychological condition that British officials refuse to self-diagnose. He calls this the ‘Churchill complex’ – the persistent delusion, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that US power requires British facilitation and approval. Winston Churchill began it; his successors have yet to escape it.

Barack Obama has written the best presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, and since Grant’s was mostly an account of his pre-presidential, Civil War generalship – written at speed, to stave off penury for his family, as he was dying of throat cancer – Obama’s lays some claim to being the greatest, at least so far. This first volume (of two) only reaches the third of his eight years in the White House.

Whatever we might think of him, Donald Trump has proven to be one of the most transformative figures in recent history. In today's episode, Timothy J. Lynch talks to ABR Editor Peter Rose about three new and highly critical books on Trump: Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump, A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, and The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton. As Lynch writes in his review, 'There is a paradox that these books illustrate but cannot resolve: why is a man so chaotic, so reviled, so malignant also so transformational?’

In year four of their respective terms, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enjoyed a mixed press. Some accounts lauded them, others were sceptical. The assessments were uniformly partisan. The titles of contemporary books reflected how Republicans backed Bush (he was ‘The Right Man’), Democrats Obama (for successfully ‘Bending History’). Donald Trump, on the other hand, stands as one of the most vilified presidents in American history, from all points of the spectrum. Indeed, these books together make the case that the forty-fifth president is a man so psychologically flawed he poses a clear and present danger to American democracy.