#robert draper

Those Essential Books pages will get updated someday. I’ve been saying that for four years, but seriously. I started doing it a few months ago, but Tumblr changed shit up and limited the number of links that you can put on each page, so it made it much more annoying.

Anyway, here’s a few recommendations for 43, 44, and 45:

GEORGE W. BUSH(The books by Peter Baker and Robert Draper are my favorites on 43, but otherwise none of these recommendations are in any particular order.)•Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (BOOK | KINDLE) by Peter Baker •Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (BOOK | KINDLE) by Robert Draper•Bush (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jean Edward Smith•Decision Points (BOOK | KINDLE) by George W. Bush•Front Row at the White House: A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush by Eric Draper [This is a coffee table book by President Bush’s official White House photographer, but it’s really great.]

BARACK OBAMA•Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (BOOK | KINDLE) by Barack Obama•Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (BOOK | KINDLE) by David J. Garrow [Just a heads-up: this book is tremendous and exhaustively researched, but it’s 1,500 pages long and weighs about 8 pounds. You can do curls with it.]•Barack Obama: The Story (BOOK | KINDLE) by David Maraniss•The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (BOOK | KINDLE) by David RemnickDONALD TRUMP•Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President (BOOK | KINDLE) by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher •Uncovering Trump: The Truth Behind Donald Trump’s Charitable Giving (BOOK | KINDLE) by David A. Fahrenthold (Fahrenthold was the MVP among journalists when it came reporting on Trump during the 2016 campaign and earned a Pulitzer Prize because of it.)[These are the only two books about President Trump that I’m ready to recommend so far, but I’m still working my way through a few and more will certainly be written in the years to come.]

Comrade Trump:

[From the article]  The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable:

Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy.

Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin.

The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event.

Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post.

Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration.

The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling.

Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff.

Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign.

Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020.

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper

US: https://amzn.to/30XRDdL