Contents
Part One: The Beginning and Beginning of the End
One: A Restive Lion Wintering in Mar-a-Lago
Two: Five Strategic Failures & the Fall of the White House of Trump
Three: An Insider’s Look at a West Wing Dumpster
Part Two: Prelude to a Post-Mortem
Four: The Coming China Wars Gets My Trump Ball Rolling
Five: A Two-Day Big Apple Popover Turns Into a Five-Year Tour
Six: The November 9thers Cometh and an RNC Original Sin
Seven: An Ambassador Strategy and Some Shuttle Diplomacy
Eight: What a Handshake Deal is Worth in Manhattan
Part Three: Let the West Wing Games Begin & Lessons Learned
Nine: American Carnage, Cheap Seats, and a Cabinet of Clowns
Ten: My Hard Pratfall From Trumpian Grace
Eleven: Process Delayed, Diluted, or Derailed Is Trump Policy Denied
Twelve: A “Where’s My Peter” Battle Cry and Oval Office Resurrection
Thirteen: Bad Personnel PLUS Bad Process Is Bad Policy Is Bad Politics
Part Four: From China Hawks to China Appeasers
Fourteen: The Road to Reelection Runs Through Beijing
Fifteen: A Wilbur Ross ZTE Belly Flop
Sixteen: Whiffing and Waffling on Huawei
Seventeen: My TikTok Aaron Sorkin West Wing Moment
Eighteen: A Slave Labor Debacle Debases the Situation Room
Part Five: That’s the Way the Blue Wall Didn’t Crumble
Nineteen: The Iron MAGA Triangle of Populist Economic Nationalism
Twenty: A Deplorable Basket of Buy American Executive Orders
Twenty-One: The Last MAGA Tango in Clyde
Part Six: The Hillary Clinton Campaign on Quaaludes
Twenty-Two: From Trump Force One to Hillary’s Hindenburg
Twenty-Three: The Bannon Cavalry Rides into a Kushner Ditch
Part Seven: Playing Checkers in a Speed Chess World
Twenty-Four: Stimulus Interruptus and the Trump MAGA Trillion
Twenty-Five: V-Shaped Kudlow Nonsense in a K-Shaped World
Part Eight: Ink By the Barrel, Cable By the Mile
Twenty-Six: The Inglorious Never-Trump Media Bastards
Twenty-Seven: Dominate the News Cycle or Be Dominated
Twenty-Eight: A White House Confederacy of Media Dunces
Twenty-Nine: Fauci, Russia, and the Ghost of Bush v. Gore
Part Nine: Taking It Back in 2024
Thirty: Tearing Down the Pelosi House in 2022
Thirty-One: No Facebook, No Fox, No Problem