A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker & Carol Leonnig

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump and the Testing of America
By Philip Rucker & Carol Leonnig
Penguin Press, 2020

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig were part of the Washington Post team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting about Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, and Leonnig has two other Pulitzers to her credit. This makes their new collaboration, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump and the Testing of America, one of the most-credentialed Trump-books yet to appear. 

By now, four years into Donald Trump’s nearly-inconceivable first term in the Oval Office, the pattern of such books is well-known. The authors might do some researching, but they’re pitching, selling, and marketing their books purely on the latest juicy bit of gossip, the hot sound-byte guaranteed to be the lead item in the news cycles generated by the advance leaks provided by the publisher. Those cycles are the fuel for all such Trump books, and the combustion is the simmer of impotent outrage felt throughout the country every minute of every day by the majority of the population who correctly see Trump as an existential threat to the survival of the idea itself of the United States. There’s been a boom of such books in the last three years, and this one by Rucker and Leonnig is, by virtue of their impressive credentials, one of the most noteworthy. 

But a noteworthy Trump book is still a Trump book, and by now one other thing is known about them: they’re every bit as sordid, opportunistic, and money-grubbing as their subject. They can’t help but be; if you touch the pitch of a lifelong grifter and conman like Trump, for a book contract, no amount of credentials will save you from being defiled. Rucker and Leonnig might want to raise public consciousness about a whole range of alarming aspects of Trump in power, but they also want to make a quick buck by scare-mongering. 

There are plenty of scares on hand in these pages, certainly. The book’s title comes from a claim Trump made about himself after a NATO summit in Brussels. “When a reporter asked Trump if he might attack NATO on Twitter after departing, just as he had maligned [Canadian PM Justin] Trudeau following the G7 in Quebec,” our authors write, “the president replied, ‘No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.’” 

In this case as in all previous cases, the burden of relaying the latest scandal-quotes falls on whoever risked talking with two very high-profile reporters, and one of the customary guessing-games when it comes to this kind of book is trying to figure out who those sources might have been. Who comes off well in the highest number of anecdotes? Who strikes a righteous or even borderline decent tone where it’s least expected? 

Take, for instance, the aftermath of Trump’s infamous Helsinki summit meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, when Trump sided with Putin against all of America’s own intelligence agencies on the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election and then ridiculously tried to lie about it: 

At about 8:30 in the morning on July 17, Trump called counselor Kellyanne Conway, who was at her West Wing desk, and told her to meet him in the private dining room off the Oval Office. The president was upset. He had been watching brutal cable television analysis about his “I don’t see any reason why it would be” comment.

“That isn’t what I said,” Trump told Conway.

“It is what you said,” Conway told him.

“I didn’t say that,” the president insisted. “Why would I say that?”

“That’s a great question,” Conway said. “Why did you say that?”

Trump had written down what he meant to say in Helsinki: “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He handed Conway the piece of paper.

So was Conway a source? Or perhaps Conway’s notoriously anti-Trump husband, the lawyer George Conway? The point isn’t the likelihood of such guesses being correct; the point is how debasing the guessing is.

The book’s subtitle alludes to the “testing” of America, and the concept comes from a “low-level cog” in the administration, an anonymous aide interviewed by our authors and willing to vent the almost anthemic frustration felt by a huge number current government employees:

Before Trump, this government aide had always felt the presidency had a kind of magic. No matter which party the president came from, he bore the weight of history on his shoulders, with the seriousness it deserved. But not anymore. “He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself that I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.”

“The time is coming,” this cog is willing to say anonymously. “Our nation will be tested.” In fact, as each new scandalous Trump book appears it becomes more obvious that the nation has already failed the important tests of Trump’s first term. Forty percent of the country’s population un-ironically considers Trump a god; the US Senate has voted to acquit him in an impeachment trial in which his lawyers failed to defend him on the facts; and the prospect of a 2020 Trump landslide looms. Not A Very Stable Genius nor a hundred more books like it will move that calculus a single digit - but at least the authors have racked up a #1 New York Times bestseller.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.