Scott Rhee's Reviews > Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency

I’m often confronted by people who are Trump supporters who ask the question, “Who would vote for Biden?”, as if it were rhetorical, as if—-the implication being—-nobody in their right mind would vote for Biden. I always seem to throw these people off when I answer, “I would. I voted for him in 2020, and I will vote for him again this November.” More often than not, they don’t know how to respond, or they respond in the only way they know how: dumbfounded, they walk away, not knowing how to engage in a civil conversation that won’t result in them calling me a “socialist” or an “idiot” or a slew of other derogatory terms meant to shut down the conversation before it begins.

I understand and appreciate the age argument. Biden, at 81, is the oldest presidential candidate ever. Trump, at 77, is the second oldest candidate. It’s worrisome. It’s a serious flaw in the system that both parties can’t seem to find any viable candidates under the age of 60.

What’s more worrisome to me is that Trump supporters, and Trump himself, have made it clear that the idea of an autocratic dictatorship is perfectly acceptable, as if they fully understand and appreciate what that means. Most if not all Americans have had it pretty easy under our democratic republican system of government, which is the closest that any nation in history has ever come to a successful true democracy. True democracies don’t work. We know that. What we have works, but a growing number of people seem to think that Trump-as-dictator would solve a lot more problems than it would create. This is, according to George Orwell, how totalitarian systems start.

Michael Wolf, in his book “Landslide”, which is the third book of his Trump White House trilogy, astutely documents the final chaotic year of Trump’s presidency, starting with the global Covid-19 pandemic and Trump’s catastrophic response to it and ending with the horrific events of January 6, 2021.

Essentially, what Wolf is describing is eerily Orwellian: a powerful elected official who is coddled by sycophants afraid to say “no” to him and that is unsullied by facts or any attempt to conform to physical reality but, rather, creates his own version of reality that everyone around him conforms to, out of pure fear of retribution.

I don’t need to ever ask the question, “Who would vote for Donald Trump?” because I already know the answer. These are the people who are afraid of the changing world around them and the feeling that they are losing their place within that world, and they are perfectly okay with someone on high telling them what to do, especially when what this person is telling them to do is feeding those fears.