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The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 Hardcover – September 20, 2022
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The inside story of the four years when Donald Trump went to war with Washington, from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale, told by revered journalists Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker—an ambitious and lasting history of the full Trump presidency that also contains dozens of exclusive scoops and stories from behind the scenes in the White House, from the absurd to the deadly serious.
"A sumptuous feast of astonishing tales...The more one reads, the more one wishes to read."—NPR.com • "A beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy." —The Guardian
The bestselling authors of The Man Who Ran Washington argue that Trump was not just lurching from one controversy to another; he was learning to be more like the foreign autocrats he admired.
The Divider brings us into the Oval Office for countless scenes both tense and comical, revealing how close we got to nuclear war with North Korea, which cabinet members had a resignation pact, whether Trump asked Japan’s prime minister to nominate him for a Nobel Prize and much more. The book also explores the moral choices confronting those around Trump—how they justified working for a man they considered unfit for office, and where they drew their lines.
The Divider is based on unprecedented access to key players, from President Trump himself to cabinet officers, military generals, close advisers, Trump family members, congressional leaders, foreign officials and others, some of whom have never told their story until now.
- Print length752 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication dateSeptember 20, 2022
- Dimensions6.4 x 1.8 x 9.51 inches
- ISBN-10038554653X
- ISBN-13978-0385546539
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Air Mail
"Well-paced and engagingly written...the most comprehensive and detailed account of the Trump presidency yet published."
—The Washington Post
"[A] detail-rich history of the Trump administration...Comprehensively researched and briskly told...Squeezing the tumultuous events of the long national fever dream that was the Donald Trump presidency between two covers...would tax the skills of the nimblest journalist. Yet the husband-and-wife team of Baker and Glasser pull it off with assurance."
—The New York Times Book Review
"The book everyone is talking about"
—Politico
"As a sumptuous feast of astonishing tales, it may hold wonderments indeed for those first contemplating the enormity of the Trump phenomenon...But even a reader steeped in years of Trump coverage and well-versed in the precedent literature may be surprised at how compelling this narrative proves to be. The more one reads, the more one wishes to read."
—NPR.com
"A beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy."
—The Guardian
"A sweeping, dishy, 700-plus-page history of Trump’s almost cartoonishly chaotic White House"
—Axios
"Elegant"
—The New York Review of Books
"A comprehensive and scathing chronicle of the Trump administration...The result is the most encyclopedic account of the Trump presidency yet published."
—Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*
"...The Divider is the definitive account of Trump’s White House years...The story continues, but Baker and Glasser give readers an indispensable starting point."
—Booklist *Starred Review*
"An insightful account of a chaotic president by two of the best journalists writing on Washington today."
—Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Twilight of Democracy
"Finally, the synthesis we need about the Trump presidency. Adding their own reporting and interpretive skills to the record – not to mention fine writing – Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s The Divider is a book worth everyone’s serious attention."
—Carl Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Chasing History and co-author of All the President's Men
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ready, Set, Tweet
On the afternoon of January 20, 2017, just hours after taking the oath of office, Donald John Trump strode into the Oval Office for the first time as the forty-fifth president of the United States. In that profound moment of transition, he was not moved to comment about the history of the room or the burden he had just assumed. He did not ruminate out loud about the weighty decisions that had been made there nor his ambitions for the next four years.
Instead, the first thing that struck him as he looked around the storied space once occupied by Roosevelt and Kennedy and Reagan was the fantastic illumination.
“How do they get the lighting to do that?” he wondered.
Then he invited his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to take pictures with him.
Trump, America’s first reality television star turned president, had long fixated on lighting. Wherever he expected to be photographed, he evaluated the angles and shadows and brightness of the sun or artificial bulbs that would frame the shot. As he entered the White House, he did not know much about government or health care policy or foreign affairs. But he knew a lot about lighting.
Trump preferred not to allow artificial illumination when cameras were on him. The harsh light changed the ever-shifting color of his hair and highlighted the caked-on makeup that gave his skin an orange tint. He hated artificial lighting so much that news photographers were reproached for using a flash in his presence. Trump’s preference for natural lighting would soon lead him to hold many of his encounters with reporters outside on the White House’s South Lawn on the way to his helicopter. Never mind that the roar of the rotor blades made it hard to hear what he was saying—it was the visual that counted. He studied iPad images of himself before television interviews to check the best angle, preferring to be shot from his right side so the part in his hair did not show. And if he did not like a picture on the front page of the newspaper, he sometimes called the photographer to complain. “That made me look horrible,” he would grouse.
All presidents are image conscious. But Trump was something different, the first president for whom the shaping of reality to fit his demands became the preoccupation of his presidency. He would spend exhaustive amounts of time each morning combing and twisting the long strands of his awkwardly colored hair into place, a three-step process that “required a flop up of the hair from the back of his head, followed by the flip of the resulting overhang on his face back on his pate, and then the flap of his combover on the right side,” as his lawyer Michael Cohen once explained. Trump cemented it with TRESemmé TRES TWO hair spray (extra hold). An aide carried a travel-size can everywhere they went. When the wind was strong, Trump wore one of the red Make America Great Again baseball caps that had become a signature of his improbable candidacy. When his hair was not done, it fell over the right side of his head below the shoulder, making him look “like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old ’60s hippie,” as Cohen put it. Trump cut it himself with giant scissors, like the kind used at shopping mall ribbon cuttings.
Trump was also sensitive about his weight. He did not like being photographed from below, fearing that would make him look heavier than the 236 pounds he claimed to weigh. Hope Hicks, his communications adviser, had issued an edict during the campaign barring news cameras from the buffer zone in front of the stage beneath Trump; only after vociferous complaints did she finally allow photographers there for just a few minutes. For that matter, Trump did not like being shot from above either. The angle had to be on the same plane as he was, because he felt it looked better on television.
Whatever the circumstances, he almost always appeared in public in a dark suit with a tie knotted all the way to the top and hanging below his belt in a way that he thought was slimming—not for him the casual bomber jacket and blue jeans that George W. Bush and Barack Obama donned for photo ops. Even in Florida, in hundred-degree heat, Trump kept the suit on, usually an off-the-rack Brioni costing several thousand dollars and worn extra-baggy so that the pants flopped around his legs. The only time he did not wear the suit jacket typically was on the golf course, but even then he tried to stymie photographers from recording that image, ordering palm trees planted to block the view on his Florida golf course after television networks managed to shoot too many pictures of him there. Perhaps even more important than the suit was what aides called “the stare.” Trump did not smile often for the cameras; he preferred an intense, slightly menacing glare, which he thought made him look more imposing. “How’s the look?” he would ask aides.
It was all part of maintaining his own cartoonish mythology. In Trump’s telling, the new occupant of the Oval Office was an American superman—physically strong, mentally gifted, healthy as a horse, rich as sin, and a magnet for beautiful women. He worked around the clock and barely slept. He was not fat, his hair was natural, his skin color perfectly normal, his hands were not small and neither was any other part of his anatomy. The fact that he had an uncle who had taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology meant that he too must be brilliant. “It’s in my blood,” Trump once said. “I’m smart.” The fact that he went to an Ivy League university attested to his erudition. “I’m very highly educated,” he assured supporters. “I know words. I have the best words.” During the campaign, he secretly ordered up a much lampooned letter that he got his personal doctor to issue under his own name declaring that Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary” and predicting he “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
No one was to admit anything to the contrary. In the West Wing, it became clear that aides should never acknowledge any human frailties on the part of the president even to each other, much less to the American public.
“He looks exhausted,” a worried Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s executive assistant, told Hope Hicks one day.
Hicks promptly corrected her. “Donald Trump is never tired,” she said, “and he is never sick.”
From his first day in office, the new president wanted to project himself as the hero America had been waiting for, a strong man for troubled times. Even those working for him were not entirely sure what to make of it. Were these merely the weird quirks of a vain septuagenarian? Or the menacing affectations of an aspiring dictator?
After his upset victory, many in Washington simply refused to believe that Trump could be as self-absorbed, ignorant, untruthful, and dangerous as he had made himself out to be in the 2016 campaign. An American president who admired Vladimir Putin and declared NATO “obsolete”? A businessman who would flout the rules that applied to the rest of the federal government and take payments from foreign governments and lobbyists while in the White House? It was unthinkable, and therefore easier somehow to deny that it was actually happening. He was an accidental president but, it was assumed, he would learn. And if he did not, well, this was what checks and balances were for. Congress would push back; the courts would push back; the media would push back.
A few days after the inauguration, Trump sat down for the first time with his national security team in the Situation Room, the nerve center in the basement of the White House where the nation’s most sensitive decisions are made. The idea was a formal introduction to the problems facing the country around the globe, but Trump had neither the patience nor the preparation. Instead, he took off on tangents that would soon become familiar rants: He complained about NATO. He complained about faithless allies like South Korea, and even about how much they charged his hotels for their televisions. He talked, his aides talked, the meeting degenerated into a free-for all. When it was finally over, Reince Priebus, the new White House chief of staff Trump had hired from the Republican National Committee, asked several of the participants to follow him upstairs to his corner office to figure out what to do next.
General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the only holdover who had been present for Barack Obama’s National Security Council meetings. A brainy, by-the-books Marine in his fifth decade of service to the country, Dunford had observed Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama at close range. Although stunned by what he had just witnessed, Dunford struck a calming note.
“Listen, I don’t think we ought to be too concerned about today’s meeting,” Dunford told the others in Priebus’s office. “Once we understand the Trump Doctrine and the new president’s approach to the world, we’ll be able to anticipate what he’s looking for—and we’ll be able to frame these problems in a way that helps him.”
Jared Kushner, the ranking relative in a White House that Trump meant to run like his family business, looked at Dunford like he just did not get it.
“Well, that’s never going to happen,” Kushner said. “That’s not the way it works.”
And of course he was right. Trump was Trump—only now with the whole world watching. He would not learn. He would not change. There would be no doctrine, no process, no pivot. The general’s misreading of the new president showed how much official Washington had yet to absorb the new reality.
If they had heard Barry Sternlicht, they would have understood better. The day before the inauguration, Sternlicht, the billionaire cofounder of the Starwood hotel chain and a longtime golfing buddy of the new president, had explained the essential facts of Trump to an audience of power players at an off-the-record gathering in New York’s Metropolitan Club. Trump, he said, had been a friend for decades. “He’s the last friend who should be president,” Sternlicht confided.
Trump’s mind was “unusual,” Sternlicht said. Something was “wrong” in his head. He could not pay attention, could not do details, was not bothered by inconsistency. “He hasn’t read a book in thirty years,” Sternlicht said. “He’s not encumbered by the truth.” To golf with him was to see the real Trump. “Anyone who’s ever played with Trump knows the rules are for suckers,” he said. Trump would take the regulator off the golf cart so he could go faster. He sometimes raced off even before his partners took their swings. Trump always insisted that he won, whether he did or not. He did not even think of it as cheating.
Trump’s New York friends knew what Washington would find out: he planned to live in his own reality in the White House just as he had in Trump Tower. The uncomfortable truth for those encountering him for the first time—including much of his own staff—was that Trump really was what he seemed to be, and he had come to office without a plan for the four-year term that neither he nor his campaign had expected to win. It was an oft-cited fact that Trump was the only president never to have served a single day in either government or military service before being elected. If anything, that understated how unprepared he was for the business of governing. He was probably the least knowledgeable new president in the modern era.
He did not know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States, did not know whether Colombia was in North America or South America, thought Finland was part of Russia, and mixed up the Baltics with the Balkans. He got confused about how World War I started, did not understand the basics of America’s vast nuclear arsenal, did not grasp the concept of constitutional separation of powers, did not understand how courts worked. “How do I declare war?” he asked at one point, to the alarm of his staff, who realized he was unaware that the Constitution prescribes that role for Congress. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that Abraham Lincoln had been a member of the Republican Party. “He knew nothing about most things,” observed one top aide. Advisers soon realized they had to tutor him on the basics of how government worked.
As he settled into the Oval Office, Trump believed he had more power than he did, expecting to rule as he always had in the Trump Organization, a family-owned company with no shareholders where he called all the shots. He never liked the idea of sharing power. “Making choices is a lot easier when you have to answer only to yourself,” he once said. To the extent that government would be different than the private sector, he assumed he could run the country like the municipal chieftains he knew who ran New York. He often told the story of a Democratic Party boss in New York who kept a baseball bat under his desk to enforce his decisions. Trump figured he could do the same, laying down the law, dictating deals, and forcing others to bow to his will.
Nor did Trump show much inclination to learn on the job. He famously would not read briefing papers longer than a single page. He unashamedly boasted that he got most of his understanding of the world from television. Asked once where he turned to for military information, he said, “Well, I watch the shows.” Where other presidents received an intelligence rundown every workday and often on weekends too, Trump met with his briefers on average two and a half times a week in his first five weeks in office.
Barack Obama reviewed the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, the compendium of information solicited from the nation’s spy agencies, each night on a tablet computer. That was too much for Trump, who insisted his PDB be printed out in hard copy, yet still did not look at it in advance. “He doesn’t really read anything,” recalled Ted Gistaro, his first intelligence briefer. He would “fly off on tangents,” said James Clapper Jr., the holdover director of national intelligence who briefed the incoming president during the transition before later becoming a prime target of Trump’s ire. “There might be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour’s discussion.”
Product details
- Publisher : Doubleday; First Edition (September 20, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 752 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038554653X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385546539
- Item Weight : 2.46 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.8 x 9.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #38,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #169 in US Presidents
- #244 in U.S. Political Science
- #323 in Military Leader Biographies
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About the author
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times responsible for covering President Trump and his administration and a political analyst for MSNBC. He has previously covered three other presidents for the Times and Washington Post -- Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He is the author of six books, including "The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton" and "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House." With his wife, Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker, he is the author of "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III," released in September by Doubleday.
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Customers find the historical content interesting and detailed. They also describe the book as amazing and a story of how we almost lost our country. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and others saying the font is small and the book is biased.
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Customers find the historical content interesting, detailed, and a must-read for historians. They appreciate the research, structure, and narrative excellence. Readers also mention the author's legendary ability to synthesize ideas and organize intricate tidbits into a coherent narrative. They describe the book as well organized, well reported, and superbly written.
"I was very impressed by the detail and thorough exploration of the Trump presidency. If you had questions about Trump, this book is scary...." Read more
"...main topics in the book had been widely reported, but the authors include new details some of which, chances are, even if you are a regular consumer..." Read more
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The authors of the book are a husband and wife team of journalists. It is not the first book that they have co-written, and of course, it is only the topic of the book that even remotely makes that a thing. Unlike some of the other books by currently active journalists that tend to stick to a strict retelling of the facts without editorializing, the authors make their opinions of the former guy abundantly clear. But, they back up their factual contentions by citing to hundreds of sources. There are a ton of endnotes that mostly just point to where they gathered information from. Some of the notes also flesh out material in the text, but mostly they just cite a source and move on. Some of the source materials are prior books written about the prior administration, some are news and magazine articles, some are TV interviews and/or testimony, and still other material in the book comes from original interviews that the authors conducted when researching the book, including with the former guy himself.
Realistically, whether you are likely to like (or even read) the book will depend on your politics and/or opinion of the former guy. The book is fairly long (about 650 pages) and pretty dense. It is not a book that can be read in detail in a day or less. So, I would be very wary of any early reviews. The last handful of chapters that discusses the post-election events probably has the newest not-previously-reported material, which is also some of the most overall revealing material. It is definitely worth reading.
Too often people only attribute this to Trump’s personality. Obviously, his personality is a factor. However, there are two questions that need more analysis: 1) What were the nature of Trump’s conflicts with the ruling class establishment? How did these conflicts impact his regime including what he did and didn’t accomplish? 2) What does Trump’s accession to the highest office in the U.S. say about the state of U.S. politics and economics?
On the first question, a major source of the high turnover of Trump appointees was this conflict. The “adults in the room” were predominant for the first couple years according to Baker and Glasser. They stayed on as long as they did to control Trump. Trump was woefully ignorant of how government operated. He thought he could run it like his businesses. He was checked by laws, bureaucracy, courts, and Congress. This shows that calling the Trump administration “Fascist” was always wrong. In the first couple years, the checking of Trump often came from inside his administration. After that, according to the authors, the push back often came from the outside. Either way, he was never a dictator, and this frustrated him. Checking Trump came from two motives: keeping him from undermining the institutional integrity that the capitalists need to rule society, and dissuading him from policies that much of the ruling class rejected (tariff wars, pulling out on NATO etc.)
The other aspect of the first question is this: How much did Trump represent a wing of the ruling class or a strong opinion within the ruling class? How much did his transactional approach to foreign policy, his dissing of NATO etc. represent a significant ruling class opinion? It seems that there was at least a reasonably strong America First tendency in the ruling class that downplayed the need for alliances and multi-lateral operations. Some of this had come out during the GW Bush administration but not to the degree it did under Trump. The smaller, less globalized capitalists were the biggest supporters of this trend. The dominant section of the ruling class however wanted to maintain traditional foreign policy of support for NATO, opposition to Russia etc. Trump compounded his America First policy with a psychological affinity for dictators like Putin, Orban and Kim Jung Un. This in turn reflected the orientation of the same smaller scale large capitalists who backed divisive right wing bigoted movements and appreciated a turn toward authoritarianism even if they weren’t yet ready to junk bourgeois democracy. (“constitutional democracy”)
On the second question, Trump was an aberration personally, but not an aberration politically. With the onset of neo-liberalism and especially with the crisis of neoliberalism, ruling class consciousness diminished. When the overall system seemed to be failing, especially after 2008, the attitude of many capitalists was “screw everybody else — I want to get mine”. This meant that they were less willing to tax themselves for the collective good of American capitalism. Their primary concern was low taxes and weak or no regulation. This was exemplified in the infrastructure debate. Though Biden finally got this through, 33 Republican senators refused to vote for it. This makes no rational sense from a collective capitalist class viewpoint. Commerce requires roads and bridges and now internet. Private corporations are not going to provide this on their own since it is not profitable. Some of the infrastructure bill may have seemed like a benefit to workers which accounts for some of the capitalist resistance, but so much of it helped capitalism overall that it is still a mystery as to why senators voted no. This is especially true since infrastructure spending would directly profit a myriad of corporations. Most of the actual infrastructure work would be done by private corporations with government money. Public spending, private profit. The conservative opinion in the ruling class seems to be that showing government can do anything right will strengthen liberal intervention in the economy and higher taxes which will hurt their interests down the road. Again, this conservatism is most pronounced among the lower reaches of the corporate capitalist class, which in some cases gives funding to the even more extreme middle class right wing.
Trump represented the conservative wing of the ruling class. His accession to office was allowed by the growth of this non-class-conscious trend in the ruling class. He was a great representative of this individually selfish mentality. He served the needs and policies of the conservative wing (tax cuts, deregulation, less international commitments) while lining his own pockets in every way possible. This included ripping off his own supporters. The common idea that “Trump had no ideology” is just wrong. He clearly opposed what he called “the radical Left”, the “socialist Democrats” etc. Despite his claims to billionaire status, he was a member of the lower reaches of the large capitalist class and saw himself as representing their interests.
Trump was also enabled by the growth of a middle-class extreme right wing (small owners, managers, independent professionals etc.) This ranged from those close to traditional Republicanism all the way over to quasi-Fascists. This mass base was increased by the failures of neoliberalism. The economic and social position of large sections of the population were hurt under neo-liberalism. Neither Republicans or Democrats gave much relief to the declining middle class or higher paid workers. In part because the Left was too small to present an alternative, they turned to right wing “populism” led by Trump, a supposed outsider and anti-establishment figure.
This gave Trump the chance to get elected, even though he never had majority support. Too often, commentators imply that this movement arose on its own out of irrationality and is driving the whole Trump phenomenon. Though the mass base and the politicians at the top reinforce each other, the creation of this mass base comes from economic and social deterioration. Much of it is funded by conservative capitalists. Though the base of the right wing was middle class , it was able to attract some workers as well. The base in the middle class is shown by who was arrested after Jan. 6, 2021.
The election of Biden was a victory for more class conscious, globally oriented sections of the ruling class. However, the battle within the ruling class continues. This is shown in part by the current fight in Congress. The small corporate capitalist/ middle class alliance is willing to shut the government down to get policies more amenable to its base. Too many commentators see this as just irrational. “All they want is power” say some. Just as with Trump, there are real perceived economic interests behind this fight. The Democratic wing of the ruling class will likely be strengthened by the continuing conflict with China. The ruling class will feel pressure to unite to some degree and even sacrifice to meet this threat to its profit and power.
It is a tragedy that any workers have been sucked into Trumpism! His promotion of racism, misogyny, immigrant-bashing, LGBTQ bashing etc. is not only disgusting but will also divide workers and make it harder to win gains for the whole class. However, the liberal wing of the ruling class is also pursuing its own strategy for continuing and increasing the exploitation of workers. They have and will continue to push austerity. Under Democratic domination, the concentration of wealth has reached new extremes and is continuing. The Democrats are intensifying the conflict with Russia and may soon be in a more direct military conflict with China. These will divert resources from human needs and lead to the unnecessary death of perhaps thousands while risking nuclear annihilation. Short of that, an increased war drive will increase repression.
The difference between the Republicans and Democrats is a difference over how to increase the exploitation of workers and exactly how to use special oppression to do this. Workers should not support either wing of the ruling class. Workers need to have their own independent political movement to fight for the needs of the vast majority. In the longer run, workers need to abolish the capitalist system. Workers create the wealth. It is time that workers use what they have created to build a system based on human need instead of profit.
This book focuses on Trump as an individual without looking at the social, political, and economic causes of Trumpism. Its underlying bias is toward the liberal wing of the ruling class, seeing Trump’s politics as irrational for American capitalism. — an economic system the authors implicitly support. Despite its underlying orientation, “Divided” gives the raw material needed for a deeper understanding of Trump and Trumpism.
Top reviews from other countries
Cap doffed to the authors Baker and Glasser first class journalism,and a real insight into the White House under Trump.
This book reminds the reader of sheer amount that occured in the one term of Donald J. Trump, how he broke every norm and tradition surrounding the U.S Presidency and kept on going. Incidents which would have defined or even ruined another president , were simply forgotton about as the lastest incident occurred.
The authors do give Trump credit when and where it is warrented, such as his remaking( along with Senator Mitch McConnell) of large swathes of the federal judiciary including 3 SCOTUS appointments. The tax cuts and deregulation agenda are also covered in a fair and impartial manner.
But in the end this is a book focused not only on Trump the man, but the people and cabinet members who were charged with managing and running the ship of state and while some excesses were prevented chaos reigned for far too much of the time. A good first draft of history in the tradition of Lou Cannon who wrote about the Reagan Presidency, worth reading if only to be reminded of the stuff that has been forgotton