It's Even Worse Than You Think by David Cay Johnston

His chapter on the goings-on at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is a textbook example of the sort of green-eyeshade reportage on which he built his formidable reputation. “The endgame is not just a smaller government, which Republicans always say they want, but a weak government.” “The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government,” Johnston argues. “Often the most important news goes unannounced, lying right out in the open in the government documents most journalists are loath to uncover and read.” It’s Johnston’s contention that much of the media’s coverage of Trump - fixated as it is on the president’s tweets and feuds - misses the real damage he’s doing to the country. “It is not enough just to cover politics and controversies,” he writes. A former New York Times reporter who in 2001 won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposés on tax loopholes, Johnston practices a brand of journalism that’s an amalgam of advocacy and forensic accounting. With “It’s Even Worse Than You Think,” David Cay Johnston has chosen a third, more difficult path. Another successful approach is provided by David Frum, whose elegantly written jeremiad “Trumpocracy” will give future historians ample evidence that not all Republicans fell in line behind their party’s president. One comes from Michael Wolff, whose jaw-dropping (and thinly sourced) tales of White House dysfunction in “Fire and Fury” cost Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime Svengali, both his media platform and his billionaire patron. During his one year in the White House, Trump has so thoroughly warped the space-time continuum of our news cycle that it seems preposterous that any words about his presidency, slapped between covers, won’t have been overtaken by events by the time they appear in print. It takes a brave writer, in 2018, to attempt a book about Donald Trump’s presidency. IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America By David Cay Johnston 306 pp.

It's Even Worse Than You Think by David Cay Johnston