Book Review: Betrayal: The Final Act of the T***p Show

 

Betrayal is a great follow-up to Jonathan Karl's first book about the 2017-2021 presidential administration. Where "Front Row" chronicled events at the beginning of the administration up to just before the first impeachment, this one chronicles the end, with a major focus on the 2020 election and the events that followed.

Karl, who was the ABC News White House Correspondent during the shit-show that was the Orange Genital Wart's administration, and who had interviewed the Orange Shitgibbon many times throughout his career, including for this book (for the MAGATs who want to scream "fake news"). He definitely had an inside track to a lot of information, some of which was probably not widely known until the January 6th congressional hearings. He details the in-fighting that was going on behind the scenes between the "normal" people who knew that t***p lost the election and the "crazy" people who were throwing shit at the wall to see if anything would stick in trying to get the results of the 2020 election overturned. And how the plans went from a pressure campaign on local officials in various states, to trying to use the courts, to going back to pressuring local officials, to finally trying to pressure Mike Pence, who found a spine for the first time in at least four years and did not go along with the crazy plans that were being thrown out by t***p and his band of dipshits. 

This book is different from the first one in which Karl was mostly presenting facts, but keeping most of his personal opinions out of the book. Here, Karl clearly says that things t***p and those around him were doing and saying were crazy, nuts, lies, made up, etc. And, even though he did not come right out and say "t***p show" is a euphemism for "shit show", it does not take much reading between the lines to figure that out.

The book is just over 300 pages and is a pretty quick and easy read. The is not much in the book that is new, especially if you kept up with the January 6th hearings, but there are some fine details that Karl reports in this book that flesh out some of the reporting that was widely known (if you get your news from reputable sources). It is definitely worth reading.