The Plot to Betray America

Thirty pieces of silver or a few billion rubles: By counterterrorism expert Nance's account, either adds up to treason. In his predecessor volume The Plot To Destroy Democracy: How Putin's Spies Are Winning Control of America and Dismantling the West (2018), the author gave Donald Trump some benefit of the doubt with the thought that perhaps he'd unwittingly fallen into schemes on the part of Russian intelligence, being "too stupid to suss it out." Here, in an account that begins with Trump's plea during the 2016 campaign for Russia, "if you're listening...to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Nance holds that Trump's open act of soliciting the aid of a foreign and rival government was an act of treason--and a knowing one as well. The pairing was natural, by the author's account, since Russia harbored the same hatred for nonheterosexuals and nonwhites that the Republican Party so openly manifests. Nance's argument is scattershot and heated, but he does a good job of showing how the Russian campaign to infiltrate the Trump campaign was staged and was so willingly accepted, with key agents taking roles in the Miss Universe contest, swaying the National Rifle Association, and conning Donald Trump Jr., "an avid shooter of defenseless animals." Moreover, he shows that Trump had opened the door for all of this collusion decades earlier, when he signaled that only he could make the decisions necessary to fix the world's problems, taking out a full-page New York Times ad in 1987 to condemn NATO and demand that the U.S. "stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves," exactly in keeping with the Russian line. Trump emerges as treasonous, to be sure, as do others in his administration, notably Attorney General William Barr--and the book is timely, inasmuch as they're now busily explaining new charges of collusion with Ukraine and other nations in the 2020 campaign. Occasionally overwrought but right on the money in enumerating Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors.

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November 15, 2019
A lot has happened during the nearly three years of Donald Trump's presidency, virtually all of it designed to undermine our democracy, counterintelligence expert Nance (The Plot to Hack America, 2018; The Plot to Destroy Democracy, 2016) argues. With this book he concludes a three-part investigation with a compendium of the concerted efforts of Trump and his inner circle to subvert the presidency and turn the White House into a vehicle for personal gain. From Russia's interference in the 2016 election to the spin following the release of the Mueller report, Nance reveals how the Trump administration has operated with deflection and efficiency, deploying a team of dissemblers to tout the president's propaganda about fake news and no collusion while simultaneously obstructing any and all attempts to investigate mounting violations of constitutional law and presidential norms. Succinctly recapping the many interconnected Trump scandals and instances of irresponsible and dangerous behavior, Nance methodically illuminates established facts and their consequences and offers new revelations and insights in an evidential fashion. The result is sobering, consequential, and urgent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)