UnPresidented

I have just finished “Unpresidented” which has taken over my life for the last week or so. What a rollercoaster of a read. it provides a forensic close up view of the US election written by the BBC's eminent Washington correspondent who is always close to the action - sometimes a bit too close at times given the COVID scares. If it was fiction it would be laughed out of court given how totally incredible what has transpired over the past few months. You really could not make much of this up.

This is the third of a trilogy of books by Jon Sopel and it completes a truly important body of work. it is extremely prescient in how it predicts that Trump will respond in the face of defeat and I just hope and pray there isn’t a final chapter still to be written given last week's storming of the Capital.

I thought Unpresidented was excellent – and far more interesting and involving than I expected. It is in the form of extracts from Jon Sopel’s journal of the 2020 Presidential Election, starting about 18 months out and ending as Biden and Harris make their victory speeches. It is vivid, insightful and – for me – increasingly gripping as the extraordinary events of 2020 unfold.

Sopel writes very well. I have always found his reporting for the BBC interesting and penetrating and the book has the same qualities, but magnified rather because he is less restrained by the requirements of impartiality. He manages to be objective (although rabid Trump-worshippers probably wouldn’t agree), but is able to point out more forcibly (and often wryly and wittily) some of the absurdities and outrageous behaviour of the Trump administration. He is also able to give a lot more inside information from off-the-record conversations which make the picture all the richer (and often, all the more horrifying). Most people, like me, will remember much of what is described in the book, but having it brought so vividly to life and so shrewdly dissected made this very fresh for me and I ended up wanting to read more to see what happened next.

I found the impact of all this very powerful. A very potent picture emerges of Trump’s behaviour as a man who is interested only in himself, in being adulated by supporters and in being seen as a “winner.” Sopel points out, for example, that a news conferences when over a thousand Americans are dying every day from Covid-19, Trump never addresses this but is interested only in speaking about how mean the media are to him. The context of the pandemic makes the lies and utter lack of principle deeply shocking and the picture of the USA so bitterly divided – especially over race – is stark. Sopel also makes clear that Trump is a formidable figure who is extremely powerful, vindictive, intolerant of any dissent or of anyone who takes his limelight, and possessed of phenomenal energy. The last four years seem much more clearly focussed in my mind after reading this book.

I read and am writing this in the period between the storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters and the inauguration of Joe Biden. It is a time of extreme tension and we will see what happens next. In the meantime, I found this picture of how the USA arrived at this point to be excellently painted and wholly gripping. I very rarely read political books, but I can recommend this on very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Ebury for an ARC via NetGalley.)

"UnPresidented" is basically Jon Sopel's diary of the 2020 US election race, the election, and a few days after. Sounds dull? It's anything but. Jon Sopel handles the events (public and personal) with a great deal of humanity that makes this book impossible to dislike in any way. I'd been following the election quite closely, but even so, there were things I'd missed hearing about. Vital reading for enthusiasts of politics, the USA, or humankind in general.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.