Tuesday, October 10, 2017

POTUS the book critic: he can so, like, read, especially about himself.

The Art of the Donald


From publisher Simon & Schuster:
Christopher Bedford is editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller News Foundation and a senior editor at The Daily Caller. Along with writing a weekly column, he is the vice chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom national activist organization, is on the board of the National Journalism Center, and is a judge in the Kansas City Barbecue Society. His work has been featured in The New York Post, National Review, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Signal, MSNBC, and The Federalist, and he appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Business.
Of the book, the publisher says,

Motivational self-help advice from President Donald Trump, covering everything from leadership and self-confidence to how to succeed in business.

President Donald Trump knows about living the good life and achieving success. With his election to the presidency, he added to a life that already includes billions of dollars, worldwide celebrity, and a beautiful family, despite legions of haters. In The Art of the Donald, Daily Caller News Foundation editor-in-chief Christopher Bedford takes you inside the new president’s unorthodox mind, unlocking the genius of his approach to everything in life and offering you insight into navigating life the Trump way.

Featuring personal campaign-trail anecdotes and lessons from Trump’s long career as a businessman and politician, The Art of the Donald offers you life-changing pieces of advice, including Keeping your message simple and delivering it effectively; Using competition to govern yourself and chaos to confuse your opponents; Cutting out the middlemen and getting directly to the deal-makers; Redefining conflicts and transactions on your own terms; Solving problems with ingenuity instead of money; and Believing in yourself, no matter what your opponents try to say.

Written in the style of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and The Tao of Warren Buffett, this is a must-read for every Trump fan (and even the haters).

Bradford is a young man on the move who makes his living writing polemical journalism for Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller; was on the national board of Young Americans for Freedom (among his accomplishments was "upholding the Sharon Statement"); learned free market cashocracy at the Charles Koch Foundation ("studying management training, professional development and the knowledge and skills necessary to further free-market ideas and more effectively advance liberty"), worked for Ballotpedia, predicted The End for Homeland Security Today; and interned at Reader's Digest,
Verifying facts and contacting famous and powerful persons, as well as everyday people, to confirm quotes and run through stories; Searching for new and interesting stories that Reader’s Digest  could pursue in the United Kingdom and elsewhere; Providing the editors and writers with an American perspective in an otherwise entirely British office; and Sorting through comic artists’ submission to find comics both  relevant to, and suitable for, Reader’s Digest, UK’s readership.
The *resident is also enjoying a sort of literary reincarnation. Politico reports,

In July, a flock of internet detectives discovered the books. The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger was published in 1889, and quickly forgotten thereafter, as was its sequel, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure. They are not timeless, and were quickly overshadowed by more compelling contemporary entries in the fanciful-travel-stories-for-children genre, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Wizard of Oz. Their author, lawyer Ingersoll Lockwood, appears in history mostly for his role in a financial tangle that occurred in the aftermath of an elderly woman's death on the railroad tracks near Philadelphia.

The most pertinent detail for modern readers, of course, is that his books are Trump-adjacent, a coincidence that somehow led a few web denizens to conclude that they were not a mere curiosity, but compelling proof that our president might just be a time traveler.

In these books, the young German protagonist, Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, better known as Baron Trump, travels around and under the globe with his dog Bulger, meeting residents of as-of-yet undiscovered lands before arriving back home at Castle Trump. Trump is precocious, restless, and prone to get in trouble, with a brain so big that his head has grown to twice the normal size—a fact that, as we have seen, he mentions often. No one tells Trump that his belief that he looks great in traditional Chinese garb—his uniform for both volumes—is unwarranted.

Lockwood’s books are spring break meets Carmen Sandiego meets Jabberwocky; at the start of each story, Trump sets out eager to find new civilizations—and manages to get distracted by more than one lady along the way. One of the first places he visits in Travels and Adventures is the land of the toothless and nearly weightless Wind Eaters, who inflate to beach-ball size after a meal. They are generous hosts until Trump starts a fire. The intrigued Wind Eaters draw near, and promptly explode after the air they have ingested expands thanks to the flames. As Captain Go-Whizz, “a sort of leader among them,” chases the murderer, the dog Bulger bites one of the Wind Eaters until he deflates like a punctured balloon. The pair eventually escape, leaving the briefly betrothed Princess Pouf-fah without a mate, and Chief Ztwish-Ztwish and Queen Phew-yoo with many a funeral to plan.

This sequence of events—anthropological study, jilting, disaster, escape—is repeated for much of the two books, like when Trump meets the Man Hoppers, who have biker calves and puny T-rex arms, and soon runs away from their crying princess after first acquiring a book with centuries of priceless knowledge. A variation on this plot recurs when Trump visits the Round Bodies. (Perhaps a wandering life such as his was inevitable; as the book explains, he was born in the land of the Melodious Sneezers, whose alphabets consists of achoos of different length and tone.) Marvelous Underground Adventure is a slight twist on the theme, as all the societies are found deep below the dirt in Russia: the land of Transparent Folk, the ant people, and the Happy Forgetters, who dread remembering anything and will, like history, forget Baron Trump soon after he goes above ground.

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