On Tuesday the Washington Post published an excerpt of “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” by their own Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The clip recounts election day 2020 pretty much from beginning to end and it’s uh, not really all that different from any other insider reporting we’ve read in the months since. Axios covered pretty well what happened inside the White House on the night of November 3rd, 2020 in the first episodes of their really solid dual podcast/article series “How it happened” and “Off The Rails” (though the first installment of each is almost verbatim the same material, they diverge in subsequent episodes about the post-election period). The New York Times also reported pretty early on about the MAGA Reich’s reaction to Fox News calling Arizona. This isn’t to say Rucker and Leoning’s is going to be a bad book, but this wasn’t a good pick for an excerpt given the ground already treaded elsewhere.

This excerpt comes on the street date of two other major releases – Wall Street Journal White House Correspondent Michael C. Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost” and not particularly reliable narrator Michael Wolff’s “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency“. Bender’s has had some excellent clips we’ve linked here on National Zero, we’ve purchased copies and will be sharing anything good we come across that hasn’t made it out of the previews. Wolff is another story. We’ve had some mixed opinions on his work, and while his first Trump book “Fire and Fury” caused a hell of a shitshow in early 2018, Wolff’s work has come under questions for accuracy in the years since. Key details from recent excerpt of the new book about election night ran contra to what was reported elsewhere, and arguably even what Fox News viewers themselves would’ve seen when the network confirmed the Arizona call. But if you’re looking for entertaining and accurate in spirit if not in actual verifiable facts then go with Wolff. On cue, Axios has a new clip from Landslide of Trump going apeshit on Brett Kavanaugh.

And if you don’t want to buy either, there’s also “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History” by the Washington Post’s Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, published last month, another Bob Woodward book – probably in September, Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal, coming in in November, three more completely separate books by New York Times reporters coming in 2022. Probably more than that in reality.