The first book by Masha Gessen that I reviewed in the Journal was “Where the Jews Aren’t,” an account of Stalin’s cynical attempt to co-opt the Zionist dream by settling his Jewish citizens in a remote backwater of the Russian Far East. Born in Russia and now living, teaching and writing in New York, Gessen is a leading historian and critic of authoritarianism, both in Russia and the United States.
Gessen’s latest book is “Surviving Autocracy” (Riverhead Books), portions of which previously appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, as well as other distinguished journals to which the author contributes. Indeed, it’s a timely book, arriving as it does at exactly the moment in history when American voters are being asked to decide whether President Donald Trump will serve a second term.
The book opens on an event still in progress — the global pandemic that already has killed more than 120,000 Americans and will surely kill more. Gessen compares Trump’s stance toward COVID-19 to the mishandling of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl during the last years of the Soviet regime: “[U]tter disregard for human life and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing the leader, to make him appear unerring and all powerful,” writes Gessen, who argues “[t]hese are the features of autocratic leadership.”
“Autocracy” is used pointedly in the title and the text of Gessen’s book. Trump “was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat,” Gessen insists. “And he won.” His “[c]ontempt for government and its work” was a danger sign during the 2016 campaign, and “[a]s president, Trump went on to denigrate the intelligence services, rage against the Justice Department, and issue denigrating tweets about officials in his own administration.” He filled his cabinet with “people who were opposed to the work, and sometimes to the very existence, of the agencies they were appointed to lead.”
Gessen’s book is considerably enlivened with asides and anecdotes that reflect the author’s deep contempt for Trump but at the same time, make the case for how profoundly flawed and dangerous the author thinks he is. In a chapter titled “The Styrofoam President,” Gessen describes how Trump wanted an exact copy of the sumptuous cake that was served at Barack Obama’s inaugural ball; Trump and Pence used a sword to cut it, but “only a small portion of the cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam.”
Geffen sometimes undercuts the argument by occasional moments of rhetorical overkill. The author feels obliged, for example, to point out that President Barack Obama’s inaugural dessert was “cake all the way through.” Almost inevitably, Trump is quoted as boasting about “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen” that was served to Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. More often, however, the case for Trump’s flaws and failings as the leader of the free world comes out of his own mouth, as when he accused the Democratic lawmakers who did not applaud during his State of the Union address as “treasonous.”
Trump, as it turns out, is not the only target of Gessen’s concern and criticism. Gessen points out the enthusiasm among Democrats for Robert Mueller was misplaced from the outset. What Democrats had forgotten (or never knew) is that “Muller’s leadership of the FBI … was in fact both a symptom and a cause of the processes that made Trumpism possible.” The author reminds us that Nancy Pelosi was hesitate to bring impeachment charges against Trump even after the Mueller Report was released: “Having a president who instructed his counsel to lie to Congress, a president who lied to the public himself, a president who was a con man, was, apparently, not an emergency.”
Gessen evens finds faults with the same media Trump himself calls an enemy of the people. “By choosing to act as though in the war on reality it was possible not to choose sides,” Gessen insists, “the [New York] Times — and with it, the American media mainstream – became, reluctantly though not unwittingly, the president’s accomplices.”
Masha Gessen’s book is considerably enlivened with asides and anecdotes that reflect the author’s deep contempt for Trump but at the same time, make the case for how profoundly flawed and dangerous the author thinks he is.
“Surviving Autocracy” is not merely an indictment of Trump; it is a short course in the core values of democracy. “Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal has written that a moral life demands overcoming the natural human tendency to ‘self-privilege,’ ” Gessen writes. “This understanding underpins the aspirational narrative of American politics.” The poem by Emma Lazarus that is displayed on the Statue of Liberty were “words of aspiration.” But Trump remains a cautionary example of what is going so terribly wrong: “In the absence of moral ambition, fear comes to the fore: the fear of others, and the fear ‘we’ want to instill in the other.” Thus does Gessen single out the border wall and the Muslim ban as “the litmus tests of Trumpism” as well as “tests of civil society’s ability to resist Trump.”
One of the running themes of “Surviving Autocracy” is the comparison between Trump and one of the foreign strongmen with whom he has conducted an ongoing bromance, Russian President Vladimir Putin: “[T]o them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics — and public politics is only the performance of power,” the author points out. Gessen quotes historian Timothy Snyder, who first sounded the alarm on Trump’s autocratic aspirations in 2016. “It’s not hard to see why Trump would choose Putin as his fantasy friend,” Snyder declared. “Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”
Gessen is not the first commentator to remind us that Trump’s point of origin and frame of reference is “the reality-television lens through which the new president viewed the universe,” but “Surviving Autocracy” insists Trump is not just another media huckster. To put it another way, the 45th president may love to play the clown when he takes the stage at a televised rally, but he is nothing to laugh about.
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.
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