My Review of “A Warning” by Anonymous

Based on the arrival of my library copy of “A Warning” this weekend, it’s clear that the controversial book about Donald Trump written by “Anonymous” is now in wide circulation, and hence there will soon be a new wave of reviews.

Recall that what amounted to a sneak preview of the book came late in 2018 after the New York Times departed from normal practice and published an opinion piece credited only to “A Senior Trump administration official” that gave an inside look at what those unfortunate enough to be subordinate to Trump have to endure on an almost daily basis. Talk about the worst job in the world!

At 250 pages it’s a quick read. At one level, and as a friend of mine who also got an early copy remarked, there’s not that much new to anyone who has been following this train wreck of a presidency on CNN or MSNBC.

Indeed, many of the early reviews based on pre-release copies gave us a good flavour of what you can expect in this book. My favourite passage in the book used not the imagery of a train wreck but an even more dramatic one of air traffic control. To wit:

‘The day-to-day management of the executive branch was falling apart before our eyes. Trump was all over the place. He was like a twelve-year old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.’

The book includes eight chapters, beginning with the collapse of the steady state (you remember the “grownups” who were supposed to act as guard rails, many now since departed), moves on to Trump’s numerous defects in character, his Fake Views, his Assault on Democracy, his weakness for Strongmen, and a chapter on how he has divided America with a “New Mason-Dixon Line.” Then he surveys the apologists and his enablers who put ambition and fear over service to country, and ends with an appeal to the Electorate.

Surprisingly, the author isn’t that keen on the prospect of impeachment: even though the book is current enough to include the early innings of the Ukraine scandal. Instead, and perhaps sensibly, the appeal is to American voters to come to their collective senses and vote him out in the 2020 election.

Three years too late?

A cynic might quip that the very title “A Warning” comes at least three years too late. But for anyone who believes another four years of this madness will all but destroy American democracy, the title is apt if understated. Perhaps a Trumpian superlative would be an improvement: something like “An Urgent Warning.”

One of the inevitable parlour games with this book is guessing who the author is, and one can be sure an enraged White House bent on discovering the identity of the Ukraine Whisteblower will be equally intent on identifying and destroying the anonymous author of A Warning.

Certainly I’ve seen the name Kellyanne Conway proposed in this context, seeing as her husband George is a very public critic of the Trump White House. Hard to tell from the book, though, as even the author’s sex is carefully masked. It also artfully refers to Kellyanne more than once in the third person, which doesn’t eliminate her as a suspect since it amounts to what could be a cleverly planted red herring. Or not!

Then there’s the problem of preaching to the converted. For anyone who is a regular reader of the New York Times and Washington Post (as I am), or tunes into the aforementioned CNN or MSNBC, A Warning is mere more confirmation of what we all know or suspected. Perhaps, as David Kay Johnson has written in another book, “It’s even worse than you think” and there is a certain amount of entertainment value in confirming one’s prexisting impressions of the ongoing Trump nightmare.

But the flip side — as the Mason Dixon chapter makes clear — is that it’s unlikely Trump’s so-called “Base” will either read the book or pay any attention to it. One hopes that families divided by this issue may slip a few copies to family members on the other side but I’m not hopeful that will be enough in itself to sway the election. It may even make things worse by confirming the GOP’s ongoing accusations that the press (including book publishers) are “out to get them.”

Investment implications

Personally, and as I remarked on Twitter the other day, after reading A Warning and then watching Sunday night’s CNN special, “All the president’s lies,” I’m just about “Trumped out” as I’m sure most people are. You can read my summary of dozens of other Trump books in the “Related Articles” links below, in particular my take on the investment implications of all this. My guess is that Trump’s ongoing attempts to politicize the Fed will mean he will do whatever it takes to keep the stock market elevated and the economy out of recession at least until he is re-elected.

Or, like Hitler in his bunker as the Allies closed in on Berlin, he’ll go down and take the whole world with him. All bets are off if Trump wins re-election and as Anonymous writes on page 7:

By then the guardrails will be gone entirely, and freed from the threat of defeat, this president will feel emboldened to double down on his worst impulses. This may be our last chance to hold the man accountable.

As always, a balanced portfolio that includes exposure not just to stocks but to cash/bonds/gold/real estate seems to be the prudent course, at least for the Baby Boomers who are at or near the cusp of Retirement or Semi-Retirement. As for older retirees, why take on risks you don’t need to take? Or as my friend the advisor says: “After a 10 year bull run regardless of Trump,  rebalance to a lower target equity allocation than one would normally have.”