TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully

TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully
TRISTAN SNELL
Melville House
$27.99 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A former prosecutor provides an essential guide to ensuring that Donald Trump—and other oligarchs of his ilk—no longer beat the rap and face serious jail time for their crimes.

For a half-century Donald Trump has evaded justice. Now he finally faces trials for his lies, cons, and misdeeds—but many fear Trump will never face any real consequences. Can prosecutors and litigants ever hold the powerful accountable? Or is our system so broken that some people are now above the law?

In TAKING DOWN TRUMP Tristan Snell argues that Donald Trump can be defeated—and shares the secrets for how to beat him.This is the first book ever from a prosecutor who defeated Snell led the prosecution of Trump University, resulting in a game-changing $25 million settlement that was Trump’s first major legal loss and still the largest ever, getting thousands of victims their money back.

Here you’ll learn the 12 rules for how to beat Trump—and how some prosecutors and litigators are following this playbook, while others failed, can voters and activists hold prosecutors accountable? How do you persevere against all the stonewalling and counterattacks? How do you get a key figure to cooperate and cough up critical evidence?

Snell faced this problem with Trump University, but with one question, he got the evidence and broke open the case. How did he do it? Whether you’re a concerned citizen, a lawyer or prosecutor, or an activist or advocate, Snell shows how America’s systems can still work to bring even the richest and most powerful to justice, and why those systems are worth preserving and improving. Ultimately, this is a roadmap for how America can begin to escape Trump’s wilderness of fraud and fascism.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have seldom wanted to read a book more than I wanted to read this one. It is no secret that, since 2016, I have opposed 45 and his MAGAt cultists being in power, dismantling and corrupting the systems of justice...flawed as they unquestionably are...in pursuit of permanent power for their repugnant, regressive, evil system of oligarchic fascism.

What I hoped to find was a source of hope for our collective future. What I got was a roadmap for getting to the better, more just future I believe we all deserve. So this read overdelivered on my expectations.

The rules themselves are not so much the focus of the read, for me personally, anyway. I needed this read as a reminder that, in spite of triumphalist media coverage (The New York Times newsletter last week headlining what 45’s second-term agenda *is*, not would be, is my latest example), there are those in position to defeat the horrible wretch at his con-man worst, using legal, honest, above-board means to do it.

At every step, every rule, I paused to appreciate Author Snell’s clarity, concision, and fervor. No words wasted in self-congratulation. No fancy rhetorical flourishes to show off his cleverness. The author must, of necessity, throw at you a large legal vocabulary. No one can tell this story without doing that very thing. What he does is explain it as we go along: Simple, direct prose clarifications, telling what his methods were that he used to hand the rotter whose vile education scam he took down entirely his first-ever serious, consequential legal defeat. I was blissed out as I read his repeatable roadmap to defeating the entire edifice of illegality that prior prosecutors had failed to do.

Since it worked before, I am heartened when I see similar steps being taken now by other prosecutors. I cringe when I see evidence that they have fallen into the traps Author Snell points out. I pray like Hell that this book, or at least its ideas, have made it onto the radar of each and every prosecutor pursuig justice against 45 and his MAGAt followers in each and every dark, unswept corner of US democracy where we know they are.

As citizens and as readers, we should all take in these clear-eyed, aphorism-ready rules, and run with them...most especially Rule #6, Play the Long Game: Fight the Fight on Statutes of Limitations. The analysis of the largely successful strategy 45 has used to run down the clock on everything he possibly can, can be fought. Author Snell explains how.

This information should be of interest to all of us as we watch the same playbook being used right this minute. It should also be of interest to all of us who resist the status quo as abused by the very rich and very powerful to get their profits ever higher. The techniques Author Snell used are repeatable, expandable, and very usable in all our advocacy efforts.

I know most do not like to think about hard subjects, but they will be there whether one thinks about them or not. The question you can affect is not whether they are there, but how you can best resolve, or partly resolve, or contribute to resolving them. Reading TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully will equip you to make a positive contribution to resolving them, not merely enduring the results of inattention and inaction.

Live today at The Oak Wheel! BAD THINGS HAPPEN by Kris Bertin, first story collection

Rating: 4* of five

My review of BAD THINGS HAPPEN is live now at The Oak Wheel. This CanLit collection, the first from author Kris Bertin, is worth ordering now before it has to go into a second printing. He's that good.

Biblioasis gets a big thank you for sending me my review copy, and I hope my almost-unqualified rave will be helpful. I want to support presses that find and publish authors of this quality. Please follow my lead!

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS by Cecelia Holland...the past as prologue, I fear (and I hope)

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
CECELIA HOLLAND
Kindle Single
99¢ available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 wrenched American history onto a new course. Focusing on events in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, this essay brings this dramatic and bloody confrontation to life, as ordinary people, driven to the wall by oppression, rose against their masters. This was the opening act in long years of savage struggle for the rights of labor that continue to this day.

My Review: Holland's historical fiction was my eureka moment of reading about history. The Firedrake, her 1965 novel of the Norman Conquest from the PoV of an Irish mercenary, woke me up as a 12-year-old voracious reader. I knew, from long-ago picture-book reading about the Bayeux Tapestry, that history was a story. That revelation made me an eager reader of all things historical (I checked out the Larousse Encyclopedia of World History so often and for so long that the librarians finally refused it to me!), but it took a novel to raise awareness that history was people's stories, average people, no one "significant" or "important"--just folks. (Specifically, the scene on one of William's ships crossing the Channel where the PoV character pees over the side when he wakes up, how human and familiar is that?)

So I saw this essay as I was browsing the Kindle store, and knowing that Holland had an entire series about the influence of the railroads on 19th-century California, I knew this would be an interesting piece of her research that didn't fit into the books.

Well. I swaNEE, boys and girls, there is interesting and there is interesting and this is the latter. The railroad riots of 1877 had barely been a blip on my mental radar as a part of labor history. (Regular readers of my reviews will recall that my views are to the left of the soulless vampire bastards that create and support the current economic system.) I had no idea of the depths of outrage that sparked this multi-city explosion. This wasn't an orchestrated, ideology-driven rebellion. This was the ultimate expression of individual people's fury and rage at the heartless, soulless exploitation of their labor for the luxury and happiness of a very, very few.

I imagine I could stop there, and most of y'all would understand why I gave the piece four stars.

But the thing that novelists do, even when they venture into non-fiction, is structure reality into a narrative. It's the way humans like to get their information, as witness the existence and survival of narratives from thousands of years ago. "Generals" Brinton and Pearson, leaders of militias called upon to suppress the rioting in Pittsburgh, were polar opposites in their approaches to the situation. Pearson's local Pittsburgh militia had a strong base of local knowledge and Pearson himself was one of the few actors in the drama with a shred of common sense. Naturally, he was sidelined and ultimately sent home. Brinton, a Philadelphia import to the scene, was by-the-book and inflexible...until shit got real and people started fighting in earnest. His men were the only ones to shoot to kill.

That did not end well.

Pittsburgh blew up, fires were set, bystanders...a four-year-old girl among them...died. This was in defense of bosses who had cut working men's wages ten percent, and announced that labor cuts were imminent. Pronunicamentoes proclaimed from the luxury of their fabulously well-appointed private rail cars. Baltimore had similar events, though for a shorter time. Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the crisis began, fared slightly better. But all were railroad towns and each had a large population sacrificed to the larger profits paid to a very few.

Greed is disgusting.

And this all takes place against the backdrop of an economy in free-fall from the Panic of 1873, unaided by the scandal- and corruption-plagued Federal Government, and record-breaking profits for the wealthiest. Does this have a revoltingly familiar sound? People made homeless, left to starve, unable to find any work ringing bells too?

Holland's point is simple: Every time capital is left without strong and painful chains, people suffer. We forget or ignore this lesson to our societal cost, and we're paying that cost yet again.

Read this historical essay. Then think about the events in Greece. In Ukraine. The Occupy movement. Just for a moment, one small shining moment, THINK ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

THE OTHER WES MOORE, not my personal preference for positive reading about race in the US

THE OTHER WES MOORE: One Name, Two Fates
WES MOORE
Spiegel & Grau
$13.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.

Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?

That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.

Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

My Review: Chronic overachiever and Marine Wes Moore gets captivated by the fate of his fellow Baltimorean, who is a convicted murderer, Wes Moore. They meet and become friends, leading to this book.

More's the pity. This damn thing is like getting a sunshine enema. One feels far crappier about disliking this book than a mere novel, or a tendentious political screed from some libertarian or conservative wingnut *coughHannitycough*. I'm all for interrupting the prevailing narrative of Black failure and the misery of existing as a Black male in our society. I'd just prefer to have that experience without the regressive reminder that "there but for the grace of God go I" (wonderful, useful phrase but origin unknown despite my belief that John Bradford said it first). One certainly empathizes with Author Moore, his relief that he's not the one in the cell is palpable, but so is his compassion...and his quietly judgmental satisfaction. Or so it felt to me.

The author's breezy, anecdotal style is perfectly adequate to the task of telling his story. It's in no way unique or even very interesting, but the points are made, the language is limpidly clear, and I never once thought the publisher was crazy for acquiring but not copyediting (meaning there are only a few errors of spelling or grammar) the book. This is an increasingly rare feeling on my part.

So what's with the curmudgeonly reaction to it? I loathe being preached at. This book feels preachy and smug to me. I can almost feel Jesus in every word, and this is a most disturbing and disagreeable sensation to me. The entire time Author Wes is reporting the conversations he has with Murderer Wes, I wished the murderer was the one I was listening to...I am that averse to being chirped at.

I didn't like it, and I doubt I'd like either Wes Moore in the flesh either. I'm glad I read it, but I don't recommend it to anyone not in search of the Wonderbra experience: Uplifted beyond that which is natural (not to mention desirable).