Play Book Tag discussion

There's nothing new here. I guess in 25 years when people have somehow forgotten the dark days of the Trump presidency this will be a good overview, but for those of us living through it it's unnecessary.

There was one crystallizing bit about the economy that I found illuminating. This was during a conversation between Trump and Cohn. Cohn was trying to explain that the economy is now a "service economy" which I knew but hadn't thought of in those terms. He told Trump:

“You have a Norman Rockwell view of America.” The U.S. economy today is not that economy. Today, “80 plus percent of our GDP is in the service sector.”


The conversation went on:

The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.......

Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”
Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”
Trump wasn’t buying it.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?”
“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

That has helped me to understand what "Make America Great Again" really means .... It means the economy 30 years ago and that will never be.

Your review reflects my expectations on the book.

I think also that Trump is looking farther back than 30 years...more like the days of the Robber Barons in the ,ate 19th/early 20th Century.

Nicole D. wrote: "There's nothing new here. I guess in 25 years when people have somehow forgotten the dark days of the Trump presidency this will be a good overview, but for those of us living through it it's unnec..."

Thanks for a very entertaining anecdote from the book. I don't like to read books that are written about the political climate while we are still "living through it".

However, I did find that anecdote completely amusing. If that is an example of Cohn's power of persuasion/explanation, I'm not impressed. I'm not sure which of these two people this reflects more poorly upon. We are a service economy because automation and outsourcing to countries with cheap labor eliminated the high paying non-service jobs, not because people don't want to work hard, not because they can sit at a desk as an easy alternative, and not because service/desk jobs pay the same amount (they don't). And then the punchline is the guy believed he could play football for 15 years - - ha ha ha, so that's his example of how long it took him to recognize something that probably was a lot more obvious than the economy.

I agree with the ultimate conclusion - - the economy has changed and the opportunities for bringing it back to the way it was are nil (though some manufacturing jobs may be able to be repatriated through tax policy). It will probably only get worse as robotics and artificial intelligence advance.

And yet the critics have been raving about this book, I wonder why.

I thought I really wanted to read it until a friend who is an editor remarked how poorly edited and how Woodward is so full of himself. :(

Theresa wrote: "Your review reflects my expectations on the book.

I think also that Trump is looking farther back than 30 years...more like the days of the Robber Barons in the ,ate 19th/early 20th Century."

nothing to laugh about, but Lol anyway;)

Booknblues wrote: "And yet the critics have been raving about this book, I wonder why.

I thought I really wanted to read it until a friend who is an editor remarked how poorly edited and how Woodward is so full of h..."

Because they all love Bob Woodward, and he is a hell of a writer...I am not expecting to like it as much as some of his others...#12 on my library's wait list, so I don't have to worry about it for awhile;)

In the Make America Great Again past, Woodward was a legend.
We just need some relevance. It wasn't a great book, fortunately the audio was fast. I gave it 3 stars out of a sense of nostalgia I guess.

Anita, I feel like people think they need to "dumb it down" when they are talking to Trump.

Ha ha, I suspect you might have that right, Nicole . . .