Inside the Media’s View of Trump’s Triumph – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power
By Alex Isenstadt
(Grand Central Publishing, 289 pages, $27)

As readers of The American Spectator may have heard, Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States last November. That statement is anodyne now, a dry recitation of fact. But just four years ago, it would have been considered an absurdity, even more outlandish than the notion that the Trump who rode down the escalator in June 2015 would go on to be elected in the first place. Vice President JD Vance called it the “greatest political comeback in U.S. history,” a notion that seems inarguably correct. How did this come to pass?

Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power is one of the first of what is likely to be many such cases to try and answer that question. The title gets right to the thesis: Trump’s win was about revenge. For himself to be sure, but also for his supporters. Isenstadt writes:

in the end voters cared less about Trump’s comportment … than about what Trump represented to them. With his sweeping victory, Trump got revenge — on the legal system he argued was aligned against him, on the media that skewered him, and on the Democratic Party, which had defeated him four years earlier. But Trump’s win was not just revenge for himself. It was revenge for his millions of followers who saw him as their vessel — and for half the country, who saw him as the best bet to address the nation’s problems.

That’s a notion that many a conservative would nod in agreement with. A conservative, though, Isenstadt is plainly not. Revenge tries not to be overtly hostile towards its subjects — laudably, sometimes it even succeeds. However, Isenstadt credulously repeats the notion that Trump called white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people,” despite clear evidence to the contrary. He does allude to the idea that Trump’s comments describing a “bloodbath” in the auto industry if Biden were re-elected were taken out of context, but argued “it played directly into Biden’s playbook.”

While Isenstadt covers how Trump’s legal cases interacted with his campaign, he never goes into the substance of the campaign’s legal drama — he never quite grapples with the idea that rather than being a mere talking point, it might genuinely have been the case that the justice system was weaponized against Trump, and that the civil and criminal cases alike that were arrayed against him were less noble and fair-minded than their proponents let on. Isenstadt is careful to couch the views of Trump and his supporters using terms like “argued” and “perceived,” even when the perception is reality. (RELATED: Democrats Wage Lawfare Against Trump)

Revenge is best described as a play-by-play of the 2024 election as viewed by the Trump campaign. Sometimes it’s the perspective of Trump himself, but his top advisers, such as Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita also feature prominently. Sometimes the internal deliberations reported are just this side of gossip, but there are several amusing anecdotes that seem to ring true.

Trump is consistent in cracking jokes throughout the book. One that comes to mind is his reaction to the news that vice presidential contender and then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem had shot her dog Crickett. “‘That’s not good at all,’ Trump told Don Jr., an avid hunter. ‘Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything.’” Another humorous moment is the revelation, heretofore unreported, that the Trump campaign had serious communications about appearing on the podcast of Hailey Welch, known more commonly as the “Hawk Tuah Girl” for reasons Isenstadt mercifully declines to elaborate on.

One gets the impression from Revenge that Isenstadt spent a great deal of time wondering what the thesis of his book would be. That makes some sense — being embedded in the Trump campaign as it happened, he couldn’t have known exactly how it would end. Had Trump lost the general election — or the Republican primary, as ludicrous as that sounds — he would have had a different book to write, with a different theory of the electorate. But he didn’t, and so there isn’t.

This approach, however, lays bare what I suspect are some of Isenstadt’s own biases. Though they assuredly do not belong to him alone, what’s covered in the book versus what isn’t says a great deal. Relatively long sections are dedicated to the internal fallout from Tony Hinchcliffe’s “floating island of garbage” joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, and Ann Selzer’s eleventh-hour poll purporting to show then-Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. (RELATED: In Defense of Tony Hinchcliffe)

It quickly became evident once the votes came in that the political relevance of these stories was purely artificial. Trump surged with nonwhite voters generally, and Latinos specifically. He would win Iowa by over 13 percentage points, the largest margin of any presidential candidate in the state since Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide. (RELATED: What’s the Matter With Iowa Poll?)

In other words, these were significant events to the media, but not to voters. Perhaps the Trump campaign didn’t perceive it that way at the time, and that’s a fair enough argument. But it’s an odd choice to write a book about Trump’s victory while dedicating so much time to diversions. One suspects Isenstadt expected them to be of consequence and covered them as major events, and was then left holding the bag when they amounted to sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

In a certain sense, then, this is a sort of “media’s history” of the 2024 presidential campaign. If you followed mainstream media coverage between February 2023 and November 2024 closely, Revenge will frequently elicit an “oh yeah, that happened, I forgot about that.” If you’d rather not rehash what you already saw and lived through, you can probably skip it. But if you’re a political junkie who’s willing to look past the media cliches and read between the lines, Revenge is a fun read.

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