Conrad Black - A President Like No Other: Donald J. Trump and the Restoring of America

PRAISE FOR

A PRESIDENT LIKE NO OTHER

Is there anything new to say of the most written-about man alive? Yes. Conrad Black is a political observer, an historian, and a businessman whos done business with Donald Trump (he sold him a building), and was one of the first to take his campaign seriously. Black understands the 45th president not only in the context of his pre-political life and family but in the great sweep of American history. This is an admiring but undeluded biography whose every page has either a shrewd new insight or revealing detail, and often both. Its also beautifully written, with both a droll wit its subject will surely appreciate and an understanding of the visceral connection between Trump and the millions of Americans who felt abandoned by both parties. A great and knowing read, and a biography that has the size of its subject.

MARK STEYN
bestselling author of America Alone, After America, and The Undocumented Mark Steyn

This hard-hitting, well-written, and admirably objective book, written by a remarkably talented historian who moreover knows his subject well, will inform all subsequent serious biographies of Donald J. Trump. There is ammunition galore here both for those who love the president and those who loathe him.

ANDREW ROBERTS
bestselling author of Napoleon the Great and Churchill: Walking with Destiny

Most readers, like myself, have never met either Conrad Black nor Donald J. Trump. But after reading this engaging biography, those of any political persuasion would wish to do both.

PROFESSOR VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, from his foreword

An unremittingly honest yet admiring account of Donald J. Trump. Incandescent intelligence and uplifting prose and vocabulary escort the reader on Trumps journey from hard-charging businessman to equally robust president. Deeply informative about things not well known or not reported, the book is a luminous account of our fascinating and always interesting chief.

WILLIAM BENNETT
bestselling author and former United States Secretary of Education

Conrad Blacks new book on Donald Trump is a brilliant analysis of the remarkable talents and unusual foibles that brought Trump to the presidency of the United States. Black knows Mr. Trump andwith his uncommon knowledge of American historyis able to place him in a fascinating context. Readers will be delighted with Blacks skills as a writerhis scholarship, sense of humor, and irony are on prominent display. A must-read at this seminal juncture in American history.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE BRIAN MULRONEY
former Prime Minister of Canada

Blacks accounts of the primaries and the general election, not to mention his heros unremittingly embattled presidency, are vivid, judicious, and perceptive. For those who did not follow the election closely, or somehow missed its import, Blacks book is the best place to start to understand an unprecedented president.

EDWARD SHORT
City Journal

A highly entertaining tale There is no going back to the politics of the 1980s and 1990sand to understand why, readers would do well to consult Conrad Blacks outstanding biography.

JAMES PIERESON
The New Criterion

A PRESIDENT LIKE NO OTHER

Donald J. Trump and the Restoring of America

CONRAD BLACK

2020 by Conrad Black

Foreword 2018 by Victor Davis Hanson

Originally published in hardcover by Regnery Publishing in 2018.

This edition is published by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York 10003.

First paperback edition published in 2020 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992

(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Black, Conrad, author.

Title: A president like no other: Donald J. Trump and the restoring of America / Conrad Black.

Description: New York City: Encounter Books, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058985 (print) | LCCN 2019058986 (ebook) | ISBN 9781641771061 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781641771078 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946 | PresidentsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC E912.B565 2020 (print) | LCC E912 (ebook) | DDC 973.933092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058985

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058986

To the presidents of the United States whom it has been my privilege to know and admire: Lyndon B.Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and Donald J. Trump.

CONTENTS

by Victor Davis Hanson

FOREWORD

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

C onrad Blacks erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote and they say gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trumps earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Blacks aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trumps methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the pastin the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Blacks unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trumps rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.