Make Russia Great Again

June 1, 2020
Veteran Washington satirist Buckley skewers the Trump administration in a farce that imagines several all-too-credible political crises ahead of Election Day 2020. In a parody of a White House memoir, Trump loyalist Herbert K. Nutterman writes from federal prison about his brief tenure as chief of staff. His first challenge is to deal with the fallout when a rogue government computer program called Placid Reflux threatens Vladimir Putin's reelection bid. Also from Russia with bromance is oligarch Oleg Pishinsky, an old buddy of Donald Trump's who is upset because Congress passed a law freezing his assets after he was implicated in the murder of a U.S. newspaper's Moscow bureau chief. He wants the law repealed and brandishes a secret weapon: a thumb drive holding video of Trump in flagrante seriatim with 18 Miss Universe contestants. Trump tells Herb and Sen. Squigg Lee Biskitt of South Carolina (read Lindsey Graham) to engineer the repeal. As these narrative lines get tangled in various ways, Buckley, a former White House speechwriter, adds comic spin to recent events, providing a plausible view of the crude, jury-rigged, stopgap daily carnival that is No. 45 at work. The author can be witty and clever but also sophomoric and sexist. Seamus Colonnity (Fox's Sean Hannity) makes a joke about something "going around like Wuhan coronavirus." Greta Fibberson, the White House chief of communications, has "a balcony you could play Shakespeare from." Herb can recognize the "Rubicon moment" that eventually lands him in prison while elsewhere thinking he should avoid a problem because "this was not a caca of my making." Buckley is a smart, entertaining observer, but the weak spots in his humor can leave a reader wincing.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2020
Buckley sets aside historical farce (The Judge Hunter, 2018) to return to his mainstay, cutting-edge political satire, with this rambunctious roman � clef in the form of a memoir written in federal prison by President Trump's seventh chief of staff. Herb Nutterman, whom Trump addresses as my favorite Jew, a loyal Trump Organization food and beverage manager, is thrust into the mayhem of the 2020 reelection campaigns of both Trump and his overseer, Putin, and forced to contend with a Russian oligarch, Trump sex tapes, and a rogue cyberwar platform called Placid Reflux. As Buckley orchestrates Nutterman's rapid rise and fall, he skewers key figures in the criminally dysfunctional Trump World with such characters as Seamus Colonnity at Fox News, spokesperson Katie Borgia-O'Reilly, and Senator Squigg Lee Biskitt. Buckley's keenly informed, caustically ironic, and cheerfully raunchy comedy is both rollicking and hard-hitting in its outrage, a bold indictment perfectly targeted for this intensely polarized election year even though that battle is overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. For a timeless Trump takedown, see Dave Eggers's The Captain and the Glory (2019).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)