Aaron Short

Reviews and links

Publishers Weekly

In this entertaining oral history, reporters Salkin and Short ask readers to accept an unconventional conclusion: that Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was “diligently” planned.

A fixture on TV and in New York gossip columns, Trump had often floated the idea of running for president—but few ever took him seriously. In fact, the authors argue, Trump spent decades “puzzling out” politics, and waiting for the right “window of opportunity.”https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-25-020280-2

Kirkus Reviews

Two journalists team up, conduct more than 100 interviews with key figures in (and out of) Camp Trump, and conclude his decision to run for president was far from impulsive.

In Hamlet, Polonius said of the prince’s psychological state, “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Salkin (From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, 2013, etc.) and Short, both of whom have written for the New York Post, set out to prove that the same is true of President Donald Trump. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/allen-salkin/the-method-to-the-madness/

Bookist

More than two years into Trump's presidency, it still seems to many that he just sprang fully fledged onto the political scene. In reality, running for president was something he had been considering since the late 1990s. After Trump’s unexpected election in 2016, the public needed to learn if there was a difference between the persona and the person to determine if there was hypocrisy behind the hype. Veteran journalists Salkin and Short conducted candid and revelatory oral history interviews with 100 people, both on the periphery and at the center of Trump World, and those enabled them to chronicle Trump’s endeavors as a business man, reality-TV host, and politician who became president without any prior governing experience. With complementary and contradictory views offered regarding the same occurrence, what emerges from these disparate voices is a deeper understanding of the fact that the Trump presidency was not a chimerical pursuit. With his 2020 re-election campaign underway, those who dismiss Trump as a one-hit wonder would do well to know the seriousness with which he pursued the previous campaign.