A review by zrock
Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America by David Horowitz

1.0

I found this book in a trash pile and figured I couldn’t pass an NYT bestseller...

Even if the reader is pro-Trump or well Right of center, I still can’t understand how this book could earn a high rating given it is almost entirely a summery of grievances, mindsets, and criticisms emanating from the author and Trump’s GOP (virtually all of which most readers will already be familiar with) and is not anywhere near “President Trump’s Plan to Save America”, which is tucked in the last six pages of the conclusion in the form of shallow paragraph-long descriptions of what policies and changes Trump has in mind. Trump’s quotes are dispersed throughout the book, but seldom in any meaningful policy or planning sense, so the book’s subtitle is incredibly misleading.

As much as I hate blaming easy targets and generalizing about political groups’ radical tendencies given these things are part of the polarization problem, I have to raise factual issues, and do not feel my evaluation is a mischaracterization given the ongoing amount of support the President continues to hold culturally, politically and in his party.

First, the book is riddled with nonfactual claims, gross overstatements, misleading assertions, selected statistics, and fallacies throughout. I literally highlighted an average of three per page. Given the author’s notoriety I was certainly hoping for...better.

Second, most of the author’s claims have not aged well at all as many of his complaints with the prior administration have been carried on or doubled down on by Trump and his administration. These overwhelmingly deal with corruption, executive overreach, division, ideology taking over, lies, popular will, etc., which is strange given the myriad signs these same things would happen throughout the campaign trail.

This hypocrisy and short-sightedness is ironically summed up by the very first paragraph, which claims Trump’s election put an end to a “presidency that divided the American people, eroded American sovereignty, diminished American power, and undermined a constitutional foundation that had made America prosperous and great.” Yikes.

There was one good chapter highlighting the ideologically extreme background and/or training some heavy hitters on the Left come from, and another about how much of the Left is willing to overlook and appropriate shockingly immoral and ‘un-American’ things for the sake of political correctness and under the guise of inclusivity. Sadly, these were the only ones that raised issues of concern with reasonably factual basis, and even more alarming is the extent to which most of these concerns could be said of the Trump or the GOP itself.

I was hoping for a much more policy-(or even reality-) based argument for or layout of Trump’s policies but this was mostly ideological drivel made without concessions or moderation of bias with a misleading title and a self-defeatingly large penchant for hypocritical blame-gaming, so I’ll have to look elsewhere.