Rough Beast: Slouching Towards Dictatorship
The introduction to my new book, "Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do if Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail"
Two months or so ago, it occurred to me that I should write a new Trump book: or, to be more accurate, that I should distill the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve produced about Donald Trump and his despotic plans for a second term, organize them into a coherent narrative, and produce a book-length argument for why this corrupt and hateful human being should never again set foot in the Oval Office—and what ugly future we should expect if he does.
The result is Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do if Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, which is, as of today, available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon, as well as in audiobook format on Audible. (It is also available for bookstores to order directly, via Ingram Spark.)
As with Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, which came out six years ago this month, Rough Beast is a short, easy-to-consume volume intended for readers who are not in the know, to alert them to the danger. It is, as I write in the sub-sub-title, “An Urgent Appeal to Independents, Undecideds, Fiscal Republicans, Third Party People, Voters Who ‘Don’t Like Politics,’ and the Biden-Hating Left.”
The most important—and, if Trump wins, the last—election in U.S. history is six short months away, and the polls show a dead heat. Rough Beast is my attempt to help the good guys prevail.
INTRODUCTION
Slouching Towards Dictatorship
Donald Trump’s term in office can be summed up in four words: pandemic, protest, impeachment, and insurrection. He left the White House with 392,428 Americans dead of a plague he exacerbated; with Washington recovering from a coup attempt he instigated; with the economy teetering towards recession; with our standing around the world at its lowest point in a century; and with the U.S. an additional $8 trillion in debt. He had, by far, the lowest average presidential approval rating since Gallop started keeping track in 1938, and was widely reviled abroad. Four of the five largest protests in the history of the country happened on his watch. He was impeached twice. He could have been impeached a third time, in 2019, after the release of the Mueller Report—which, contrary to what Trump and the mendacious Bill Barr told us, did not exonerate him. Even his much-ballyhooed campaign promises fell flat: He failed to build the wall, and he failed to drain the swamp. He did, however, watch a lot of television and play a lot of golf.
In the various presidential surveys taken since Donald left office, historians have consistently ranked Trump dead last, behind even the contemptible white supremacist Andrew Johnson and the hapless James Buchanan. This is not recency bias. By any metric, Trump was a catastrophic failure: corrupt, sociopathic, cruel, venal, disruptive, artless, dumb, and pathologically inept—a terrible president and an even worse human being. He threw paper towels at hurricane victims! He called veterans of our armed forces “suckers and losers!” He invited the Taliban to Camp David! He banked $2.4 billion in emoluments during his four years in office! He characterized the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people!” He nominated an(other) alleged sexual assailant to the Supreme Court! He sat on his ass watching TV as his besiegers stormed the Capitol! He humped a flag! And that’s just off the top of my head.
We have never had a monster like this in the White House. No one comes close. That the country managed to survive four years of Trump suggests that Otto von Bismarck was on to something when he remarked that God seems to have a special providence for the United States of America. With Donald, we dodged a big orange bullet.
In a word, we were spared.
And yet as I write this, Donald John Trump is the presumptive nominee of one of our two major political parties. Only two individuals have a legitimate chance at winning the White House in November—I’ll talk about the myth of third parties and the perils of voting for the nihilistic likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Chapter 9—and Trump is one of them. And he’s not just that political party’s nominee. Donald Trump has subverted the entire GOP, purged it of the disloyal, and taken total command. He installed his daughter-in-law—Lara Trump, desecrator of Tom Petty’s memory and wife of Eric Trump (Donald’s son who ripped off his own cancer charity)— as co-chair at the RNC, and changed the organization’s rules there so that the lion’s share of donations will be used to cover his mounting legal bills. As I explore further in Chapter 8, the conventional, old-school Republicans of yesteryear have either retired, lost, died, or kissed the ring. Don’t be fooled by the cute elephant logo. Whatever the branding, this is no longer the Party of Lincoln. There is no GOP anymore, only MAGA. It is an entire party built around a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions.
If the polls are to believed, that demagogue has a coin flip’s chance of retaking the White House. Like, this might actually happen! People in my family are going to vote for him. People in your family are probably going to vote for him, too. And if, God forbid, he succeeds, there are—as I explain in Chapter 7—a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025. The threat is real. The situation is dire.
This isn’t me, a known “TRUMP HATER,” trying to frame the narrative to make Donald look bad. All of what I’m saying here is objectively true, as this book will make abundantly clear. As the kids say: #Facts.
To which you might ask: Says who? Who is this Greg Olear guy to make such grandiose claims? Since 2017, I’ve been writing, researching, reporting, podcasting, broadcasting, and tweeting about Trump. In my regular column and on my interview podcast, PREVAIL, I cover politics, history, national security, foreign affairs, organized crime, dirty money, global corruption, and the fight for democracy. I’ve written extensively about Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jared Kushner, Rudy Giuliani, Leonard Leo, Brett Kavanaugh, and other characters in the MAGA universe. The PREVAIL archive—some of which was appropriated to produce this book—is vast. When I started covering Trump in 2017, I could be dismissed as a mere novelist. Not anymore. This has been my job for over seven years now.
In May of 2018, I published a short book called Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia. In the introduction, I wrote: “Donald Trump is nothing less than a threat to the American way of life. His term in office comprises an existential threat to the republic, the gravest since the Civil War. Not since 1860 has the future of the Union itself been in such doubt. Other presidents might have lacked good judgment, but we never questioned where their true loyalties lay. George W. Bush loved America, Richard Nixon loved America, Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding loved America. Trump loves only himself, cares only about himself, is loyal only to himself. And Vladimir Putin has exploited this weakness, to the detriment of not just every American, but every freedom-loving human being on earth.”
All this was true six years ago—before the four indictments and the fraud case and the defamation lawsuit; before his Russian strongman idol invaded Ukraine; before the Big Lie and the insurrection; before the two impeachments; before the covid response he horribly mismanaged; before Volume 5 and the Mueller Report; before the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing—and it’s doubly true now. The stakes have never been higher.
A second Trump administration would bring about the end of American democracy, full stop.
Academics who study authoritarian movements, scholars of fascism, foreign correspondents and government employees who work in other countries and know first-hand what corrupt autocracies look like—I’ve interviewed quite a few of these experts on my podcast over the last three years—are in consensus on this.
The United States is slouching towards dictatorship. Party of Lincoln, you say? If Trump wins, the fallen at Gettysburg will have died in vain; a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will perish from the earth.
Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think I’m full of crap, or have some ulterior motive, or am on George Soros’s payroll. Maybe you have a soft spot for Donald Trump, or find him amusing, or loved him on The Apprentice. Maybe you like that he says the quiet part out loud, because you share his feelings about immigrants. Maybe you think he’s the victim of a Deep State conspiracy, a witch hunt, a Russia hoax. Maybe you believe there is no discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans, or Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Maybe the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade doesn’t concern you. Maybe you are reluctant to vote for Joe Biden because of his age, or his support of Israel, or his choice of vice president, or his alleged financial enrichment by some Ukrainian company his son sat on the board of a decade ago. Maybe you find James Comer and Jim Jordan credible. Maybe you dismiss me—and the fascism scholars, and the foreign correspondents, and the government workers, and the experts in authoritarianism—as a flock of Chicken Littles. Maybe you’re sure that we’re all being dramatic. Maybe you think, like those good Germans in the last days of the Weimar Republic, that what Trump plans to do couldn’t possibly happen here.
If so, my friend, this book is for you.
That is my purpose: to show you who the real Donald Trump is (a lifelong criminal); to remind you of Trump’s unprecedented failures as president (almost four hundred thousand dead of covid on his negligent watch, two impeachments, and an insurrection); to explain what he’s planning to do if he wins (install himself as dictator, dismantle the federal government, criminalize abortion in all 50 states, impose an autocratic system that will strip away rights from most Americans); and to impress upon you the ugly future we have to look forward to if the Rough Beast prevails—especially if we’re trans, gay, Black, brown, a Trump-critical journalist, an immigrant, a migrant, a refugee, a rape victim, from another country, from a Democratic-leaning voting district, poor, working class, or a woman. On the pages that follow, I make this urgent argument. I also want these pages to serve as a time capsule, so that future generations—assuming they survive the ravages of climate change Donald’s policies would accelerate—will know what it was like, living in the United States of America a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
Am I getting all worked up over nothing? Do I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, as the social media trolls contend? Is this just a ploy to convince you to vote for an unpopular incumbent? Donald Trump can’t really be this bad, can he?
Read on and decide for yourself.
Description
Who is the real Donald Trump? A serial liar with long ties to both organized crime and the Kremlin. A corrupt demagogue whom most historians consider the worst U.S. president of all time. And, most urgently, a vengeful wannabe dictator whose re-election would end American democracy. In this short and necessary volume, Dirty Rubles author Greg Olear presents the facts about FPOTUS: who he is, what he plans to do, and why the country cannot survive a second Trump term. Donald Trump is a Rough Beast. America is slouching towards dictatorship.
Table of Contents
Trump is a serial liar
Trump is a lifelong criminal and a longtime Kremlin stooge
Trump is corrupt af
Trump was an awful president
Trump wants to be a dictator
The far right wants a dictator—a Red Caesar
Project 2025 is a despotic roadmap for Trump’s second term
The old GOP is dead and gone
Voting for a third party candidate helps re-elect Trump
Life of the real Donald Trump
PRAISE FOR ROUGH BEAST
“As readable as it is horrifying, Greg Olear’s Rough Beast bathes the reader in unassailable facts about the presumptive Republican nominee…Here they are, in one convenient, breezy tome: the countless crimes committed, duly reported, prosecuted, and then frequently forgotten over the past four decades; the bad actors and miserable sycophants in the man's orbit; and the Apocalypse-can't-come-fast-enough, Jesus-hates-you right-wingers hitching their wagons to his dark star…This is real. This is not a drill. Avoid reading this very necessary book at freedom’s peril.”
—Rachel Slade, author of Into the Raging Sea and Making It In America
“Rough Beast lays out in detail who, and what, the US would be bringing back into office, and the picture should frighten anyone who isn't going to directly benefit from theocratic autocracy.”
—Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy
"If Donald Trump wins a second term in office, it won't be at all like his first—it will be much, much worse. As Greg Olear shows with bracing clarity in Rough Beast, Trump is a criminal who is desperate for power and revenge. Trump is running for dictator and the 2024 election might be the nation's last.”
—Jennifer Mercieca, author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump
“Greg Olear’s voice—informed, erudite, outraged, lyrical and concise—is the necessary antidote to Steve Bannon’s ‘flood the zone with sh*t’ MAGA chaos communications strategy. Buy, read, and share this book wherever the madness of Trump’s first term has left memory holes.”
—Nina Burleigh, author of Virus and The Trump Women: Part of the Deal
“Olear makes compelling case after case about why voting against Trump is the only good option we have. But the details Olear curates are not some boring lecture about Putin’s mark or the horrors of the pandemic—Rough Beast is a truly enjoyable read, despite the darkness of its subject…It’s a fast read and a must-read, a great and important work that makes sense of it all.”
—Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research & host of “Grave Injustice”
“Just the facts ma’am. That’s what you’ll get in Greg Olear’s exceptional follow up to Dirty Rubles. A comprehensive guide and breakdown to the past present and future of the GOP and the Trump administration, Rough Beast serves as a as an explainer and a warning…Written in an easy conversational style, it never feels as dense as it is, but by the time you’re finished reading it, you will also be an expert in everything from GOP money laundering to Supreme Court capture to Project 2025. Be brave and dive into this terrifying look into the possibilities and inevitabilities if we don’t prevail in 2024.”
—Aja Raden, author of Stoned and The Truth About Lies
Book Trailer
Thanks to Chunk for the awesome art and animation.
Have the Kindle version. Two more weeks of travel. I am staying away from anything US political, especially DD's trial. BTW take DD = Dumbass Don. Shall read when home.
Here in Florence seems every third person I hear speak is American. Same when in London last week. If the economy is as bad as DD followers say why can so many afford to travel? I cannot fathom for an instant how there is a virtual tie. WTF!!!
Quick scan of your book, the Lincoln Project should force feed it to maga-nuts. Then we might get to 65/35, a much more accurate reflection of the two candidates. 35 = the unreachables.
Good luck with the book.
I'm getting the paperback delivered today. I know most of this but look forward to your writing, always superb. I'll pass on to grandchildren.