American Resistance by David Rothkopf is an insightful and spot on account of the ways in which many of the career public servants helped save (for now) democracy from the authoritarian attempts to undermine it by Trump and his flunkies.

You'll see the people who either support Trump (like liquidbrains) or are sympathetic to the ideals he encourages (usually with cries of being too biased) do what they can to give the book less credit than it deserves. Well, one-star ratings with no review (because liquidbrains can't read well enough to grasp the book) only speaks to the person's idiocy, so ignore the moron. The ones who complain about not being unbiased, well, when someone who supports their country's democracy is writing about someone who is doing everything possible to destroy it, I don't think I will call their unwillingness to pull punches being biased, but rather very frank in their portrayal of the orange menace.

My biggest issue with the book isn't one of content but of sourcing. Much of what he talks about is either from personal interviews (which he usually mentions in the text) or has been widely circulated elsewhere. Even though we know about, for instance, Trump's exaggeration of his time at military school and that it has been verified, it would have been nice to have more notes showing sources. It isn't that I doubt very much in the book, but those who want to defend the anti-democracy leanings of the former moron-in-chief will use the lack of source acknowledgements as ammunition to pretend to find fault with the book. Unless the notes are only missing from the ARC I read, this is a negative. If the final copy has notes, well, "never mind."

Like many Americans I often make fun of civil servants at the same time that I acknowledge they are the ones keeping the country on a relatively even keel. This volume shows just how important these people are. It isn't about whether many of them lean left or right, they all support the idea of a government that tries to function well and for the benefit of all. They perform their duties as required even if they don't agree completely with the policies. But when the attempts at creating new policies circumvent established norms and are designed to destroy the government, they find every conceivable legal path to avoid implementing them. And we need to thank them.

I would recommend this to those who know how lucky we as a nation, as well as the world at large, were to dodge the bullet that was the tRump administration. This shows some of the ways honorable people resisted. Did they have personal reasons as well as public good? Of course! We all have multiple reasons for what we do. It is horribly disingenuous to pretend that having those other reasons as well as doing good somehow minimizes the good that was done.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )