Two Views of a Single Presidency

The people who serve in the Trump administration have never been reticent about telling their stories. They have, however, mostly declined to put their names to their tales. That preference for anonymity has begun to end. On the same day—January 29—Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and Trump ally, released a memoir of his political career, , and the former Trump communications aide Cliff Sims published an account of his service in the Trump White House, . Each book offered up some news-making stories. Sims confirms in excruciating detail the bizarre story of Sean Spicer personally stealing a drink mini-fridge from his own staff. The story was reported in the day Spicer resigned, and was ferociously denied by Spicer at the time and in his own memoir—but after Sims’s account, nobody will doubt that the ’s report was true in every shabby detail. On a somewhat more world-historical level, Christie reports that President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, convinced themselves in February 2017 that they had silenced the Russia matter by firing former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Christie quotes himself offering this authentically wise advice to Trump: “There is no way you can make this process shorter, but there’s lots of ways you can make it longer. And the biggest way for you to make it longer is by talking about it. Don’t talk about it. That’s the biggest, most important bit of advice I can give you. Don’t talk about it.” But as so often with insider memoirs, the value comes not from the big stories, but from