Where? When? Why?

Who cares?! This is Where’s Waldo? for the MAGA fanatic. Context and meaning are irrelevant. Page after glossy page, the people around Trump – the extras – change, but Trump remains as iconic and dependable as a bottle of Coca-Cola.

As always with the Very Stable Genius’s photo books – this is his third – the selection and order speak volumes. The effectiveness of our legal system to hold Trump responsible is demonstrated by the photo he’s chosen as the prefatory image: his brooding mug shot at the Fulton County Jail after he was indicted in August of last year on racketeering charges in Georgia. It’s one of the few photos here that gets the signature Sharpie treatment, with the words “Never give up / Never surrender” scrawled over his golden hair.

Then the story begins in earnest, dragging us back to Trump’s central obsession and his administration’s initial “alternative fact.” Under a photo of the 2017 inauguration, he writes, “Democrats tried to disparage Crowd size, knowing that this was the Largest Inaugural Crowd EVER - See for yourself!”

A hundred pages in, Trump returns to that theme, claiming that he drew a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr. “But I don’t care,” he says magnanimously, “because I love Martin Luther King!”

Even the book’s brief nod to January 6, 2021, is obsessed with crowd size rather than, say, accusations of incitement, treason, conspiracy and insurrection. “THIS IS THE REAL JANUARY 6TH,” Trump writes under a photo carefully selected to avoid showing Confederate flags, nooses, and thugs beating up police officers and smashing their way into the Capitol. “Pictures were almost impossible to get,” he says about the most photographed event in modern history. “They never captured the size of the Crowd – Nobody wanted to speak about it.” So unfair. You try to violently overturn just one presidential election, and nobody is willing to give you credit for the crowd size.

There probably aren’t more than a few hundred words total in this shiny work of propaganda, but if Save America could be said to have a plot, it’s the epic struggle between Trump’s desire to exalt himself and his instinct to denigrate his enemies. This dark impulse is so randomly exposed that it feels all the more thrilling when it pops out like a switchblade. In a sense, Save America serves as a graphic demonstration that Trump’s ability to calibrate the appropriate treatment of friends and foes is totally haywire.

For instance, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, appears here shaking Trump’s hand. Trump assures us that he “got along well” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He calls Hungary’s autocratic Viktor Orbán “one of the Great Leaders of the World.” And North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who periodically threatens to lob nuclear weapons at the United States, appears in an astonishing spread of 10 adoring pages that look as if they were designed by a high school yearbook staff in Pyongyang.

But woe unto Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Right after a happy photo in the White House, Trump erupts with an unprecedented threat aimed at the actual billionaire:

“Mark Zuckerberg would come to the Oval Office to see me,” Trump writes. “He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” Like everything in Save America, there is no explanation provided with this rant, which continues: “He told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison – as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

The prize for weirdest caption, though, must go to Trump’s remarks about Justin Trudeau. One of the longest bits of sustained commentary in the book, it’s a prose poem of Trumpian lunacy: “His mother was beautiful and wild,” he writes about the Canadian prime minister. “In the 1970s, she would go ‘clubbing’ with the Rolling Stones, but she was also somehow associated with Fidel Castro. She said he was ‘the sexiest man I’ve ever met,’ and a lot of people say that Justin is his son. He swears that he isn’t, but how the hell would he know! Castro had good hair, the ‘father’ didn’t, Justin has good hair, and has become a communist just like Castro.”

Any suspicion that Trump didn’t write this book himself should be allayed by the presence of such glorious gibberish.

If there were more unhinged ramblings like this in Save America, it’d be a whole lot more fun. It’s been said before: Let Trump be Trump.

The Washington Post

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