Once, just before an appearance on Morning Joe, Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump ran into Katy Tur, the reporter NBC assigned to cover his campaign, and kissed her. Just up and kissed her. Out of nowhere, shockingly, he kissed her.
Ms. Tur tells that story very well in Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, tells it well and without animus. Given the rash of downright dirty old men in the news as of late (Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly), Trump's quick green room peck seems downright innocent, more goofy than gross. But it's a reminder of his "grab them by their. . ." line with Billy Bush, when he so joyfully confessed that, try as he might, he just can't stop kissing beautiful women.
Katy Tur's memoir will bring that all back again, a long with a ton of sludge from a campaign that, as she says, was "the craziest in American history." Tur, who was quite comfortably ensconced in NBC's London bureau, was selected--she still doesn't know how or why--to return to this country to cover the unlikely Presidential campaign of Mr. Trump, a campaign everyone thought would go belly-up within a month. When it didn't, and when Trump clearly wore more Teflon than Reagan ever hoped to, Tur found herself in a stunning position, the ace reporter covering a man who not only sucked the oxygen out of whatever room he was in, but out of the entire country, daily, hourly. For months, Trump was the news. Everything else--everyone else--fell away into zombie land, even men and women with dynasty written all over them, a Bush first, and then a Clinton.
Trump's real enemy (real means fake in Trump's world) soon became the national press. In a particularly delightful moment in the book, Tur describes quite painfully what it felt like to have Donald J. Trump call out her name abusively in the middle of his rallies--"Little Katy," he called her, pointing her out to the crowd. The first time he did it, she was astounded--and scared because Trump loves to militarize his base. Once, a man spit into her face. Regularly, his mobsters came up to the press area and assaulted her with profanity.
But the memoir captures her toughness. She spends some time describing and defining her parents, news freaks in LA, the first reporters to use a helicopter. The newsroom wasn't a foreign land to a little girl who flew along on big scoops, her mother hanging out of the door to get the shot, her father at the controls. She may be "little Katy," but she's tough.
And it's clear that "the Donald" didn't intimidate her, not in the least. Scare her?--yes, in part because of his vicious minions; but intimidate her?--no. It's a gutsy book, something of a tell-all, done in a rambling, journalistic style that captures the absolute madness of Trump's character.
Why NBC chose her to follow Donald J. Trump isn't clear, but they did--and there lies the story she alone can tell. Trump's campaign didn't flop, even though dozens of journalists penned post-mortems dozens of times. Katy Tur's delightful memoir brings all of that back, the whole list of sins, of things he shouldn't have said, tweets he shouldn't have written.
If you love the guy, don't read Unbelievable; Katy Tur doesn't worship "his majesty." If you hate him, be warned that running over the man's truly bizarre rise to power will trigger painful memories you'll wish you didn't have.
Honestly, it's a book that will make you sick--not because of Katy Tur, but because of the madness that we've already forgotten in light of the latest Trump excesses, excesses that keep coming, and keep coming, and keep coming. Remember!--the man who so frequently vilified Katy Tur, kissed her. He calls the press "Public Enemy Number One," but he knows darn well he'd be nowhere without them.
He's our President.
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