The pattern of single-source quotation and favorable portrayal also suggests the cooperation of Joseph Votel, the former four-star Army general who, until March 2019, led United States Central Command: the command that oversees all U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. “A lanky six-foot two, [Votel’s] black glasses and earnest demeanor gave him the look of a very fit Clark Kent,” Bergen writes, noting elsewhere, with appreciative biographic attention, that the commander in the fight against ISIS was a Minnesota native “and a big Vikings fan.”

Those disfavored, most notably supporters of Trump, are dismissed summarily. Retired General Jack Keane, a widely respected architect of the surge strategy in Iraq under President George W. Bush and an informal adviser to the president today; Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran with a Ph.D. in international relations; and Heather Nauert and Morgan Ortagus, the last two spokeswomen for the State Department, are all described, because of some prior association with Fox News, as “Fox News talking heads.” Van Jones, on the other hand, is a “CNN commentator,” and Fareed Zakaria a “CNN host.”

REFERENCING EVENTS that occurred as late as October 2019, Trump and His Generals carries the immediacy of cable news. But the product often feels rushed, owing both to the lazy, crude language permitted to remain in the final draft, as described above, and to the numerous grammatical errors and internal inconsistencies which, under a more forgiving publication timetable, might have been caught and fixed.

“On the campaign trail,” one sentence begins, “Trump had campaigned on the promise…” The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is described as “wedding-cakelike.” Aides “tried to reduce the amount of times that Kellogg could get in to see Trump.” There are others, omitted here in favor of this epic run-on sentence:

Mattis had worked with General David Petraeus on the 2006 counterinsurgency manual that helped to revolutionize the US approach to the Iraq War by emphasizing that fighting insurgents required assuming greater risks for American troops, who had to get out of their massive bases and live among the Iraqi people if they were to have a chance of really understanding and ultimately defeating the Iraqi insurgency.

Questionable claims, of varying consequence, dot the narrative. On the lower end of the spectrum is the assertion that The Apprentice “turned Trump from a blowhard local businessman well known to the readers of the gossipy New York Post into a national celebrity.” In fact, the future president’s reality show debuted on NBC in 2004, seventeen years after Trump’s first appearance on the cover of People, the Bible of celebrity coverage, and a dozen years after he played himself on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, one of tv’s highest-rated programs. “Imagine Houston run by an efficient version of the Taliban,” Bergen riffs at another point, straining readers’ imaginations, “and you get an approximation of Riyadh.” The most egregious is Bergen’s claim that Iran proved willing to negotiate away its nuclear program, despite the author’s admission later in his text that the regime was “allowed under the agreement” to continue enriching uranium.

Nor does the indictment of the president always cohere. “There tended to be very little difference between what Trump said in public and what Trump said in private when it came to his key obsessions,” Bergen writes—apparently forgetting his earlier description of a private meeting between the president-elect and Fran Townsend, the former homeland security adviser in the Bush-Cheney administration who met with Trump to discuss a possible return to government service. “Trump,” Bergen writes, “was charming and asked a number of sharp questions about national security, presenting quite a different persona than the boorish tycoon known to the public.”

THESE DEFICIENCIES aside, what is the central thesis of Trump and His Generals? It is never plainly stated, but a general contempt for the president emerges. Bergen laments that Trump, suffering from “a particular kind of determined Know Nothingism … fiddled while the world burned.” “Trump,” the author declares, “was gradually eroding the U.S.-led global order that had generally worked in America’s favor.”

This sweeping pronouncement ignores the central economic datum on which Bergen’s cohort in the liberal intelligentsia predicate their entire set of prescriptions for fixing American capitalism: namely, that the real average wage for American workers, as the Pew Research Center reported in 2018, “has about the same purchasing power it did forty years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.” The fact is that somewhere along the line, decades ago, the postwar international architecture stopped working in America’s favor—or at least in Americans’ favor. Trump’s grasp of this fact enabled him to tap into what Bergen, again, calls “the widespread sentiment among ordinary Americans that the elites … had failed to deliver for them.”

Yet even the president’s supporters would be hard-pressed to quarrel with Bergen’s assertion that Trump “played on America’s racial divisions, promoted baseless conspiracy theories, lied or made false claims thousands of times when he was president, and made most matters of state about himself.” Some who sport MAGA hats like it that way; many more wish the president would rein in his proclivity for indiscipline, adopt a less serrated tone, and focus on the policy achievements they cherish him for delivering. “Americans aren’t hiring angels as their CEO,” Bergen notes correctly, citing the personal and professional failings of several recent presidents, “but they are hiring someone who will successfully perform the people’s business.”

One of the dirty little secrets of Bergen’s work, however—unknown to those colleagues of Bergen’s at CNN and New America who congratulated him on this book without taking time to read it—is how frequently the author credits Trump’s performance of the people’s business, and how often, conversely, the author finds reason to criticize the conduct of Trump’s immediate predecessor.

“The Obama White House had a well-deserved reputation for micromanaging military operations,” Bergen writes, and instituted rules of engagement that “severely constrained the Pentagon’s ability to support the Syrian forces fighting ISIS.” “The rise of ISIS,” he adds, was made possible by “Obama’s unwillingness to intervene in a decisive manner in the Syrian war and also his haste to disengage from Iraq at the end of 2011.” “Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS,” Bergen observes, and when the terror group “started seizing large chunks of territory … the Obama administration dithered … for many weeks.” Tasked with deciding whether to arm the Kurds in Syria, Bergen reports, “the Obama team debated these options for so long that it eventually ran out of time to implement them.”

Most scorching is Bergen’s assessment of how President Barack Obama handled the Iran account—the very subject on which the author, zestfully rebutting much-loathed neocons like John Bolton, exalts the nuclear deal as a paradigm of diplomacy and national security policymaking. Bergen briefly betrays some understanding that, far from drawing Tehran into the league of civilized nations, the nuclear deal emboldened the regime’s regional aggression. “Obama seemed to have given Iran a free hand in the Middle East,” Bergen acknowledges halfway through his text.

In fact, the tens of billions of dollars in cash that the United States gave Iran and the business contracts that were signed by the Iranians generated revenue not for the Iranian people but for the regime and key components such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which accelerated its operations across the region in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Equally surprising is Bergen’s admiration for Trump, particularly his talent for disruption. The author cites approvingly the commander-in-chief’s determination to debrief ground-level troops before conferences with uniformed commanders, a means by which Trump seeks to hold the brass accountable: “This was the way Trump ran his hotels and golf clubs; he didn’t just talk to the general manager, he also spoke with the doorman and the concierge and the guy doing the greens.”

The pattern was set early on. “In his first months in office, when Trump encountered a national security problem he tended to ask the same five questions,” Bergen writes.

“Why do we care?” “What does it matter to the American people?” “Why can’t others do it?” “Who’s paying for it?” “Why can’t others pay?” […] These were all very good questions. They were also unsettling questions for many in the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington because they hadn’t been asked in a long time.

Bergen assails the president for kowtowing to Putin but concedes that the Trump administration “generally took a tough line on Russia.” When the administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on Tehran, aimed at depriving the regime of the funds it uses to bankroll terror groups across the Middle East, the early results, Bergen admits, were impressive. “The new round of U.S. sanctions more than halved Iran’s oil exports,” he writes. “As a result, Iran had to reduce its support for key regional proxies such as Lebanese Hezbollah … A key goal of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran … had started to work.”