When I heard Katy Tur (Trump called her Little Katy) had written a book, I was glad. Here was a person who had suffered from the ugliness and lies of the Trump campaign. For those of us who were NeverTrump, Katy Tur was heroic: Katy at the bridge fighting off the barbarians.
Read her book and you cannot believe that any more. Instead, you get a person who chooses to open her book galivanting in Paris with a trivial boyfriend. She demonstrates no knowledge, no insight, nothing beyond whatever ideas drifted into her mind as she reported on people doing things while she worried about wardrobe.
She is telling her story, but it might as well be called: “Why Trump Won.”
If you reduced any seemingly substantial person to the trivialities she chooses to describe herself (makeup in a car mirror, curling irons, bad buffet food, spanx), you would be accused of cruelty. Katy Tur has revealed herself as unable to understand anything outside her limited life . . . one more comfortable in London and Paris than most of the United States. That would be fine, if her London and Paris were not the fake Establishmentland of those who simultaneously wish to avoid tourist Europe (so cliche!), but end up in the same city one would find in Berkeley, Austin, or Cambridge . . . just with different background music.
Tur has written a book about a boor by a polished boor. She has the proper attitudes, decent people opposed what she opposed, but she shares and lives Trump’s relentless success driven morality . . . only with a social justice veneer. It is not that Tur cannot write, the book moves along, but that Tur lacks a single idea or a moral core. She experiences her life as if the Socratic “know thyself” was a command to diary life in the vocabulary of a tenth grader. Tur is the kind of writer to ostentatiously use the “f-word” sometimes repeated as an entire line of text, so tough, earthy, authentic, before sneering at Trump for eating fast food.
Tur was right to oppose racism, misogyny, and lies. Her book reveals why her reporting had so little impact: she is opposed to bad ideas in Trump, but cannot fathom that some of her own ideas might also be bad. Why did Romney fail when Trump won? Tur is content with Republicans if they lose, but irritated when they win. I see no reason to think she would have given any quarter to Marco Rubio (my preferred candidate), Tur would have just shivved him more politely.
There is nothing in this book we did not already know. She came, she saw, she regurgitated.
If you want to know why some people think the game is fixed, read this book. Look in vain for anything in Tur that is more moral than Trump. She is polite where he is vulgar. He gilds his adultery while her sin is done while sipping the right coffee. If Trump is openly decadent, Tur lacks any moral center other than an opposition to Trump . . . but there is no substance.
She revealed herself to be morally small . . . unable to judge except vulgarity, style, taste, too much gilding. Tur’s book is cultivated decadence sitting in judgement on lowbrow indulgence.
No.
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