Retribution

I read Jonathan Karl’s Retribution right after Christmas. This is a book whose cover is adorned with the infamous “Fight” photo taken right after the 2024 “assassination attempt” in Butler, PA and left to my own devices I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. But it was a Christmas present, so I read it. 

It was fine, I guess - very critical of Trump though not nearly critical enough. Karl is also critical of Biden and Harris and although some of his criticism is reasonable, the book as a whole reads very much as though Mr. Karl is trying to come across as “balanced” and “fair,” things that used to be very important to serious journalists and I suppose still are. But there are not always “both sides.” As they say on the internet, if one person tells a journalist that it’s pouring outside and another tells the same journalist that it’s bright and sunny, then the journalist’s job is not to present both sides of the story - it’s to look out the fucking window and see who’s telling the truth. 

*****

It is interesting that Sean Curran, who was Special Agent in Charge of Trump’s security detail on July 13 2024 is now the head of the United States Secret Service. Kimberly Cheatle, who was the Director of the Secret Service on that day, was fired; but the SA who was actually responsible for the safety of then former President Trump was promoted. Jonathan Karl interviewed Director Curran about how the Secret Service would respond if Trump was convicted and sent to prison in 2024, and Curran assured Karl that the Secret Service would continue to protect the former President no matter where he was, and that Curran himself was prepared to remain imprisoned with Trump. “There’s nothing I would not have done for him,” Curran said. Nothing he would not have done. Interesting. 

*****

I am a chronically well-informed person who lived and breathed every minute of the 2024 election campaign. I remember most of the details, most of the day to day ins and outs of that campaign. I remember the excitement and optimism of October, when I thought Kamala Harris would win. I also read 107 Days, Harris’s book about the campaign, pretty much the minute it came out. So I was already pretty well-versed in the events of 2024, and I didn’t learn much reading this book that I didn’t already know. It’s well-researched and well-written, but it didn’t reveal anything, about Trump or the campaign, that I wasn’t already aware of. Until the end, though, I thought that it might be a fine book to read for anyone who wants a primer on the last presidential election. But Jonathan Karl’s closing arguments tanked the whole thing for me. 

*****

About journalist friends who feared that a second Trump term would be the end of democracy in the United States, Karl writes “I have long believed - and still hope - that those fears are overblown.” This is just stupid, so shockingly stupid, that it outweighs any of the book’s positives. 

This is a book that came out late in the year 2025, a year in which a Congresswoman was arrested for trying to fulfill her oversight responsibility at an ICE holding facility in her district. It was a year in which a sitting US Senator was grabbed and thrown to the floor for daring to ask the Secretary of Homeland Security a question. The first official act of this presidency was a pardon for hundreds of insurrectionists, including people who attacked police officers with flagpoles and bear spray. 2025 was the year in which National Guard troops were nationalized and deployed on city streets. On October 1, 2025, the nation’s top military officers were summoned to a browbeating by the Secretary of Defense with a guest appearance by the President who told the Generals and Admirals that they needed to be prepared to fight the enemy within; i.e., us. We shipped people to a torture prison in a foreign country. We built an actual concentration camp. And that’s just what I can remember right off the top of my head. If none of that was enough to convince a journalist that his colleagues’ fears for the country were not “overblown” then what is he even doing?   

*****

I don’t blame the media for everything. But I blame them for not doing their jobs, and it seems to me that a journalist publishing a whole ass book about the 2024 campaign and the early days of his second term and still downplaying the seriousness of what’s happening in this country is really not doing his damn job. I’m going to go read a real book now.