Make Russia Great Again, by Christopher Buckley (Simon & Schuster, 274 pages)
When word got out that Christopher Buckley had a new book, this one about the Trump administration, Buckley fans didn’t just salivate; they drooled.
Buckley, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., made his own name writing satire, most notably 1994’s Thank You for Smoking, the story of three lobbyists who called themselves merchants of death because they represented tobacco, alcohol and firearms. It was later made into a movie; the book was 50 times better.
Now Buckley is back with a fictional memoir of the Trump years, told by his seventh chief of staff, now enjoying the amenities of federal prison. Herb K. Nutterman had retired after 27 years as the food-and-beverage manager at an assortment of Trump properties when the president summoned him to the White House. Despite the howling of his wife, Hetta, Nutterman reluctantly returned to his former boss’s employ, where he soon became part of a Russia scandal that may sound familiar, but not familiar enough to get Buckley sued for libel or defamation.
In this scandal, America has interfered in Russia’s election, inadvertently.
A computer program designed to retalilate automatically if a U.S. election has been hacked and the president is incapacitated goes into action, causing a communist trailing Vladimir Putin by 50 points to come in first, forcing a runoff election.
Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch known for manufacturing a chemical that is mysteriously involved in the deaths of people who run afoul of Putin and his cronies has surfaced and wants a favor from Trump.
It’s Nutterman’s job to solve these problems, quickly and quietly, before Putin finds out about America’s involvement and decides to retaliate by releasing some odious secret he is keeping about Trump.
Nutterman, ever loyal, is determined not to let that happen, but as he works to avert disaster, the scandals keep accumulating, somewhat as in real life.
As he reflects, “One minute you’re on the golf course minding your own business, thinking, Gosh, what a nice day. The next, the earth has gone out from under you and you’re in a conference room being deposed with three lawyers in attendance at a thousand dollars an hour each.”
Some real people in the real world have speculated that Putin, elected Russia’s president in 2000, has incriminating information on Trump that he withholds in exchange for presidential favor. In Buckley’s version of things, the purported blackmail has something to do with the Miss Universe Pageant, which was held in Moscow in 2013, and Trump’s enthusiasm for beautiful women.
If it’s hard to keep up with what is real and what is fiction, multiply that by 274 pages. As he has done in the past, Buckley combines actual people and events with fictionalized ones, although he puts as much effort into disguising them as a person who dresses for Halloween by putting on a hat.
Take, for example, the character of Seamus Colonnity, “Fox News’ number-one personality,” and a Trump confidante, who “truly enjoyed fawning over Mr. Trump, whereas others fawned out of fear.” Colonnity, of course, is Buckley’s version of Sean Hannity; I don’t know enough about Fox News to know who Corky Fartmartin is supposed to be. But you get the gist.
Buckley also thinly disguises a certain blond adviser to the president as Katie Borgia-O’Reilly, who is “sexy in a — I don’t want to say ‘creepy’ — certain kind of way, as if you might discover after sleeping with her that she was in fact an android or an Albanian assassin sent to murder your grandmother for no clear reason.”
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is clearly Sen. Squigg Lee Biskitt, whose “folksy rhetoric earned him titles like ‘Li’l Cicero’ and ‘Tiny Titan of the Senate’.” Ivanka becomes Ivunka; Jared, Jored. And so on.
I suppose there’s a certain logic to this, imposed by those thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers with which Buckley is seemingly familiar, but the juxtaposition of the real and satirized gets baffling after a while. Why, for example, are Newt Gingrich and his wife transformed into Mr. and Mrs. Neuderscreech while George Will and George Soros get to play themselves?
The bigger problem with Make Russia Great Again, at least for a general audience, is that it’s too much insider baseball. If you can laugh uproariously at something being described as “eerily Rumsfeldian,” or at least remember who Donald Rumsfeld is, you’ll find the book at least mildly amusing. If not, read Thank You for Smoking instead. Make Russia Great Again is a book-length stand-up act, with plenty of punchlines, the sort best served with cheap beer.
As someone raised on Firing Line, it pains me to say this; I want everything associated with the Buckley name to be accompanied by the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. More fitting for this book is the Faber College Theme Song. (Then again, this is old material for Buckley. He first envisioned a Trump presidency in 1999, when he wrote an inaugural address for President Trump when the idea was simply a joke. In the last line, the president says he’s ordered the Treasury Department to issue “a couple billion extra in $100 chips.”
“Enjoy yourselves,” the fictional President Trump says. “It’s the dawn of a very great era.” Half the country still believes that. The other half waits impatiently for Christopher Buckley to be great again. B-
BOOK NOTES
Christopher Buckley (reviewed above) is a past winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, given annually in honor of James Thurber, the celebrated humorist and New Yorker cartoonist who died in 1961.
Buckley won in 2004 for No Way to Treat a First Lady.
Four months into a pandemic, we all could use some merriment, and there’s not a lot of humor to be had this month, in book form anyway. So here’s a look at the funniest books of the past decade, according to Thurber Prize judges.
All are available in paperback; your local bookseller would appreciate your business.
Hits and Misses, short stories by Simon Rich (Little, Brown & Co.)
Look Alive Out There (runner up), essays by Sloane Crosley (Picador)
Priestdaddy, memoir by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)
Born a Crime, memoir by Trevor Noah (One World)
The World’s Largest Man, memoir by by Harrison Scott Key (Harper Perennial)
Dear Committee Members, novel by Julie Schumacher (Anchor)
Truth in Advertising, novel by John Kenney (Touchstone)
Dan Gets a Minivan, memoir by Dan Zevin (Scribner)
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, collected works by Calvin Trillin (Random House)
Half Empty, essays by David Rakoff (Anchor)
The 2020 winner will be announced, pandemic willing, sometime in the fall.
