Donald Trump is not like other presidents, argues Masha Gessen

Surviving Autocracy. By Masha Gessen.Riverhead Books; 288 pages; $26. Granta; £12. 

TWO DAYS after Donald Trump was elected, Masha Gessen argued in the New York Review of Books that he was “the first candidate in memory who ran not for president, but for autocrat—and won.” The piece offered advice, such as “Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.”

The years since have testified to Mr Trump’s autocratic instincts. He has been more hostile to oversight and dissent, and more demanding of personal loyalty and displays of adulation, than any American president in memory. He has spurned allies and fawned over dictators. In a pithy but overstated new book, Gessen (who prefers to be referred to that way) updates and expands on that early warning. Mr Trump, Gessen writes, is qualitatively different from any of his predecessors, given as he is to “ignoring and destroying all institutions of accountability”.

The author, who was born in the Soviet Union and has written acutely about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, chronicles Mr Trump’s tussles with those institutions. The determination of the press to appear objective and balanced, Gessen argues, as well as its weakness for hope, have prevented it from accurately describing Mr Trump’s predations—even as it hyped...