Review: The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis

No matter how bad you thought the Trump administration was, they are much, much worse.

This book looks at the damage they’ve done to some of the parts of the government that don’t get much media attention, such as the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce. The Trump administration failed to appoint staff to critical positions in these departments, or appointed people with deep conflicts of interest (e.g., appointing the AccuWeather CEO to be in charge of the National Weather Service), didn’t do knowledge transfer to figure out how these critical and complicated parts of the government worked, and are generally setting up the country for disaster.

So it’s an interesting read… And then it abruptly ends. This book is almost comically short; it claims to be over 200 pages, but I think based on fonts/margins/etc it’s closer to 125 “normal” pages. I guess it’s a loose collection of essays Lewis has written, and while each one is fairly interesting, they don’t come together to form a coherent book. It just sort of ends, without a complete narrative, resolution, or ideas for the future.

Rating: 3 stars