The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World

From a preeminent national security journalist, an explosive account of Donald Trump's collision with the American national security establishment, and with the world

It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America's most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his America First agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it.

Very quickly, it became clear to a number of people at the highest levels of government that their gravest mission was to protect America from Donald Trump. Trump and His Generals is Peter Bergen's riveting account of what happened when the unstoppable force of President Trump met the immovable object of America's national security establishment--the CIA, the State Department, and, above all, the Pentagon. If there is a real deep state in DC, it is not the FBI so much as the national security community, with its deep-rooted culture and hierarchy. The men Trump selected for his key national security positions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, were products of that culture: Trump wanted generals, and he got them. Three years later, they would be gone, and the guardrails were off.

Author: Peter Bergen
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 05/31/2022
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.35w x 1.02d
ISBN: 9780525522430

About the Author
Peter Bergen is a vice president at New America in Washington, DC, as well as national security analyst for CNN, where he writes a weekly online column. He is also a professor and codirector of the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University and has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Bergen is the author of five previous books about national security, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post nonfiction books of the year. In 1997, as a producer for CNN, Bergen produced Osama bin Laden's first television interview, in which bin Laden declared war against the United States for the first time to a Western audience.

He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, documentary producer Tresha Mabile, and their children, Pierre and Grace.