Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy parachute into the netherworld of weaponized libido that is the life of the 45th president. Salaciousness abounds. Their book is lurid, informative and aptly subtitled ... All the President’s Women is breezy but heavy. Unlike Stormy Daniels’ 2018 bestseller...none of it is entertaining. Not surprisingly, the White House declined multiple opportunities to rebut the book’s contentions ... The book rests upon firsthand interviews, transcripts and prior reports. It also contains a detailed appendix that lays out its sources. Said differently, if you can actually believe Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim born in Kenya to a cocaine-addled Martian, then opting in to at least 50% of All the President’s Women should be a no-brainer ... It is unlikely All the President’s Women will change many, if any, minds about Trump. He was never viewed by anyone as a boy scout. Each half of the US sees what it wants. If Trump is brought down, it won’t be by his zipper.

Relying heavily on firsthand interviews, court reports, and other documentation (including President Trump’s own public comments), veteran journalists Levine and El-Faizy provide a comprehensive, yet thoroughly disturbing look at the president’s history and pattern of sexual misconduct ... While many of the most shocking incidents discussed here are public knowledge, the significant new material and the book’s usefulness as a single-volume source on the topic make this not only a critical current read but one likely to become even more important in the future.

Ew. That’s really the only way to describe the experience of reading All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator a deep dive into the many allegations that depict Trump’s relationships with women as vulgar, misogynistic, demeaning, sometimes violent and always puerile. The accusations wash over a reader like a tidal wave of sewage until you are thoroughly caked in muck and lightheaded from the stink ... you long to scrub your memory bank with bleach, to douse yourself with disinfectant ... And yet. Even though the book elicits disgust and anger, it never shocks ... Nothing in All the President’s Women is shocking because this is the president the public has come to know. All of it, however, is exhausting ... The theme of this book is quite straightforward: The president is a pig. But is Trump, who was not interviewed by the authors, something more than that? Is he a sexual predator? An actual criminal? ... All the President’s Women assembles Trump’s cruelties and transgressions into one neat volume. As a matter of historical bookkeeping, this is useful. But for all the effort, the citizenry is not better informed, only more deeply disgusted.

When former National Enquirer executive editor Barry Levine began writing a book about Donald Trump’s relationship to women, some speculated that he might share details about the tabloid’s long-standing protection and eventual endorsement of the president ... broad swaths of the book read as if they were closely adapted from the tabloid’s pages, with all the coy phrasing, wealth worship, and casual misogyny the Enquirer and its peers have long used to simultaneously sensationalize and neutralize the bad behavior of powerful men ...Throughout the book, El-Faizy and Levine attempt to fuse those two strands of Trump’s sexual behavior, the consensual and the nonconsensual, into a unified theory of Trump and women ... At best, this booklong conflation creates an unpleasant discontinuity of content and tone, with stories of violent assault sitting pages apart from passages that describe women in belittling, objectifying terms ... At worst, the way All the President’s Women intermixes Trump’s rich-guy philandering with his alleged assaults completely undermines its ability to do his accusers justice. The authors never say outright that Trump’s alleged sex crimes fall in the same category as his boorish-but-legal macho misbehavior, but it’s hard to follow their hairpin turns from titillating gossip-pages content to stories of alleged abuse that deeply traumatized several women without coming away with the sense that the line between the two is blurrier than it actually is ... For all its worthwhile reporting, All the President’s Women suffers for both its misleading promotional claims and the little attention it pays to the lives of Trump’s accusers before or after the alleged assaults they describe ... The tabloids protected and promoted Trump for decades. Their reporting standards are ill-suited to the task of holding him accountable now.