Terris is particularly adept at depicting the sense of permeability — and the resulting opportunity to rapidly gain prominence and wealth — that has followed from both the rise of social media and the rise of Trump ... The Big Break suffers to an extent from its limited time frame — nearly its entire narrative takes place in 2022 — and from Terris’s largely commendable commitment to showing and not telling ... What Terris does provide is an intimate, entertaining and damning portrait of the way Washington works, not just now but maybe always.
Terris is interested not in D.C.’s formal institutions, but in the nature and character of what the former president loved to call The Swamp ... Terris is a writer of true skill, in the best tradition of old-school newspaper journalism. He writes succinctly, without ornament, and allows his subjects to show us who they are without the heavy hand of the author steering the narrative. Yet the more we see and read about these people as they truly are, the more we dislike them. Even in the hands of a gifted chronicler, the subjects are too self-centered for readers to connect with on an emotional level ... The book succeeds in its task of shedding light on the culture of post-Trump Washington. It also makes, unintentionally, a powerful argument that those changes may have finally rendered this genre of navel-gazing, Inside Washington book obsolete.
