How Did Michael Lewis Pitch Trump's Second Term?

Michael Lewis says he has no interest in writing the same book twice. The Fifth Risk, his book on Trump's first term, was a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect, and he had imagined that book was the end of his time in the federal government.

The second term arrived with a different plan. After the election and the inauguration, Project 2025 sat in the background, a plan to radically remake the federal government that Trump had disavowed. Lewis says it stayed unclear whether Trump cared until he reached the White House. Then the story reversed. Trump went from not managing the government to asserting powers presidents previously had not had. Lewis calls the move a huge power grab: the president would micromanage everything, and the two million person nonpartisan civil service, people who take an oath to the constitution and who are supposed to refuse an illegal order, would become loyalists in a Trump political operation.

Lewis has kept the same publisher for 35 years, so the pitch was to himself. The book watches a transformation of the government and the executive branch, the two million person civil service, across public safety, data collection, and long-term scientific research the market will not fund, plus what happens to the people who do the work. He pictures an environmental shift: a meteor hits the planet and habitats change.