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The Declaration of Independence, signed and issued to the public 250 years ago this month, was the banner under which the American Revolution was fought. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The Declaration, “the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” as Lincoln called it, stated the ideals behind the revolution, but played little role either in starting or ending the conflict. The battles of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the war, had been fought more than a year earlier, in April 1775; the war would continue for another five years until it was settled in 1781 by the American victory at Yorktown. Without victory in the war for independence, the Declaration of Independence might have been relegated to a footnote in history.
In American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, H.W. Brands provides a highly readable single-volume biography of the architect of that victory, and the indispensable Founding Father of the American republic. Brands, professor of history at the University of Texas and author of previously published biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, relies upon letters, diaries, speeches, and other original documents, to draw a fresh portrait of Washington that shows him to be less distant and elusive, and more human in both his virtues and vices, than he has been rendered in other biographies and popular histories.
Washington’s aristocratic bearing along with his commanding presence were important ingredients in his success but, as this biography shows, Washington earned his lofty reputation by persevering through setbacks, defeats, and disappointments, all of which prepared the way for subsequent victories. Washington’s life was one of action and experience: He participated in nearly every important event that roiled the American colonies and the new nation during the latter half of the 1700s. Brands succeeds admirably in compressing these events, and Washington’s role in them, into a single volume that is at once accessible to most readers while remaining faithful to the rapidly unfolding history of the era.
It is a good question why this proprietor of a Virginia plantation with some 300 slaves decided to risk everything by leading revolution against the world’s most powerful empire. Brands finds an answer, partly in Washington’s character, but also in his unsettling experience as a young officer in the British armed forces.
In 1754, Washington, then just 22 years old, was authorized by the British governor of Virginia to lead a detachment of roughly 160 soldiers into the wilderness in western Pennsylvania to caution French troops against maintaining a fort in contested territory at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (present-day Pittsburgh). Arriving in the area, his troops ambushed a small force of French troops sent in turn to warn him against encroaching upon French territory. The enterprise turned into a disaster as the French organized a counterattack, forcing Washington into an embarrassing surrender. That campaign, starting with Washington’s ambush, provoked a wider war between the British and the French in North America that continued until 1763.
Washington’s conduct in that campaign reinforced British doubts about the military abilities of the colonists in general, and of Washington in particular. British leaders dispatched their own experienced officers to lead the campaign against the French. Washington signed on as an aide-de-camp to assist British general Edward Braddock in a renewed campaign in the west. When Braddock was mortally wounded in one of those engagements, he passed his command to Washington, who braved intense musket fire to lead his troops in an organized retreat. Notwithstanding that achievement, British officers passed over Washington for a formal commission in the British Army, and ignored his advice for advancing on the French garrison at Fort Duquesne. After British and American troops captured the fort in 1758, Washington resigned his colonial commission in frustration with British military practices.
Washington learned important lessons in those early campaigns—first, that British leaders regarded Americans as second-class citizens, unworthy to serve as officers in their armed forces. In addition, he saw that British officers were not well prepared to fight wars on America’s rugged and forested terrain. The British, he saw, were not as powerful as they seemed.
The end of the war brought a different kind of turmoil to the colonies as British leaders, mindful of accumulated debt built up from the costs of previous conflicts, moved to tax colonists for the costs of the recently concluded war. When Parliament adopted the Stamp Act in 1765, Washington judged that the British had blundered by exaggerating the colonists’ ability to pay and underestimating their determination to resist. As the conflict escalated over the next several years, Washington changed his mind: The British meant to enslave the colonies in general and would do so as soon as Boston was brought into line. He understood from harsh experience how the British looked down upon the colonists.
The battles at Lexington and Concord changed the calculus of opposition from protest to outright warfare, and from proposals for conciliation to calls for independence. The Second Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in May of that year, took charge of the war effort by voting to organize a Continental Army out of scattered militia units in Massachusetts. Washington attended the Congress, wearing his buff and blue military uniform, a sign that he was willing to serve as general. The gambit succeeded: Congress, on a motion from John Adams, appointed Washington as general of the Continental Army. He pledged to exert every effort in support of “the glorious cause.”
Washington would spend the next eight years in command of the army and away from his wife and plantation in Virginia. He, along with his men, made enormous sacrifices for the cause of independence, enduring brutally cold winters, inadequate supplies, carping and criticism from members of the Continental Congress, long marches, and much more, before the conflict was settled in 1781. It was a close-run affair: There was scarcely a time in those years when it was clear to either side which one would prevail.
Washington settled quickly on an overall strategy for fighting the war. He could lose ground, cede it to the enemy as necessary, but he must not lose his army. “He could,” Brands writes, “retreat and retreat, so long as he had an army to retreat with.” He would strike British forces here and there when he had a tactical advantage, but would not risk a decisive defeat. He would win the war by refusing to lose it. When the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Washington was in New York City awaiting an expected return of British troops after he had driven them from Boston a few months earlier. The document inspired his troops, when it was read to them five days later, clarifying the cause for which they were fighting.
Over the next several weeks, some 30,000 British troops landed in Staten Island and Long Island under the command of General William Howe, who hoped to engage Washington’s forces in a decisive battle. Washington, following his strategy, refused to accommodate him. Seeing his troops outnumbered and outmaneuvered, he led them in a series of retreats from Brooklyn to Manhattan, then north to White Plains, across the Hudson River into New Jersey, then into Pennsylvania, while under continuous pursuit from British forces. Then, when it was least expected, Washington led his troops across the icy Delaware River on Christmas night to stage a daring counterattack on Hessian and British troops at Princeton and Trenton, thereby reviving sagging American spirits.
Washington was not in all cases the master of the military situation during the revolution, as Brands points out. It was General Horatio Gates, not Washington, who in late 1777 engineered the defeat of British forces in the Battle of Saratoga, the most significant American victory in the war prior to Yorktown. That victory persuaded the French government to lend financial and military support to the American cause, and induced the British in turn to adjust its overall strategy to winning control of the southern states.
Later, in 1781, it was Count Rochambeau, commander of French forces in America, who advised Washington to abandon plans to attack British forces in New York City, and to focus instead on a siege of Yorktown where French naval forces would be available to pin down General Cornwallis’s troops near that town on the Virginia peninsula. Washington agreed: He and Rochambeau combined forces outside New York City and proceeded on a long march to Yorktown. Their planned siege, carried out with a combined force of 17,000 French and American troops, assisted by a French naval blockade, forced Cornwallis to surrender and the British to call for an end to the war. The British might have fought on from there but decided to cut their losses.
When British officials signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783 in a final act of surrender and withdrawal from American shores, Washington resigned his commission as general of the Continental Army and returned to life as a private citizen. He had outclassed and outfought Britain’s best generals and thereby won a towering reputation among his countrymen, and especially among the soldiers under his command. King George III, hearing of his voluntary retirement, said he was “the greatest man in the world,” as he may have been.
It marked the pinnacle of his career, but far from the end of it. He watched in those years as the federal government, rudderless under the Articles of Confederation, listed from crisis to crisis, unable to win the respect either of European powers or its own citizens. It was nothing new to Washington: He had endured the same during the crisis of the Revolution.
He had always been in favor of a stronger national government, and so it came as no surprise when, on request from a young James Madison, he agreed to serve as chairman of the convention in Philadelphia that would design a Constitution for the American union. He said little during the proceedings. He did not have to: His presence lent needed legitimacy to the enterprise.
There was never any doubt as to who would be the first president under the new Constitution; indeed, the provisions in Article II may have been drawn up on the assumption that Washington would be the first occupant of the presidential office. He was elected unanimously in 1789, with John Adams as his vice president. He had no particular agenda to pursue, other than to establish the legitimacy of the new government, and to make it visible among citizens by his travels and public appearances.
As president, Washington inadvertently helped to establish the party system by appointing a team of rivals to his cabinet, led by Alexander Hamilton, his aide-de-camp during the war, and Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, two ambitious figures who disagreed over every major issue. He sided with Hamilton, and against Jefferson (and Madison), in debates over the national bank, funding public debt, neutrality in the new war between Britain and France, and the Jay Treaty. Jefferson, frustrated with those decisions, resigned from the cabinet and, with Madison, created a new political party to oppose those policies, claiming they were “monarchist” in design. Yet Washington’s decisions were consistent with views he had expressed for decades about the necessary powers of government.
Washington, as Brands writes, never forgave Jefferson for injecting partisanship into the new system, and for implying that he had designs to be a king. That was hyperbole: Washington wanted most to throw off the cloak of power and return to private life, which he did after two terms in office, but not before warning Americans about the corrupting dangers of partisanship and entanglements with European powers. In his final act as a private citizen, he directed in his last will and testament that his slaves should be emancipated on his wife’s death.
Washington was America’s first and only patriot president, elected without regard to party or ideology, and solely on the basis of devotion to his country. There could be only one Washington, born in an age of aristocracy but living through an age of popular revolution that he helped to shape but in which he was out of place. He was in all things the indispensable American, America’s patriarch, the image that shines through this splendid new biography.
American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington
by H.W. Brands
Doubleday, 640 pp., $40
James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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In December 1818, an 83-year-old John Adams—slow of step and weak of sight—was ushered into Boston’s Faneuil Hall to behold John Trumbull’s now-legendary painting of the presentation of the Declaration of Independence. The former president was said to have given “his warm approval.” He was probably lying.
Adams distrusted art that portrayed human events on an Olympian scale. In a letter to Trumbull, the former president suggested that an accurate rendering of the revolution would have depicted legislative debates so prosaic they likely wouldn’t have inspired anyone to pick up a brush.
Thomas Jefferson’s conception of the Founding was not so modest. As revolution churned in France in 1789, he wrote to James Madison that the French view of America’s Founding documents was “like that of the Bible, open to explanation but not to question.” That he was the author of one of those documents invites the question of whether he left the analogy unfinished.
These contrasting views of America’s Founding—one attributing it to the halting, tortuous work of imperfect men; one sensing a whiff of the divine in the proceedings—are the central preoccupation of Jim Rasenberger’s new book, A Perfect Coincidence: The Extraordinary Friendship and Astonishing Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
As Rasenberger notes, the fact that Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—was interpreted by many Americans of the day as a sign that divine providence had been at work in the Founding project. The effect on the country was so pronounced, he tells us, that it lodged a previously uncommon word—”coincidence”—permanently in the American vocabulary.
The book is less concerned, however, with whether the public saw the hand of fate guiding the proceedings than with whether Adams and Jefferson did. And thanks to the extensive correspondence they left behind, we know the answer to that question: On this, as on so many points, they disagreed.
It is de rigueur in accounts of the decades-long (and often contentious) friendship between these two men to note that they were a study in contrasts: Adams a short, squat, irascible New England Federalist with an inborn fatalism; Jefferson a tall, trim, taciturn Virginia Republican with a deep romantic streak. Where Rasenberger shines is in picking at these superficial differences to reveal the deeper divide for which they were a proxy: These were two men with fundamentally different conceptions of human nature.
Jefferson wrote that man’s “mind is perfectible to a degree of which we cannot yet form any conception.” Adams approvingly quoted Machiavelli that “whoever would found a state … must presume that all men are bad by nature.” Nearly every salient difference between the two flowed from those headwaters. Jefferson was impatient for the coming apotheosis of mankind. Adams was simply grateful for every day that society resisted the entropic descent into anarchy.
Rasenberger goes to great lengths to dispassionately adjudicate between the two views. He does not fully succeed, for the simple reason that it may be an impossible task.
To remain neutral in the debates between Adams and Jefferson is to remain neutral on the foundational questions of political life. You either thrill to the grandeur of Jefferson’s poetics or nod along to the horse sense of Adams’s often heavy-footed prose. You either drift toward the Burkean caution of Adams or the revolutionary zest of Jefferson. You either sniff at Jefferson as a bacillus of Jacobinism or wave away Adams as the Eeyore of the Founding generation.
Rasenberger tilts toward Adams, as becomes clear with the litany of disclaimers he adds in an attempt to give Jefferson a fair hearing. Noting how the self-styled Virginia rustic professed to disdain Europe while living the high life in Paris, the author gently notes that “truth with Jefferson was always complicated.” In trying to weigh the sincerity of his views that Adams and Alexander Hamilton were crypto-monarchists, the author stipulates that “for Jefferson biographers, the challenge that always comes up sooner or later is figuring out whether their man meant what he said.” Noting Jefferson’s confident assertion that the French Revolution would be bloodless—and the glib indifference he displayed when it turned out not to be—we are told, “For all his genius as a visionary, he was often blind to developments close at hand.”
These asides are not as tendentious as they sound. While Jefferson’s biographers often portray him as inscrutable (Joseph Ellis titled his Jefferson biography American Sphinx), a simpler interpretation is that he was something like an exceptional undergraduate: brilliant, romantic, florid, and largely unconcerned with either consistency or the practical implications of his views. Rasenberger provides damning evidence to this effect when he notes that Jefferson’s famous thought experiment proposing that the Constitution and all laws should reset every 19 years was written in a letter to Madison, “who had just spent three years of his life crafting and fighting for the passage of the U.S. Constitution.”
If Jefferson was prone to flights of fancy, however, it’s hard to deny that we’re all better off for it. When Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this weekend, the winged prose with which he suffused the Declaration of Independence will be inescapable. John Adams, who also served on the document’s drafting committee, referred to the finished product as a “theatrical show”—a bit of necessary razzle-dazzle, but not especially serious business. Adams concerned himself with the libretto. He simply could not hear the music.
It is unsurprising that someone this literal-minded dismissed the notion of a providential fate for America with the judgment, “Miracles will not be wrought for us. We don’t deserve them. If we will have government, we must use human and natural means.” The closest Adams could get to optimism was his frequent refrain, “We shall blunder through!” Like so much of the second president’s thought, it’s mildly depressing, rough around the edges, and entirely correct.
To understand American independence as a foreordained triumph is to misunderstand the sense of contingency the Founders themselves felt. Trumbull’s painting may cast the signing of the Declaration in a heroic light, but Rasenberger quotes Benjamin Rush’s testimony that the actual event happened in “pensive and awful silence.” These were not men who knew they were steering a course set by the gods. These were men who knew they were potentially signing their own death warrants. We call it providence only because we know how the story ends.
A Perfect Coincidence earns its keep by illuminating the real dynamics at work rather than settling for the just-so story. Jefferson’s America would never have been possible without the realism of John Adams tethering it to the ground. Adams’s America would never have been possible without Jefferson’s idealism urging it toward the horizon. Both would have been insufficient unleavened by the respective geniuses of Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, and countless others. At the remove of 250 years, that convergence seems more remarkable than ever.
A miracle? No. Something more.
A Perfect Coincidence: The Extraordinary Friendship and Astonishing Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
by Jim Rasenberger
Scribner, 496 pp., $31
Troy Senik is a former presidential speechwriter and the author of A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.
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America has always been a country of hustlers. In 2008 we elected Barack Obama, a serial memoirist with no functional experience who hustled his way to the White House after trouncing an establishment favorite. He shattered cherished norms, made promises he couldn’t keep, and started wars he didn’t want to finish but declared victory anyway. He revolutionized American politics, reshaped the presidency in his image by pushing the boundaries of executive power, and dramatically increased his net worth upon leaving office. Yes, he did.
Donald Trump is president now, having pulled off one of the greatest political comebacks of all time. The second term is different in some ways. Over the course of a decade, Trump has hired James Comey, fired James Comey (and his daughter), and is now trying to imprison James Comey, who has since retired to write third-rate crime fiction. In other ways, not much has changed. After a four-year hiatus, mainstream journalists have resumed publishing bestsellers about the president.
In Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, veteran New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan point out that Trump has always regarded “hustler” as a “term of admiration,” but considers “con man” to be one of the “worst insults.” The book’s target readers—other journalists—are encouraged to savor the irony and affirm their existing view of Trump as a world-historic strongman intent on subverting our cherished democracy.
Based on over a thousand (mostly anonymous) interviews with “people close to President Trump,” Regime Change purports to give the inside scoop on how Trump became “the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes” while waging a “campaign of retribution unlike anything before.” Like the man himself, the book’s authors are fond of superlatives.
“No White House communications director had ever communicated like this,” the authors write of Steven Cheung’s use of the word “retards” to describe members of Congress. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran shattered what was “perhaps the most sacred covenant” he made with voters. They go on to explain why—based on journalistic insights beyond the reach of ordinary voters—it would be foolish to describe anything Trump says as a “sacred covenant.”
Ominous title sections—Whirlwind, Retribution, The Enemy Within, Plunder—convey a sense of imminent doom that rarely comports with the “inside” look at a White House operation that is (still) quite bumbling, haphazard, rarely coherent, often absurd, albeit unrelenting. Veep meets Uncut Gems.
Regime Change describes a free-wheeling Oval Office with a revolving door of “Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, Gulf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons,” while the man who would go on to become the world’s first trillionaire plays video games in the dark upstairs. The Situation Room oscillates between high-stakes war planning and higher-stakes crisis PR meetings to address “nipple fetish” allegations in the files of a notorious pedophile.
What we’re seeing now is “pure Trump,” in the words of Steve Bannon, the president’s briefly imprisoned former adviser. Gone are the “well-credentialed strangers” Trump relied on in his first term, replaced by loyalists with varying appetites for self-abasement. The authors contend that second-term Trump is the Kool-Aid Man, smashing through institutional barriers that had previously frustrated his ambitions, thereby demonstrating “they had no mechanism to stop him.” The evidence is underwhelming.
Regime Change offers dramatic accounts of Trump aides discussing policies that would be genuinely draconian—suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act. The conversations go nowhere, in part, because of strong pushback from within the administration. The same is true of Trump’s repeated threats to fire former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. The word filibuster does not appear in the book, for obvious reasons. Notwithstanding his unchecked power, Trump still can’t get the GOP Senate to abolish it.
The book’s portentous framing is undermined as well by its very existence. Regime Change is merely the latest bestseller to offer a critical take on a man often denounced as an existential threat to the journalistic craft. This version of the Trump administration “rarely” leaks, they write. But Haberman and Swan got plenty of people to leak to them. They are mostly anonymous apart from Tucker Carlson, who makes several appearances—including as an emissary for the Maduro regime in Venezuela—and whose conversations with Trump unfold as if transcribed from an audio recording.
For all its apocalyptic melodrama, the book’s most enduring image of Trump is that of an elderly man “clutching a tube of superglue and attempting to affix gold decorations to the marble fireplace mantel.” There are few things he enjoys more than getting Vice President J.D. Vance in a room with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and asking people to assess their prospects in 2028. Trump takes great pleasure in trolling Democratic leaders by having the White House photographer snap their photos next to an array of “Trump 2028” hats. They were there to discuss the impending government shutdown, but Trump “knew that nothing would come of the meeting” and was “content to play games … it was good sport.”
But, oh, the precious norms.
In refusing to play by the rules and accept “because that’s the way it’s always been done” as an answer, Trump is a quintessentially American figure. He takes what he wants until somebody stops him. Jill Biden would be proud (and boiling with envy). Trump was counted out, shot at, and hauled before judges only to emerge victorious—just as he planned all along.
“I do understand that it’s all basically a game,” Trump said almost 50 years ago. “We’re all here to play the game, and we’re all hopefully going to play it well.” In a final interview with the Regime Change authors, Trump urged them to write the “one thing you can say about me that anybody believes. … Essentially I won every fucking time.”
Trump is (probably) done winning at the ballot box, but his legacy will endure. Just as he advanced his predecessor’s expansive view of executive power, future White House occupants will inherit Trump’s victories and learn from his defeats. In many ways, Regime Change is a primer on how to half-ass an imperial presidency.
Haberman and Swan recount a March 2025 meeting with oil executives at the White House where attendees marveled at Trump’s ability to make decisions the old-fashioned way without getting bogged down in expert analyses and environmental impact statements. They were thrilled, for the time being.
“He has a better sense of his executive authority than anybody else we’ve ever dealt with,” one executive said. “I would never want a Democrat to have that same sense of executive authority. But this guy fucking does.”
When Democrats do take power, we can take comfort in knowing our esteemed journalists—models of consistency in every respect—will be first to sound the alarm.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $34
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Tom Bower is the only celebrity biographer who does his job properly. All his biographies are unauthorized, from his first essay in the form, the life of the Nazi sadist Klaus “Butcher of Lyon” Barbie, to his latest, Betrayal, on Meghan and Harry’s campaign of self-enrichment and revenge. On the way, Bower has done the dirty on British politicians (Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown) and been sued by the media magnates Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Conrad Black, and also Richard Desmond, who made his money in pornography and then sank to newspaper publishing.
Betrayal is the sequel to 2022’s Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors. These horsey folk are not Bower’s only entrants in the donkey derby of royal biography. He has also exposed Harry’s dad as a pampered philanderer (2018’s Rebel Prince, lately enthroned and expanded to Rebel King), and David and Victoria Beckham as a marketing exercise in human form. The subtitle of the Beckham biography was Money, Sex and Power. Reading Betrayal, you get the impression that Prince Harry is on short rations of all three.
The first third of Betrayal is a recap of Revenge. These opening chapters are a reminder that nothing Meghan and Harry say can be trusted. They describe how Meghan, who claimed she didn’t know who Harry was despite having collected biographies of his late mother Diana, snagged Harry, who really didn’t know who he was and was also captivated by the Diana myth; and how the British people took the young couple to their calcified hearts because they pitied Harry the motherless son, and because the toothless hordes like a dusting of Hollywood glamor now and then.
The fairytale wedding of 2018 turned into the media nightmare of 2021’s Oprah with Meghan and Harry. Meghan accused Harry’s family of being racist snobs, Harry nodded along, and Oprah bathed in their fresh bile. For Harry’s family, and his ailing grandmother Elizabeth II in particular, the treason of a foolish prince and an American divorcée revived memories of the most shameful acts in the history of modern British monarchy. No, not Sarah, Duchess of York, having her toes sucked by the Texas millionaire Johnny Bryan, or Prince Andrew partying with Jeffrey Epstein, but rather Wallis Simpson curtsying to Hitler in 1937 and Edward VIII speculating against the British pound in the summer of 1940. For Harry’s father Prince Charles (now Charles III), it revived memories of the most shameful period of his life: his ex-wife Diana using a TV interview to denounce him as a false husband whose idea of phone sex was to imagine being his lover’s tampon. His lover is now the Queen of England.
It was not clear what Harry expected to happen next. Traditionally, a second son with blackhearted treason in mind commandeers a herring barque to France with a gang of malcontent noble blades, intrigues with the bastard King of France, kisses the sand on a remote Scottish or Welsh bay, raises an army of swineherds and disenfranchised aristocrats, and fights his brother the king-in-waiting in a field in the English Midlands whose precise location will be discovered in the early 21st century during renovation works to a municipal car park. But this is the 21st century.
In Betrayal, Meghan and Harry exchange the gilded cage of British royalty for the cage fight of American celebrity. Meghan seems pleased with the bargain, Harry less so. For Meghan, royal life was a three-year role-play, a detour from Hollywood, but for Harry, it was who he was and all he had ever known. For her, the royal association paid off, at least for a while. It was a shortcut to a status she could never have won as an actress; even among the real A-listers, only Fergie can match Meghan’s claim to be a duchess. But Harry does not want the relatively simple status of a celebrity, who exists by being seen.
Harry expects the hereditary perquisites and privileges of a British royal—money and status, and privacy by right—even as he denounces his family and cashes out in California. Harry claims that he fled to California to spare Meghan and himself from what he called the British tabloids’ “constant harassment (online and off), intimidation and abuse.” From his fortress in Montecito, he sallies forth to the law courts of London to sue the British papers for intruding into his privacy. Yet, as Bower shows, Harry also feeds stories to a Daily Mail journalist from a Facebook account in the name of “Mr. Mischief.” He is so entitled and dim that when he leaks stories via WhatsApp messages, he signs himself “H.,” so no one can guess who he is.
Harry’s strategy for winning privacy was Meghan’s strategy for winning visibility. As soon as they land in L.A., Bower reports, their new agent advises that Netflix will pay more if the Sussexes “delivered hours of private video shot in their most intimate moments.” His new life is even more unreal than his old one. At first, he and Meghan pocket “millions of dollars” by paring morsels of royal gossip and slander. But once they have done Oprah and Harry has issued an autobiography ghostwritten by someone who evidently despises him, the cupboard is bare.
As their celebrity stock falls, their more famous Montecito neighbors turn down invitations to appear on their Netflix show and Meghan’s podcasts. They ask for Beyoncé. They get Beyoncé’s mother. Meghan reboots as a jam-making wine mom, but it turns out that someone else already owns the name of her brand, American Riviera Orchard. If she had hired a professional to run the company, she would have spared herself the embarrassment, but she didn’t. Similar failures of judgment lead Harry into a public slanging match with his African charity.
Meghan and Harry’s images crack through repeated self-exposure. Two High Court judges doubt Harry’s veracity. Their Archewell nonprofit loses more than 20 senior staff in four years. In 2024, only three years after their American relaunch, disgruntled ex-staff tell the Hollywood Reporter that Meghan is an incompetent bully. A Vanity Fair profile entitled “American Hustle” calls her a “Mean Girl teenager.” Tina Brown opines that they’ve “run out of road.” Their Archewell philanthropic venture fails and is rebooted as a for-profit that doesn’t make any money. Their second Netflix series reaches number 383 on the Netflix chart. America is not renewing its option. As Timon of Athens rues when his friends disappear as the money runs out, “ceremony was but devised at first / To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes.”
We have to admire how Meghan holds her “rictus Hollywood smile” despite the failed ventures and public snubs. Her As Ever Christmas collection includes a candle scented with “Moroccan mint, cardamom and tea leaves” that evokes “the freshness of a day in the English countryside,” where none of these plants are native (yours for $64), a Signature Fruit Spread gift set ($42), and a relabeled bottle of “unexceptional” white wine ($89). But Harry follows up in the rear with a “perma-scowl.” By autumn 2025, they are “running out of money.” According to Bower, Mr. & Mrs. Privacy now monetize their young children by posing them for Instagram posts.
Some of Betrayal’s British reviewers felt that Bower, having slaughtered the impostor couple in Revenge, has wasted his investigative talents by returning to the scene of the slime. But the Bower method of forensic detail and telling context is a perfect fit for subjects who fudge their details and manipulate their contexts. They present themselves as an ethical media phenomenon. Bower shows they are unscrupulous freeloaders.
In 2024, Colombia’s left-wing vice-president Francia Márquez invited Meghan and Harry to make a “state visit.” Márquez, Bower writes, is an “anti-imperialist” seeking reparations from the former European powers. She takes Meghan at her word, and thinks that Meghan sympathizes with “her battle against white supremacist exploitation of black people” and seeks “the end of capitalism.” A “state visit,” even a fake one, might also boost Márquez’s standing in a country where the poverty rate has risen from 30.9 percent in 2016 (already above the Latin American average of 24.1 percent) to 34.5 percent in 2024.
George Soros’s Open Society Foundation secretly funds Meghan and Harry’s trip.
Dressed in a $2,150 metallic jacquard dress, wearing $875 Jimmy Choo sandals, and a gold Cartier necklace and rings valued at $23,550, plus a Tank Française watch inherited from Diana, Meghan arrived at the National Arts Center (CNA) to watch a dance group. Next, the Sussexes joined a panel discussion with Márquez in a half-filled room about the perils of fake news on social media for social cohesion. The audience was more interested in Meghan’s metallic outfit.
Meghan changes outfits for the next event, because that is what the people in a country with a 34.5 percent poverty rate expect, and slums it in “White Mango and Banana Republic with a Cesta Collective basket bag handwoven in Rwanda.” Cesta, Meghan tells the plebes, taught her “how many women’s lives were being impacted and uplifted through their work.” The Rwandan women, Bower notes, work in mud huts where their uplift is priced at 10 pence (13.7 cents) an hour. The women earn $3.38 for a bag that is “sold in America for $724.” Meghan’s fans can buy her clothes and handbags via the ShopMy page of her Instagram and give the hard-strapped duchess a commission. Imelda Marcos would have loved the internet.
This goes on for three miserable days, though Harry, who discussed his use of hard drugs in his autobiography, surely enjoyed the visit to Cali, the “capital of the cocaine cartels.” At the end of the trip, Márquez tries to shake down the tourists and explains that Meghan and Harry were “expected to make a serious donation to match George Soros’s Open Society’s donations.” In 2024, Bower writes, Open Society’s operating budget was $400 million. Archewell’s was $2 million. Instead of cash, Meghan offers soundbites and self-care. Colombian women should “empower each other,” she says, and “wash things over with love, kindness and generosity.” At the end of the year, Archewell’s accountants claim a tax-free donation of $8,310.
Back in Britain, King Charles fires his creepy younger brother Andrew from The Firm. He also cannot trust Harry, because Harry will sell the contents of their conversation. As King Lear says, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” Prince William lets it be known that Harry is “an embarrassment.” Harry’s fate, Bower believes, now depends entirely on William, and William sees Harry as Edgar does his half-brother Edmund in Lear: “A most toad-spotted traitor.” Harry, like Andrew, was denied the right to wear his military uniform at his grandmother’s funeral and Charles’s coronation. He sold a thousand years of royal style for a mess of media pottage. There can be no way back, and there is no way forward. Accept no imitations.
Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family
by Tom Bower
Bonnier, 464 pp., $39.99
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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