The Fixers

The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President

By: Joe Palazzolo, Michael Rothfeld

Narrated by: Jim Frangione

Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's Summary

The shocking, definitive account of the lawyers and media tycoons who enabled the rise of Donald Trump, featuring new revelations from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal team

With his blunt-force fame and the myths he’s propagated about himself, Donald Trump has always moved in a world of gossip barons, crooked lawyers, and porn stars. But when he became the Republican nominee for the presidency in 2016, all of these characters crawled out from the underbelly of Trump’s stardom and stumbled onto the global stage with him. 

In The Fixers, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld have produced a deeply reported and exquisitely drawn portrait of that world, full of secret phone calls, hidden texts, and desperate deals, unearthing the practice of "catch and kill" by which Trump surrogates paid hush money to cover up his affairs, and detailing Trump’s historic relationship with his fixers - from his early, influential relationship with Roy Cohn to his reliance on Michael Cohen, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. It traces the arc of their interactions from the 1970s through the 2016 campaign and beyond. It is a distinctly American saga that navigates the worlds of reality TV, cash-for-trash tabloids, single-shingle law shops, celebrity bashes, high-end real estate, pornography, and politics. The characters and settings of this audiobook are part of a vulgar circus that crisscrosses the country, from New York to LA to DC. 

Terrifying, darkly comic, and compulsively listenable, The Fixers is an epic political adventure in which greed, corruption, lust, and ambition collide, and that leads, ultimately, to the White House. 

Praise for The Fixers

"Of the dozens of books chronicling Donald Trump’s presidency, The Fixers is destined to sit atop the pile. It has everything you look for in a political page-turner: Colorful characters, intrigue, sex, corruption and - unlike much of the Trump canon - meticulous, factual reporting by two ace reporters. What a read!" (John Carreyrou, New York Times best-selling author of Bad Blood)

©2020 Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“Yes, we know Donald Trump thinks and acts and lives like a gangster. But these two first-rate investigative reporters portray in depth and in vivid detail what that means and how that works. The Fixers is like a riveting modern true-life sequel to Sweet Smell of Success, terrific nonfiction noir with stupendously high stakes.” (Kurt Andersen, New York Times best-selling author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)

“Anyone interested in the seedy and fascinating intersection of money, sex, media, power, and the law that has threatened to topple the Trump presidency should drink in every sentence of The Fixers. It’s deeply engaging, built upon hard-won and deft reporting, and written with grace and authority, and it offers a series of indelible portraits of all of the opportunists and scammers who got their hooks into the White House.” (Timothy L. O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald)

Disturbing

Objectively speaking, this book evokes a whole host of feelings. The word that keeps coming up in my mind is disturbing. All of these characters are truly disturbing. On every level. I feel as though I need to take a shower after reading the actions of all involved in these pages.
Well told are these facts. I went through this whole book in less than 24 hours.

Worthy of your time and something you should know

I wish all Americans would listen to this book so they can learn the extent powerful people will go to lie.

Well written, interesting, good narration.

Lame (review updated)

About 10% of this book is about Trump. It should be called "6 Degrees from Donald Trump". I could be in this book because I've seen him on television. Very disappointing! The slim sections that are about DT are very old news we all know about. Very lame! These writers may have won Pulitzers but certainly not for this. The reader is good.
UPDATE: Okay, I admit it. This book is not lame. It is extremely lame! Not only do they write about old news that everyone has known for months, years even, but they repeat the stories, Yes, that's right. They tell the same stories two, possibly three times. I really don't know how many times they repeat the same stories in this book because I finally got fed up and returned the it after the second or possibly third repetition of the Stormy Daniels story. The writers should be ashamed! Maybe the publishers told Palazzolo and Rothfeld that any book about Trump just makes money. I hope that most people who get this book, get it on Audible so that it can be returned.

Very good read!

very well written about all of the scum surrounding the former president! it is absolutely disgusting that he won and did so much damage to our beautiful country!

Well Done

Good research, well written, comprehensible, fluent, and terrific narration. Narrator provides an enjoyable voice with good emphasis and articulation. As much as I despise the subject matter, I enjoyed this book very much

Provides In Depth Information on Things You...

... probably already know.

If you're the type of person who enjoys reading a 5 page report of a football game you saw, this is for you. I initially planned to rate this much lower because this was information I didn't care to know that much about, but I realize political junkies may have a different take. This is well researched. There are mini-bios of Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, and all the other players in this drama. The writers are newspaper reporters and this reads like a very long newspaper article. Reportage with few, if any, analysis. If you need to know the details of what happened behind the scenes, you should get this. Otherwise, it's an easy pass.