Lewis’s
new book on the Covid debacle,
The Premonition, is a companion study of
sorts to his 2018 book
The Fifth Risk, which sought to document the
heroic resistance to the raw dictates of Trumpism mounted by conscientious
civil servants ensconced in the federal bureaucracy. As in that book,
The
Premonition renders the crisis of the moment as a long-gestating case study
in the misallocation of policy imagination. In this case, the challenge of the
pandemic summons a corps of policy entrepreneurs, both within and without the
public sector, to act as an ad hoc sort of Justice League, managing by force of