CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/6/2022

Transforming toxicity into beauty, Richard Kraft's penalty cards track Donald Trump's transgressions in office

During a week remembered by most for its national and personal trauma and shame, we can think of no better book to feature than Richard Kraft's five-volume It Is What It Is: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017–January 2021, published by Siglio. Collecting almost 10,000 offenses and transgressions committed while in office via a system of soccer-style penalty cards—coded from yellow (mild) to red (severe) to egregious beyond any previous card-notational scale (magenta, purple and finally, crimson)—each volume contains textual annotations for each card and an index by penalty type (Conspiracy Theories, Environment, Golf, Race, etc.). "I signed up to be a referee for a game that everyone is watching, but for which the rules, when applied, seem to have no effect," Kraft writes. "From about any vantage point, this piece is an exercise in futility, and that futility made the effort all the more worthwhile. After all, what better way to counter a man for whom money is the only measure of worth than to make a durational art work that is broad in its reach, large in scale, and crucially, utterly useless ... nevertheless, I feel exactly the same now as I did when I began: the gravest danger with autocrats is to allow their crimes to disappear. This is a record, one among many, all of them essential as a bulwark against forgetting."