Barack Obama’s First Netflix Project Revealed to Be About Donald Trump

Barack Obama’s very first Netflix project has been revealed to be about the Donald Trump administration.

According to Vulture, the Obamas have acquired the rights to a book titled The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis and reportedly plan to explore the possibility of adapting it into a series for the streaming service.

The Fifth Risk is a New York Times best-seller about the beginning of the Trump presidency, focusing on the notion of “what are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?”

“‘The election happened,’ remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. ‘And then there was radio silence.’ Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them,” a summary of the book from publisher W. W. Norton & Company reads.

“Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly,” the summary continues. “Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.”

“Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems,” the summary continues. “There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”

“If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running,” the summary concludes. “Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.”

Many outlets have praised The Fifth Risk and its author, with the New York Times itself saying that “Michael Lewis makes a story about government infrastructure exciting.”

“An important and timely story, one that all of us who pay for, care about, and want government to work should hear,” writes NPR Books.

“The Fifth Risk challenges us to expect and appreciate [accomplishment, motivation, and public-spirtedness] at the highest levels of our federal workforce. Better yet, to demand them,” adds the Washington Post.

At this time, there is no word on when the series may make its way to Netflix, but it likely would not be until sometime next year or beyond.