"In 'Seven Days in May,' a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States..."

"... whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as 'Fail Safe' and 'Dr. Strangelove,' belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in 'Fail Safe,' and of civilization, in 'Strangelove'—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart. The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published 'The Threat"... [about] eight days in May of 2017.... McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy."

Writes Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker.

I don't think Toobin meant to imply that "The Threat" is a work of fiction — and a cheesy one at that — a mere "popular novel," in the genre of "Cold War fantasies."