What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

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For Jamie, Fiona, and Finn

Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!

—Donald J. Trump, July 17, 2020

INTRODUCTION

HOW WE THOUGHT HERE

Early in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, I approached an editor at the Washington Post with what I considered an inspired proposal: What if, as the paper’s new nonfiction critic, I binge-read a selection of the candidate’s books published since the 1980s—including Trump: The Art of the Deal, that foundational text of Trump Studies—and explained to our readers whatever I learned about him? Even ghostwritten books still reveal much about the purported author’s self-image, much as all propaganda divulges its intentions. The editor liked the idea, but he urged me to hurry. It wasn’t clear how long interest in Trump would last.

That was in July 2015.

Interest in Trump has lasted far longer than may have seemed possible, if interest comes close to describing the hold that Trump, as candidate and president, would exert over American public life. Reading his books did offer a preview of a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random, as I wrote at the time. Elsewhere, such qualities might get in the way of the story. With Trump, they are the story.

In the years since, I’ve pored over books on the Trump era, trying to keep pace with the intellectuals, journalists, insiders, partisans, and activists who are grappling with the turmoil it has wrought. I’ve read some 150 of them thus far, and even that is just a fraction of the Trump canon. One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads, preferring the rage of cable news and Twitter for hours each day, has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency.

Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on gender and identity. Histories and memoirs of race and protest. Surveys of populism, authoritarianism, and anger. Investigations of political extremism. Polemics on the future of left and right. Debates and proposals on immigration. Studies on the institution of the presidency and the fate of democracy. And, of course, plenty of books about Trump himself—his values, his family, his businesses, and his White House.

There are still many more I want and expect to read, but this sample is enough to hazard some conclusions. These books, appearing between 2016 and 2020, have dominated the bestseller lists. As a publishing phenomenon, they have succeeded. Less so, I fear, as an intellectual project. The best of these works combine urgency and insight, timeliness and timelessness. But too many books of the Trump era are more knee-jerk than incisive, more posing than probing, more righteous than right, more fixated on calling out the daily transgressions of the man in the Oval Office—this is not normal!—than on assessing their impact. They are illuminating in part because they reflect some of the same blind spots, resentments, and failures of imagination that gave us the Trump presidency itself, and that are likely to outlast it. Individually, these books try to show a way forward. Collectively, they reveal how we’re stuck.

Among the president’s opponents, the response to Trump was born in disdain for his campaign, aversion toward his supporters, shock at his victory, and revulsion against his policies. Essay anthologies quickly sprouted, with activists, novelists, and politicians wallowing in their election night woes and calling for resistance to the new order. When expletives and all caps crowd out discernment, and when high-mindedness veers into dogmatism, the resistance lit can be among the least inspiring subgenres of this era.

On the right, Trump deepened a breach between opportunists and absolutists. The former offer books pandering to their new leader, ignoring or reveling in his more sordid traits and undemocratic impulses, captive minds seeking to retrofit Trumpism into something approaching a coherent ideology. The latter, meanwhile, publish hardcover breakup letters to their party and movement, without realizing that sometimes, when the love is gone, it really is you and not them.

Scribes and sociologists descended upon every small-town diner and rusted factory between the coasts, hoping to divine the mind of the white working-class Trump voter, seeking to adjudicate which shorthand motivation, whether economic deprivation or racial prejudice, explains the enduring devotion of Trump’s base. The least convincing of these works insist on one answer alone; the most vivid are those that show how the two impulses can be intertwined—because people are human and humans are complicated—and how, rather than pushing voters toward a particular candidate, such feelings can leave them believing that politics has no place for them at all.

From the academy, packed bookshelves emerged to warn that Trump was killing off the American experiment, with the precise cause of death determined by each writer’s expertise. Political scientists warned of the death of democracy. Philosophers and literary critics worried about the death of truth. Internationalists fretted over the death of global trade and alliances. Historians, meanwhile, shook their heads and explained to anyone who would listen that we’d all been here before.

Donald Trump may not read many books (Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started, he replied in 2017 when a Fox News host asked him about his reading habits), but he understands their cultural and political allure. He has published more than a dozen books, and he launched his campaign in 2015 declaring that "we need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal." That 1987 memoir, whose true writer has since expressed regret for his role, is as much a part of Trump’s image as The Apprentice or Trump Tower, maybe more. The president is certainly aware of the books covering him and his administration, publicly praising or trashing them depending on whether he thinks they are nice to him—no matter that his attention boosts their sales and reach either way.

Critics scoff at the president’s literary indifference, often comparing it to his predecessor’s reverence for the written word; Barack Obama receives rapturous coverage every time he promotes a new list of titles purchased from the local indie shop. To the extent that Trump relies on books at all, it is to confirm his instincts rather than to challenge his assumptions; to ratify, not edify. (In 2015, for instance, his initial campaign remarks insulting Mexican immigrants may have been partially inspired by Ann Coulter’s ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, which the candidate had hailed as a great read just three weeks earlier.) Yes, I would be delighted if our president read more books, even more so if they were good ones. But of the many concerns I have about Trump, a thin TBR pile is not foremost among them. I’d settle for him reading his briefing materials. Or the Constitution.

The books Americans buy, debate, and prize usually say something about how they feel about their prospects, their politics, and their leadership. Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir, appealed to readers hoping for insight on the motivations of the communities backing Trump, even if the book never even mentions him. After the candidate won and took office, George Orwell’s 1984 displaced Vance atop Amazon’s sales ranking, meaning readers were suddenly less concerned with how we got here than with where we were headed. Ben Lerner’s heralded 2019 novel The Topeka School drew upon the shifting tactics of high school debaters a generation ago to explain the rapid-fire rhetoric and macho posturing of right-wing politics in our time. And shortly after Trump pledged to dominate the streets of American cities where protesters were demonstrating against racism and police violence, books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) became bestsellers.

Every book, it seems, can be a Trump book.

My own concern is not how we got here, but how we thought here. I’m not interested in identifying that one book from decades ago that supposedly saw it all coming. I focus on the books and debates of this moment—from the heartland to the border, from the resistance on the left to the civil war on the right, from the battles over truth to the fears about democracy—not out of some misplaced now-more-than-everism but to preserve a snapshot of how we grappled with the Trump era in real time. I want to remember what I thought about it, too.

Some of the ideas I explore here build on the essays and reviews I have written in the Washington Post during the Trump years. Obsessive Post readers may recognize my views on particular authors or subjects from these earlier writings, but they may also notice that, on occasion, my conclusions about specific books have shifted during flight. Fresh arguments and events can place a book in a new light, whether brightened, dimmed, or filtered. And often a work reads differently when in dialogue with additional books over a longer timeline, or when it is read in a new circumstance in the life of the nation or the life of the reader. The most rewarding books are the ones I never stop reconsidering and reviewing in my mind, even if I never open them again.

I realize it may be early to judge the books of the Trump era; almost certainly, the most illuminating works about this period have yet to be written. Future memoirs will offer new details and settle old disputes (Don McGahn, Robert Mueller, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Anthony Fauci rank highest on my wish list), while official and reported investigations will deepen the record. I also understand that using nonfiction books alone to assess the intellectual output of this time may seem limiting. With so many relevant forms of expression available—newspaper and magazine reporting, novels, drama, music, poetry, film, television, speeches, podcasts, photography—there is something oddly nostalgic about relying solely on words that are printed and bound.

But if journalism is still history’s first draft, then books remain the first draft of how we think about that history, how we seek our place in it. That is the spirit of this exercise, to which I bring nothing more than the discipline of a dedicated reader and the zeal of a new American. The 2016 presidential election was my first as a U.S. citizen and voter, and Trump’s rise in national politics has coincided almost exactly with my time as a book critic. The demands of both literature and citizenship will forever shape the way I view this presidency.

As both reader and citizen, I believe that the early intellectual response to the Trump presidency is of enormous consequence. This president has challenged principles, practices, and standards of American life—on the accountability and legitimacy of our leaders, on who can take part in the American experiment. With that challenge in mind, the books that matter most right now are not necessarily those revealing White House intrigue, policy disputes, or official scandals, no matter how crucial those subjects. They are, instead, the books that enable and ennoble a national reexamination—one that Trump has attempted to carry out on his own and on our behalf. They are the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, that hold fast to the American tradition of always seeing ourselves anew.

They are the books on the white working class that do not oversimplify its motives or its politics, and the resistance volumes that resist dogma and exclusion. They are the studies on the decline of truth that leave room for self-doubt, and the works on immigration that find newcomers changing America from within, and being changed by it, too. They are the memoirs of race and identity that see the individual behind every group struggle, and the reports of White House mayhem that reveal the long-term erosion of the office and our government. They are the volumes on democracy that identify today’s battles as part of that endless fight to live up to our self-professed, self-evident truths, and that show that striving, while failing, to reach them is not just a feature of our system but its definition.

Such books are not beholden to this moment, which is why they reveal so much about it. The most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.

ONE

HEARTLANDIA

I keep running into Ed Harry.

Harry, in his seventies, is a former labor organizer from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and an air force veteran who served in Vietnam. He’s also a lifelong Democrat, even a delegate to the 1992 party convention that nominated Bill Clinton. I wasn’t just a guy who voted straight Democrat up and down the ballot, it was a religion to me, it was my identity, he told a reporter.

Then, in 2016, Ed Harry cast his ballot for Donald Trump.

Harry’s shift, and that of other voters like him, became a subject of endless fascination for journalists, academics, intellectuals, and assorted authors exploring America’s heartland to examine the politics of white grievance. Are Trump’s working-class supporters driven mainly by their economic struggles or—in that politest euphemism of our age—their cultural anxieties? Who is to blame for their plight? Is Trump helping them or just using them?

A descendant of nineteenth-century Welsh immigrants and a son and grandson of coal miners, Harry is an especially popular emblem for the heartland set: he is featured in not one but two prominent books explaining the Trump voter, published five months apart in 2018. The overlap reveals more than the formulaic qualities of the genre. It turns out that Harry’s political impulses vary significantly from one book to the other—in ways that neatly fit the authors’ divergent explanations of how Trump won the presidency.

In The Great Revolt, by Salena Zito and Brad Todd, Harry is motivated mainly by economic and political concerns. He worries about trade deals that encourage companies to relocate jobs overseas and he despises political dynasties like the Clintons and Bushes. Harry mistrusts big anything—big banks, big Wall Street, big corporations, the establishment of both parties and their lobbyists, and the big media corporations, he ticks off—and he attacks Democrats for abandoning the working class. Blue-collar America essentially had the door shut in its face, he complains. Zito and Todd seem proud of their archetype. If anyone went to central casting looking for blue-collar union boss type and Harry was in line, he would be the first man picked. He is, the authors say, the kind of guy you want on your side.

In Ben Bradlee Jr.’s The Forgotten, however, Harry has more expansive motives. Sure, he rails against the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but he also eagerly enlists in the culture wars. To me there are more important issues than getting an extra door for transsexuals in public buildings, he tells Bradlee, complaining that the Democrats have gone so far left. In the pages of The Forgotten, Harry morphs from central casting into a 9/11 truther (you’ll never convince me that two planes caused the buildings to collapse) who listens to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, questions the official story behind the Oklahoma City bombing, and believes that Black Lives Matter protesters have secretly received tens of millions of dollars from George Soros. He accepts Trump’s claim that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in 2016, and even considers that estimate too modest, because Barack Obama, Harry assures, urged immigrants to come in and vote. In this book, Harry does seem like the kind of guy you want on your side, as long as you’re on a very particular side.

So why does Ed Harry, salt of the earth in one volume, go scorched-earth in another?

The answer may say less about the politics of a single voter than about how a single voter can be politicized by those seeking to explain him. Yes, the white working class may have helped put Trump in the White House, but it has also become a literary and sociological device advancing the political interpretations of the writers and intellectuals suddenly fixated on this demographic.

For Bradlee, a former senior editor with the Boston Globe, Trump’s campaign message constituted a nostalgic paean to a simpler, whiter time in America, and it resonated with voters who felt that the country was being inundated with immigrants. He warns that Trump promotes a retro-tribalism that is trending toward the old separate-but-equal ethos—and naturally he emphasizes the parallel views he finds among Trump voters. (Part of Bradlee’s book features a white nationalist and former Klansman in Luzerne County who considers Trump the greatest president of his lifetime.) By contrast, Zito and Todd relish Trump’s efforts to tear down elite institutions, including political parties and the news media, and to defend traditional America as they see it. The Trump voters in their book are kindhearted people who speak in thoughtful, folksy, quotable paragraphs, whose smiles and laughs and love of life are all infectious.

The debates over the Trump voter have produced a rush of such books examining, debunking, or somehow channeling the white working class. They include histories, memoirs, polemics, academic surveys, and near-fetishistic dispatches from writers pulling up to every chrome-counter diner (they must be chrome) and shuttered factory (shuttered is an obligatory adjective) in America. The books’ individual literary merits vary widely; some are delightful, others insufferable. Analytically, they offer a mishmash of insight, data, blame, poignancy, and condescension, with a generous helping of partisanship. As often as not, the heartland chroniclers interpret their subject through their prisms and biases, projecting onto the white working class their own wishes and worries, confirming whatever they advocate or imagine.

The quest to assign blame is a powerful impulse of the heartland genre. Many of the writers appear driven to find one overriding culprit for the economic and even spiritual struggles of the white working class, and where they choose to attach culpability is a product of their research, reporting, and experience—and also their politics. Blame yourself or anyone but yourself; blame the community or distant politicians; blame job-stealing immigrants or soulless corporations or knee-jerk emotions. The possibilities are endless, overlapping, and conflicting.

J. D. Vance’s eternal bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, appeared in the summer of 2016, precisely when the Trump voter had become a subject of earnest cable-news hits and incessant cultural deconstruction. A memoir of the author’s childhood in southwestern Ohio, his roots in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and his path from deprivation to Yale Law School, Hillbilly Elegy is affecting and inspirational. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash, Vance writes of his community. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

But he also calls them out. In Vance’s telling, the spiritual and material poverty—the hub of misery—enveloping his childhood in the 1980s and 1990s was almost always the fault of those suffering it. You could walk around his home of Middletown, Ohio, Vance writes, and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. In towns such as his, many folks talk about working more than they actually work. His explanation for that dissonance is damning: it is a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it, a multigenerational legacy perpetuating self-pity and recklessness. If Vance could change one thing about the white working class, he asserts, he would eradicate this pervasive helplessness, a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.

Vance identifies the guilty party—and his own worldview—early in life. He saw how people gamed the welfare system, he writes, recalling his days as a grocery store cashier during high school. They would buy packs of soda with food stamps only to sell them at a discount for cash, or they’d ring up separate orders, using food stamps for food and their own money for booze. Most of us were struggling to get by.… But a large minority was content to live off the dole, he complains. This willingness to point the finger inward helps explain the bipartisan appeal of Hillbilly Elegy: the book confirms liberal elites’ suspicions about the pathologies of the deplorable pro-Trump white working class but also ratifies the bootstraps ethos of mainstream conservatism. Even Vance’s path to Yale Law, with stops in the marine corps, Iraq and Ohio State, affirms the favored meritocracies of the Left (Ivy League, check) and of the Right (military service, check). As Mamaw, the tough-talking grandmother who helped raise Vance, reminds him, Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them.

But you don’t have to be a loser to blame a stacked deck—you just need to see the world through different politics. Sarah Smarsh also endured chronic poverty, the kind in which all your relatives’ old letters are about looking for jobs, searching for homes, and hoping for money. In Heartland, her 2018 memoir, Smarsh, a fifth-generation Kansan with roots so deep in the country where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons, argues that a poor work ethic was hardly their challenge. Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark, she notes wryly, it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work.

Smarsh probes more deeply than Vance into the cultural, personal, and economic identities vying for power over her. Being born both female and poor were marks against my claims on respect, she writes, while the very concept of the white working class (a term she first encountered as an adult) mixes racial privilege and economic deprivation, "an obvious, apolitical fact