What Were We Thinking review: Carlos Lozada on why Trump books matter
A long time ago, 10 years or more, I worked nights on the Guardian sports desk. The shift started at 11pm and by 4am there was no more to do. But there was a lasting high from the 2am espresso and there was also YouTube, which I surfed for two kinds of video. Sarah Palin being terrifyingly rightwing, and naturalists turning over logs in the Amazon, looking for poisonous spiders.
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I am both politically liberal and horribly arachnophobic. To liberal readers Donald Trump and his presidency resemble footage of a Goliath birdeater. A crawling, creeping horror, an object of terrible fascination, a shifting dark mass from which one cannot tear one’s gaze. Traffic figures to news websites say so. So do publishers’ profits.
Since 2016, Trump books have poured on to shelves, then flown from them. Carlos Lozada, literary critic for the Washington Post, has read more than 150. The result as the election looms is an elegant yet lacerating volume, A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.
Lozada’s vision is grander than mine – and more nuanced too. Introducing a chapter on what he calls The Chaos Chronicles, volumes written by embittered former aides or well-sourced White House reporters which I, a gleeful media cynic, think of as the true Trump books, he writes: “I blame Michael Wolff.”
There is much more to Trump books and what they say about America than the scandal of Michael Wolff
He might as well blame the Guardian. After all, we broke news of Fire and Fury in January 2018, detonating a news cycle which never stopped exploding. Either way, he has a point: Wolff’s first Trump book was slapdash as well as sensational, selling millions but deserving the tough treatment Lozada metes out. To Wolff, Lozada is what the enormous huntsman was to the great Clive James: a fearsome predator “whose idea of a big thrill was to suck a wasp”.
Lozada is capable of waspishness himself. By design, this is a brief survey; his need to use just a few lines to sink any given book comes to seem unavoidable, even perhaps unfair. It’s sharp to point out that the former Republican consultant and Rick Wilson ridicules Trump for being fixated on sex while churning out knob gags himself. But I think Wilson deserves lengthier consideration as a comic talent, a brutal polemicist. The knob gags get baroque. To repurpose Adam Serwer’s famous phrase in the Atlantic, the cruelty to Trump is the point. And after all, Wilson did pick a title which rings more true with each new low: Everything Trump Touches Dies.
On the other hand, it’s gratifying when Lozada ensnares and punctures a writer with whom one does not see eye to eye. Considering The Fourth Way, a 2017 book by Hugh Hewitt, Lozada notes that the conservative radio host said Trump was “not likely to casually tempt the impeachment gods” and would “self-regulate”, thereby governing “inclusively, energetically, joyously”, ushering in a “booming, generous, open-handed Republic of Virtue”.
Uh-huh.
Of course, as the mere existence of Lozada’s book demonstrates, there is much more to Trump books and what they say about America than the scandal of Wolff, the satire of Wilson or the rank absurdity of Hewitt. Lozada says two books, The Unmaking of the Presidency by Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessy and The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis, “put the other Chaos Chronicles in proper context; they get at the meaning and the consequences of the disorder the others detail.”
Lozada is all about the meaning and the consequences of Trump’s rise to power, which is why he then pivots to a book published before Trump took office. Why Presidents Fail is by Elaine Kamarck, who lectures on public policy at Harvard and is a Brookings fellow in Washington. We’re not all in the gutter, laughing as authors land punches, making Trump see stars. In a low period for American democracy, Lozada aims high.
In doing so, he rightly considers a host of books which are very much not Chaos Chronicles – which, on the face of it, are not actually about Trump at all. Such works are examined in chapters on books about Trump voters in the heartlands; on the resistance; on immigration; on conservative thought; on the nature of truth itself.
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In chapters on race and feminism, Lozada singles out Know My Name, by Chanel Miller, and When They Call You A Terrorist, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele.
Miller writes of surviving sexual assault by a star college athlete, the travesty of a trial which followed and the horrible blaze of publicity, a central saga of the #MeToo era. Writing in the year of George Floyd and national protests for racial equality, Lozada calls Khan-Cullors’ Black Lives Matter memoir “an unforgettable distillation of her life and project”.
Neither book is a Trump book, but neither could assume quite so much power were he not lurking in the Oval Office, in his web, under his log, haunting hopes and dreams of progress. If we cannot tear our gaze away, Lozada shows us how best to look.
