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The Lessons of Reading Every Book About Trump

By Katy Waldman

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Earth, releasing such a thick plume of toxic particles that most of the creatures spared by tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and wildfires died of asphyxiation, cold, or hunger. It was exeunt dinosaurs, along with most life on the planet. In the rebooted world, mammals reigned, despite their high body temperatures (which chewed up calories) and relatively low reproductive rates. For years, this rise was a scientific mystery. How did such inefficient life-forms beat the competition? One explanation is that the dark, wet Earth, newly crowded with decaying matter, became a fungal paradise. Molds flourished and bloomed, colonizing the flesh of cold-blooded vertebrates; meanwhile, the trait that seemed to spell doom for the mammals—their heat—protected them.

I learned this history from a podcast, “Radiolab,” while desperately seeking distraction from an apocalyptic news cycle. (To the episode’s credit, it didn’t end with the words “and that’s how we got Trump.”) The next segment was about the many thousands of species of fungi that are now evolving in response to climate change . Our ancient enemies, it seems, are beginning to tolerate dangerously high temperatures, and could soon gain the ability to thrive in warm-blooded hosts. If they do, a scientist informed the podcast’s warm-blooded host, the age of mammals might be revealed for what it is: an epoch-spanning fluke.

Which brings me to Carlos Lozada’s new book, “ What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era .” Lozada, the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post , revisits all the books on Donald Trump that he’s read since 2015: about a hundred and fifty titles, each purporting to illuminate the man and his times. (Immediately, the reader is primed for the sequel: “What Was I Thinking.”) One of the book’s standout preoccupations is whether Trump is an asteroid or a fungus. In other words, was the President’s victory a freak event, a chunk of debris that crashed into the country and transformed it forever? Or had Trumpism long been waiting in the soil, its destiny intertwined with ours? As Lozada shows, some Trump books exclaim over the norms that this Administration has broken; others take a longer view, considering the White House’s channelling of dark American traditions. Lozada finds the second approach more useful (the revolution will, and should, be contextualized) but leaves room for the fact that Trump has degraded us, and that some of the rot can be scraped off.

The book’s most original idea is its structure: a taxonomy that presents ten types of Trump book, including the White House “chaos chronicles” (“an endless encore of officials expressing concern”), “heartlandia” (lyrical portraits of Trump voters in flyover country), “Russian lit” (a genre which both looks at Trump’s personal ties to Russia and unpacks his Soviet-style tactics), and activism manuals for the resistance. Each chapter offers an essay made up of loosely connected mini-reviews; because there’s a lot of stylish recapping, the appeal of Lozada’s study can depend on the material being discussed. A chapter on the erosion of truth contains a fascinating précis of “ A Lot of People Are Saying ,” Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s tract about “the new conspiracism,” which proceeds via “innuendo and repetition” and “substitutes social validation for scientific validation.” (With Trump, Lozada writes, “there is conspiracy, but no theory.”) A chapter on immigration, which thrums with Lozada’s mixed feelings about what America has come to mean for the hopeful and the suffering—Lozada, originally from Peru, obtained U.S. citizenship in 2014—is enriched by references to “ This Land Is Our Land ,” by Suketu Mehta, and Greg Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “ The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America .” For Mehta, Lozada writes, immigration isn’t simply a matter of go-getters with big dreams; it’s “reparations . . . payback for colonialism, for the plunder of resources, for ecological and economic devastation.” Grandin, meanwhile, believes that once Americans lost the “safety valve” of a frontier and became hemmed in by a border, the result was “an extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”

The most entertaining chapter, “The Conservative Pivot,” maps Trump’s effect on the right’s media ecosystem. There are the sycophants, Lozada shows, with their sloppy, hagiographic accounts of the President’s “invincibility.” (Think Jeanine Pirro and Newt Gingrich .) There are the conservative intellectuals, such as Rich Lowry or the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who labor to dress Trumpism up in tweed. Lozada reserves his most annihilating judgment for the Never Trumpers, who, in a series of books he calls “meh culpas,” bemoan the G.O.P.’s tribalism and obstinance but refuse to examine how the Party got that way. Lozada proposes that the Never Trumpers change their name to Only Trumpers. “Had Trump come close but failed to win the 2016 Republication nomination,” he notes, brilliantly, “the conscience and corrosion of conservatism, the mind of the Right, would remain undisturbed and unexamined. Only with Trump. Maybe they should thank him.”

Lozada’s strengths as a critic are obvious. He is charming, funny, and light on his feet, and his descriptions are exceptionally clear and pithy. Pro-Trump intellectuals “claim to support the president for his principles but they really love him for his enemies,” he writes. And: “Bush hoped to remake the world. Trump just makes it up as he goes along.” This aphoristic style cuts to the quick of complex ideas, making them easy to maneuver in the course of the book’s meta-analysis. Yet Lozada also tends to substitute minor aesthetic judgments for evaluations of a work’s substance, as when he complains that Gregg Jarrett “argues by adverb” and that Robin DiAngelo’s “ White Fragility ” “reads like a pharmaceutical ad for treating whiteness.” (As someone who, initially beguiled by DiAngelo’s ideas, remains curious about the backlash against her, I was eager to hear how Lozada would prosecute his case. Instead, he simply asks the book to “do better.”)

And “What Were We Thinking” ’s complaints can be confusing. Lozada attacks Naomi Klein’s resistance tome “ No Is Not Enough ” for outlining a specific and ambitiously progressive policy platform. (“Demilitarization of police. Free college tuition. One hundred percent renewable energy.”) A few pages later, he announces that “the resistance books are packed with calls for the renewal of the American story but give no clear sense of how to begin.” Lozada also chides Klein, along with the writer Dana Fisher and the social activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, for excluding moderate and conservative voices from their movement. “The intellectuals of the resistance seem to deliberately alienate prospective foot soldiers, prioritizing the purity of resistance over its expansion,” he writes. But the very next chapter is the one in which Lozada savages the Never Trumpers, suggesting that the issue is less line-drawing per se than where, exactly, the line is drawn.

Did we arrive here because of an asteroid? Mold? Climate change? In one sense, “What Were We Thinking” studies the hazards of trying to pick apart the innumerable contingencies that prop up a moment. Most of the titles being discussed lean on a specific theory or framework, which can’t help but prove incomplete. (At times, Lozada seems to fault the books for this limitation—several interesting-sounding projects are dismissed for their failure to definitively explain, say, the “white working class.”) But, taken together, the hope is that the literature will paint a rich cumulative picture. Through a combination of summary and critique, Lozada is trying to achieve what he believes the authors he’s writing about mostly have not: a genuinely revelatory Trump book.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that we know all we need to know—and perhaps all there is to know—about who Trump is. Lozada seems to steer around the flatness, the weird transparency, of his subject by suggesting that “the most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.” There is a hint of circular reasoning here: volumes are assessed for their ability to elucidate the Trump age, yet they are only selected because Lozada believes that they should elucidate the Trump age. At times, one is left with the impression of a critic who has lumped together disparate works in order to have something to criticize.

And, just as Lozada assumes that all books about the present can be made to speak to Trump, he also assumes that all books can be made to speak well . For him, either a work offers insight in the traditional fashion or it inadvertently reveals the folly that helped sweep us to where we are. As the introduction makes clear, “What Were We Thinking” is largely a critical history—a scathing one—which examines intellectual projects that, as Lozada argues, are riddled with “blind spots, resentments, and failures of imagination.” (Exceptions exist: an epilogue singles out the twelve volumes that “helped me make sense of this time,” Lozada writes, and he has a gift, perhaps in spite of himself, for making whatever title he’s describing sound at least a little alluring.) The badness, though, is a feature, not a bug. Sycophantic praise poems by Fox News personalities, self-important nothingburgers by anonymous White House staffers, memoirs that condescend to coal miners or rely heavily on “racial grievance”: according to Lozada, they all uncover something “essential” about our moment.

Sure. But the “good” Trump books make their points more fully than Lozada can, and dissecting the “bad” books—his more central concern—only yields the most obvious truths. If I were Lozada, straining to find meaning in an empty publishing phenomenon, I might take the redundancy dogging his project as a lesson for our time. Once, it was effective to underline Trump’s abnormality. Later, it seemed fitting to situate the Administration’s atrocities within a wider context of disgrace. Both framings—Trump as exception, Trump as steroidal avatar of the country that formed him—have always been true. The difference is that, in 2020, they are equally banal. Watching Lozada press his lively intelligence into what feels, in places, like a critique of itself is its own education in saturation, and in the incentives of a culture that is designed to keep talking long after there’s anything left to say.

Books & Fiction

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10 best books on the Donald Trump presidency

From searing satire to explosive exposés, these are the reads you need to make sense of the man in the white house, article bookmarked.

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Fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, the implications of the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency cannot be underestimated. From satire to scholarship, from polemic to protest, much ink has been spilled in the last year in an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible – and as much as we tried to find a balance of opinions on the Trump presidency, the reactions to it, and the present state of democracy, have been generally negative. The books surveyed here explore the Trump phenomenon, its possible causes and probable consequences, and the likely long-term effects on us all, throughout America and the rest of the world.

Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House by Luke Harding: £14.99, Guardian Books/Faber

• 7 best political biographies
• 6 best Russian history books
• 10 best new novels for 2018
• 9 best fiction books of 2017

Collusion – robustly denied by Trump but convincingly demonstrated in this exposé by former Guardian Moscow correspondent Luke Harding – is the subject of the on-going and highly contentious Mueller investigation. Harding adheres to the maxim “follow the money”, and despite Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, his detailed research reveals the tortuous and shadowy links between the Trump empire and Russian cash, going back decades. The explosive dossier written by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele is corroborated through interviews with the man himself, as well as others in the intelligence community. A solid piece of investigative reporting this certainly is, but it’s also an enthralling page turner with twists and turns worthy of a Le Carre spy thriller.

Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green: £14.99, Scribe

Out in paperback and with a new preface, Devil’s Bargain takes us to the heart of the alt-right in the US and its links with the Trump presidency. Steve Bannon, almost unknown before Trump was elected, quickly hit the headlines when he was enthroned as chief strategist and became a ubiquitous and controversial presence in the White House. The alliance with Trumpism was always fragile however, and since this book was written he has been banished from the White House, airbrushed from Trump’s version of history, and faces an uncertain future in the political wilderness. Joshua Green is one of the US’s best-known journalists, and has been covering the development of right-wing politics closely for the last few years. He published an in-depth profile of Bannon, who he got to know well, in 2015. This book, closely based on interviews with Bannon and other right-wing figures in politics and media, is a fascinating insight into the underbelly of politics in the US, and a pacy, entertaining read.

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump and the Rise of the Far Right by Neil Faulkner: £12, Public Reading Rooms

This is an important and timely book, which makes a persuasive case for the rise of fascistic tendencies among our ruling elite, tendencies which are insinuating themselves into the body politic by hiding in plain sight. Trump’s election was a manifestation of the lurch to the anti-democratic far right, echoed in other countries around the world. Faulkner argues that we are living in a “second wave” of fascism and that we ignore its creeping threat at our peril. Far from being a spontaneous backlash by the poor against the system, he sees the rise of the neo-fascist right as a deliberate power grab, engineered by bullies in suits rather than paramilitary thugs in uniform. Powerfully argued and clearly written, this is a call to arms against complacency.

Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur: £20, Dey St. Books

Katy Tur is a journalist on MSNBC and as Trump announced his run for president back in 2015, she was assigned to the campaign. Nearly two years later she had travelled thousands of miles and attended dozens of rallies, filing reports from the front line. This is her story, and as much about what it’s like to be a news reporter at the heart of a media whirlwind as about the campaign itself. The highs and lows, the exhaustion and exhilaration, the fears for her safety as Trump whipped up hatred against the media, and above all the mystery of the man himself, singling her out by name at his rallies as if in some perverse parody of a love/hate relationship – Tur’s personal odyssey is also a disturbing chronicle of political madness unfolding.

If Only They Didn’t Speak English by Jon Sopel: £20, BBC Books

The United States is a foreign country– yes they speak English, but that doesn’t mean they’re like us. The BBC’s North American editor, Jon Sopel, takes us on a tour of the cultural differences, focussing on Americans’ love affair with guns and religion, their distrust of big government, tradition of individualism, struggles over race, and more. These themes are reflected in politics and Sopel shows how they translated into support for Trump and his uncompromising agenda. In a chummy style, complete with puns and jokes, he expertly probes the contradictions and quirks of history which led to the shock of the Trump victory. From the perspective of an outsider who is very much on the inside and in the know, Sopel makes an entertaining and perceptive attempt to understand modern America.

Trump’s First Year by Michael Nelson: £19.95, University of Virginia Press

Measured, scholarly, and always accessible, this is a cogent analysis of the first year of the Trump presidency from a respected academic. It refutes any accusation of partisanship by presenting indisputable – rather than alternative – facts, and the result is a damning litany of failure, incompetence, and cronyism. Trump’s insistence during the campaign that his much-vaunted business acumen would translate into efficiency and effectiveness in government is shown to be wide of the mark. Everything in the book is already in the public domain, but is gathered here into a narrative timeline which makes an objective (and fully annotated) assessment of an extraordinary year.

In America: Tales from Trump Country by Caitriona Perry: £19.99, Gill Books

Award-winning Irish journalist Catriona Perry explored the Trump heartlands, from Florida to Michigan, Texas to New York, recording conversations with Trump supporters from all walks of life, and the result is an illuminating travelogue which helps to shed some light on the multifarious reasons why ordinary voters backed the reality TV star. And why most of them continue to do so, despite – and sometimes because of – the scandal and controversy that has surrounded this presidency from the start. The picture which emerges is one of a deeply divided nation, where pivotal issues such as abortion and gun control, along with the perception of a corrupt and uncaring government, combined to swing votes towards the unlikeliest of candidates and plunged the US into an identity crisis.

Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff: £20, Little, Brown

Gossipy, shocking, contentious, intimate and titillating, this is a fly-on-the-wall account of goings-on in the Trump White House as observed by journalist Michael Wolff from his position on a West Wing sofa. The culture of leaks, feuds, and backstabbing played into his hands. Arch-leaker and senior strategist Steve Bannon did not survive the putsch that followed, but the book became a controversial bestseller and required reading for Trump-watchers everywhere. Legal attempts to ban its publication backfired, as did Trump’s supposed plan to use his bid for the presidency solely to boost his commercial brand – according to Wolff, he never thought he would win. Then he did. The shambles that ensued is the subject of this addictive chronicle of chaos.

Fake News: Strange Historical Facts Reimagined in the World of Donald Trump by David Hutter: £4.99, independently published

The Trump presidency has been a gift for satirists – everything, from his speech patterns to his egotism to his hairstyle, has proved irresistible targets for mockery. In Fake News , David Hutter cleverly counterpoints imaginary events in Trumpworld with some historical oddities to show that we have indeed “been here before”. A killer rabbit, a lost nuclear missile, and a madcap scheme to change the number of days in a week all feature in an outrageous and sharply targeted send-up of Trump and his hapless administration. Funny and cutting, this is the perfect antidote to despair.

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic by David Frum: £20, HarperCollins

Many Republicans are, of course, deeply hostile to the Trump project, and as a conservative commentator and former speechwriter for George W Bush, David Frum provides a right-of-centre perspective on the direction of America since Trump came to power. In fact he argues that Trump is actually opposed to fundamental conservative principles, and is an opportunist who has allied himself to a political party which, to its shame, has sold its soul for short-term gain. Frum’s analysis of what he terms this “repressive plutocracy” now in charge makes cogent and compelling reading and should concern anyone who cares about the future of democracy.

The Verdict: Books on the Donald Trump presidency

“Collusion” is the word on everyone’s lips right now, not least Donald Trump’s. His oft-repeated assertion that there never was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia requires serious scrutiny, as the implications of any kind of covert meddling in the democratic process are potentially explosive. Luke Harding’s Collusion is thoroughly researched, expertly written, highly entertaining, and an invaluable aid for any reader who wants hard facts to counter the spin and propaganda.

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An Analysis Of New Books About Donald Trump's Presidency

Several books about the Trump administration's final year, some including interviews with the ex-president, are arriving in bookstores. How do they change what we know about the Trump White House?

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

What the Trump Books Teach Us

It all comes down to spotting the former president’s lies.

William Blake once proposed that John Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” because he evoked Satan in Paradise Lost with such gusto. By contrast, Blake observed, Milton seemed inhibited when he wrote of plodding, sanctimonious old God. Have Donald Trump’s recent chroniclers, most of whom quote the former president liberally and with relish, turned to the devil’s party?

Loathsome characters bring out zestful writing, and authors who represent Trump as perilous to democracy—that is, all writers with eyes and ears—could find that the danger the former president poses to America’s future is more cinematic than democracy itself.

Peril , the latest big book about the former president, is not the best book by Bob Woodward, or even his best about Trump. That would be Fear , which came out in 2018. But in Peril , Woodward and his co-author, Robert Costa, manage to pull off a singular trick. They don’t let Trump’s devilish ravings, tweets, and tantrums run roughshod over their own, more disciplined voices. Woodward and Costa flex their rhetorical muscles not by writing the hell out of the Trump character, but by smacking down their arch-villain, keeping a choke chain on his every utterance.

When writing about the appalling presidential debate of September 30, 2020, they skip Trump’s cruel and confounding yawps about Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. They also ignore the Proud Boys, whom Trump that night refused to condemn. Given that group’s participation in the attacks of January 6, Trump’s words—“ stand back and stand by ”—now seem stomach-churning and fateful. But in Peril , the sole line Woodward and Costa quote from that debate is Biden’s demand of Trump: “Will you shut up, man?” With this choice to not quote Trump at all, the book elegantly obliges Biden.

For years, Woodward has been accused of styling himself as “impartial” during a crisis that demands partiality. But this underestimates the old master’s ego. Woodward takes a side: his own. His voice in Peril is imperious, swaggering, and territorial. He and Costa lock their subject in a narrative cage, where he remains mostly gagged.

David Frum: Woodward missed everything that matters about the Trump presidency

Other recent Trump books allow their subject more space to strut and fret. This has costs, but it also means they bring more brio to evoking the former president. These books are potboilers: Stephanie Grisham’s I’ll Take Your Questions Now , Michael C. Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It , and Michael Wolff’s Landslide . These Trump books align in that they keep the former president’s flamboyant psychopathy center stage, where readers can hate-watch it. They all read like airport thrillers.

But the books also play back Trump’s falsehoods, sometimes at top volume. Three draw their title from lies told by Trump, and two directly quote the so-called Big Lie. Trump didn’t win the 2020 election—neither “frankly” nor by a “landslide”—and he alone could not fix jack. But it’s not just the titles that replay Trump’s lies. At regular intervals, Grisham, Bender, Leonnig and Rucker, and Wolff quote or cite Trump’s horseshit, often letting it steam there, uncorrected.

This can have unnerving effects. About midway through Landslide , Wolff writes of “the president’s determination to sully Joe Biden,” a motivation for defamation and lies if ever there was one. (See: Trump’s first impeachment.) But hot on the heels of this statement, Wolff asserts that Trump has “absolute belief that the Bidens were among the most corrupt political families of all time.”

Does he? An absolute belief? Wolff doesn’t mention that this is a ludicrous claim, and with Trump hardly anything is “absolute” or a “belief.” But to note any of this would break Wolff’s narrative flow; his talent is for free indirect discourse, which lets him enter the minds of his principals, and he’s never going to clutter his slick prose with allegedly s or weasel words chosen by lawyers. So rather than punish the character of Trump, as Woodward does, Wolff lets Trump run wild. In all of his books, including a new one out this month about, no joke, “the damned,” Wolff is inexorably drawn to the devil. (Unlike Milton, he always knows it.)

Another example of the difficulty of rendering Trump’s freaky deceptions comes in a chapter about his 2020 electoral defeat in I Alone Can Fix It . In describing Trump’s rejection of data, Leonnig and Rucker write, “Georgia was MAGA territory—or so Trump thought.” Georgia in 2020 was very much not MAGA territory. Biden beat Trump statewide to win the state’s 15 electoral votes, and both of its Senate seats flipped to Democrats. But the fact that Trump’s stubborn delusion—“Georgia was MAGA territory”—is allowed to air out like that means we’re in Trump’s head as he churns over the Big Lie. Once again: Does he really think he won Georgia, i.e., that it was MAGA land? Or did he simply want Georgia officials to pretend that he’d won so he could stay in the White House?

The title of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost does keep Trump’s Big Lie securely in quotation marks, and corrects the record with its subtitle. But elsewhere in the book, Bender prolifically recaps the inane banter among Trump and his cronies while also reproducing some of Trump’s most persistent lies about, for example, the size of his rallies. “Nobody has seen anything like it ever,” Bender quotes Trump saying. “There has never never been anything like it.” (Bender, to be fair, points out that Trump hurts himself when he imagines that his distorted apprehension of crowd size is more accurate than the polls that predicted he’d lose the election.)

During the 2016 campaign, cable news channels aired Trump’s rambunctious campaign rallies live, and did nothing to correct his lies. In those days, his whoppers seemed so self-refuting that they could pass as reality-TV bacchanalia. Like Alex Jones, whose lawyer has called him a “ performance artist ,” Trump’s Barnumism was left unchecked for years simply because nothing as appalling had ever been seen in presidential politics. After five years, we’ve become inured to Trump’s lies, and many of us can recite them as if they are an anthem-rock chorus. Fact-checking, by contrast, requires complexity and pedantry; no one chants Daniel Dale ’s brilliant fact-checking live-tweets at Jones Beach.

Read: Fact-checking the president in real time

Trump is simply a narrative migraine. To write a monograph about a figure whose speech and actions don’t comport with identifiable beliefs—much less with reality—is to get in deep with a flailing, splintered, and antisocial mind. Grisham, Trump’s former press secretary, quotes several of Trump’s non sequiturs, including some trash talk about the mother of a prime minister. These choice quotes stop her story like a record scratch. And there’s always a reaction shot: Grisham agape at the audience, reflecting on her own WTF . She quotes Trump’s bunk less to correct or satirize him than to render her own chronic bafflement at the former president’s “batshit things.” It hits the spot.

Usually, depth psychology—the theory that there are distinct emotions, sensations, and needs somehow “under” one’s personality—is steady ground on which to build a portrait. But with Trump, it falters. Does he even have an interior life? In 1997, in an astute profile of Trump in The New Yorker , Mark Singer concluded that his subject leads “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.” The British writer Nate White also defines Trump by absences: “ He has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honor, and no grace. ”

If the afterwords and acknowledgments of all these books are any guide, the authors seem entirely spent by effort. No wonder. The skull of Donald Trump, where delusions and desperation clamor for nourishment like hungry ghosts, is a grim place to spend time. Other readers may have chosen to leave these disturbing books on the shelf; me, I’m grateful that so many observers concluded, as Grisham did, “I have to get this all out so I can process, in my own mind, what the hell happened.”

In their various idioms, Bender, Grisham, Leonnig and Rucker, Wolff, and Woodward and Costa have shed collective light on what the hell happened. And they’ve done a supreme public service simply by etching the events of America’s bleak recent history into the record, where they will be more difficult for Trump and his heirs to lie about in the years ahead. When Condoleezza Rice recently urged Americans to “move on” from the January 6 insurrection, all I could think was, No, no, no, don’t move on; read these books. And when Trump runs again in 2024, remember that those who forget history are condemned —ah, but you know the rest.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

All The Books About Trump’s Presidency…So Far

Anna Gooding-Call

Anna Gooding-Call is a librarian and writer originally from rural central New York. She got her BA in the city that inspired "The Twilight Zone" and confirms that the hitchhikers really are weird there. Today, she lives in Massachusetts with her wife and two cats.

View All posts by Anna Gooding-Call

Say what you will about a life of perfidy and misconduct, it’s fun to read about criminality. Devotees of true crime will insist that they’re there for the takedown, but really, who are they kidding? Without a proper buildup, that satisfying gotcha moment just doesn’t pop. If Ted Bundy doesn’t murder a bunch of innocent people, we won’t care when the police nab him. The misdeed is as important to the book’s readability as the sweet, sweet justice. This may explain why, midway through his chaotic first presidential term, we’ve got a thriving new genre based on books about Donald Trump.

I’m not going to discuss the degree to which these accounts are factual, because honestly, I have no idea. What I’d like to do is to count them and list them chronologically.

It would be nice if I could say, with perfect honesty, that this post is meant to highlight an unhealthy media obsession with a deeply troubled man who can’t help but hurt himself and the people around him for any amount of attention, good or bad. I’d love to be that deep and empathic.

It would also be lovely if I could somehow poignantly demonstrate that no educated body politic could derive meaningful information from this cacophony and respectfully debate whether the earnest efforts of journalists to provide critical information are noble or quixotic. I could even throw ex-administration authors into the picture as an example of how celebrity antics can make honest journalism seem foolish through association. That would probably be a very intellectual and interesting piece. I’d have citations. Maybe even an interview.

However, I am first and foremost a librarian. I like data and I don’t have enough about this bizarre new true crime/celebrity bio/political thriller genre to draw any real conclusions about it. For example, how many Trump books are there, excluding self-published works? At what rate are they hitting the shelves? How much would it cost to buy one copy of every title published since 2016? Until I know this esoterica, I must not only forbear from speculating about the genre’s qualities and future, but I must spend my livelong nights staring, red-eyed, at the ceiling, haunted. So let’s dive right into the good part: the numbers.

I found no less than 51 qualifying books about the Trump presidency, excluding self-published works. I’ll list them below in chronological order. Maybe you have a weird-ass reading list you’d like to add them to. Also, it’s entirely possible that I missed some, so please do comment about them if so. Heaven knows we need more of this nonsense. Check out the graph below if you’re more of a visual processor.

Cory Lewandowsi, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, and David Cay Johnston have each written two Trump books. I’ve marked the 10 books authored by former campaign or administration employees with a triangle. Roger Stone’s second Trump book isn’t on the list because as of this writing, it hasn’t been published yet.

To give these numbers some context, I have found less than 10 books written about or by Barack Obama during his presidency and campaign. Two of those were by Obama himself. I have also found 16 Obama books that hit the shelves after Trump swore in. Some are laudatory and nostalgic, others are hostile. Many seem to be reactions to the Trump presidency one way or another. It may be useful, if demoralizing, to consider Obama books a genre variant on or offshoot of Trump books.

New hardcover copies of each Trump book cost between $25 and $30, but paperbacks, used copies, and price cuts of 50% or more abound. This suggests that the genre, whose material is entertaining but fairly narrow in scope, may be approaching some kind of market saturation. Eventually, perhaps there will be nothing more to say about the President’s competence or lack thereof. At that point, it’s unclear what will happen to this ballooning literary phenomenon. A bubble bust situation seems possible.

If you’ve bought and read a new copy of every single representative of the Trump genre over the past three years, then congratulations! You’ve spent about $1,305 on Trump books. Of course, if you’ve borrowed them from your public library, then  they have spent about $1,305—maybe a little less with their library discount, maybe a little more if they’ve gone in for multiple copies of the most notable titles. That money came from you anyway, because you pay taxes. In that sense, if you’ve bought any Trump books with your own post-taxes income, you’ve kinda double-paid. Sorry, pal.

Preorders and Legacy Hits

However, judging from America’s recent surge in political nonfiction sales , you’re not alone in your desire to possess a book of Trump. Plenty of people are grabbing the hits right off the shelves and slapping down real money for them, which has elevated several onto the New York Times bestseller list. Buyers are also ordering them ahead. Woodward’s book alone topped 1 million presale units . I haven’t even attempted to count sales of legacy books by and about the president. Older titles concerning Trump  have also benefitted from our current political drama. While these could be considered associated and possibly entangled with true Trump presidency books, they were written in a different context and never intended for the same informative purposes. Therefore, I have excluded them from the scope of my research.

So here’s the whole list of books about the Trump presidency, every one I could find published post–January 2016, arranged chronologically. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the positions these books take, and nor do I consider every single one a viable and reliable source. However, they are now an undeniable feature of the publishing landscape. For how long, who knows? When this administration passes, as it inevitably will, it will leave behind a historic trail of literary detritus. Let’s hope it’s doing somebody some good.

In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! by Ann Coulter, August 2016

Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America by David Horowitz, January 2017

► The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution by Roger Stone, January 2017

How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution by Joel Pollak and Larry Schweikart, February 2017

Trump’s War: His Battle for America by Michael Savage, March 2017

► Understanding Trump by Newt Gingrich and Eric Trump, June 2017

The Swamp: Washington’s Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It by Eric Bolling, June 2017

Rogue Spooks: The Intelligence War on Donald Trump by Dick Morris, August 2017

Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy by Alan Dershowitz, August 2017

All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump by Edward Klein, October 2017

God and Donald Trump by Stephen E. Strang, November 2017

Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House by Donna Brazile, November 2017

The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston, November 2017

Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Luke Harding, November 2017

► Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story Of His Rise To The Presidency by Cory Lewandowsi, December 2017

It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing To America by David Cay Johnston, January 2018

Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth by Howard Kurtz, January 2018

Killing the Deep State: The Fight To Save President Trump by Jerome Corsi, March 2018

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff, March 2018

► A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, April 2018

Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other by Conrad Black, May 2018

The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, May 2018

Trump’s America: The Truth about Our Nation’s Great Comeback by Newt Gingrich, June 2018

The Case Against Impeaching Trump by Alan Derschowitz, July 2018

Leakers, Liars, and Liberals: the Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Jeanine Pirro, July 2018

► The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President  by Sean Spicer, July 2018

The Russia Hoax: the Illicit Scheme to Clear Hilary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump by Gregg Jarrett, July 2018

► Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House by Omarosa Manigault-Newman, August 2018

Everything Trump Touches Dies: a Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever by Rick Wilson, August 2018

Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind by Ann Coulter, August 2018

Under Fire: Reporting From the Front Lines of the Trump White House by April Ryan, September 2018

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride: the Thrills, Chills, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency by Major Garrett, September 2018

The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda by Jason Chaffetz, September 2018

Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin A. Frank, September 2018

Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels and Michal Avenatti, October 2018

The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy by Greg Miller, October 2018

Golden Handcuffs: the Secret History of Trump’s Women by Nina Burleigh, October 2018

Trumped!: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall by John R. O’Donnell and James Rutherford, September 2018

► Trump, the Blue-Collar President by Anthony Scaramucci, October 2018

Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America by Seth Abramson, November 2018

The Case for Impeaching Trump by Elizabeth Holtzman, November 2018

► Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State is Undermining the Presidency by Cory Lewandowski, November 2018

Mar-A-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace by Laurence Leamer, January 2019

► Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims, January 2019

► Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics  by Chris Christie, January 2019

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clock This article was published more than  8 years ago

I just binge-read eight books by Donald Trump. Here’s what I learned.

From memoirs to financial advice to politics, inside the collected writings of Donald J. Trump.

Sitting down with the collected works of Donald J. Trump is unlike any literary experience I’ve ever had or could ever imagine. I spent this past week reading eight of his books — three memoirs, three business-advice titles and his two political books, all published between 1987 and 2011 — hoping to develop a unified theory of the man, or at least find a method in the Trumpness.

Instead, I found . . . well, is there a single word that combines revulsion, amusement, respect and confusion? That is how it feels, sometimes by turns, often all at once, to binge on Trump’s writings. Over the course of 2,212 pages, I encountered a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.

Elsewhere, such qualities might get in the way of the story. With Trump, they are the story. There is little else. He writes about his real estate dealings, his television show, his country, but after a while that all feels like an excuse. The one deal Trump has been pitching his entire career — the one that now culminates in his play for that most coveted piece of property, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — is himself.

“We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’  ” Trump declared during his presidential campaign announcement in June, and he has repeatedly cited that 1987 book in other appearances. In it, Trump, then 41, explains the power of psychology and deception — he calls it “bravado” or “truthful hyperbole” — in his early real estate acquisitions. Before he was a brand name, he had to convince people that he was worth their time. It was small things here and there. Like asking his architect to gussy up the sketches for a hotel so it seemed like they spent huge sums on the plans, boosting interest in his proposal. Or having a construction crew drive machinery back and forth on a site in Atlantic City so that the visiting board of directors would be duped into thinking the work was far along. “If necessary,” he instructed a supervisor, “have the bulldozers dig up dirt on one side of the site and dump it on the other.”

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump explains . “. . .­­ It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” Perception is reality, he writes, and achieving an “aura” (a recurring word in his writings) around his projects, his ideas and himself is essential.

Trump has been mocked for emblazoning his name on every building, plane, boat or company he touches. “Mostly it’s a marketing strategy,” he writes. “Trump buildings get higher rents.” But this is more than branding. Trump writes of his buildings as if they were living beings — friends or even lovers. “My relationship with 40 Wall Street began as a young man,” he writes in “The Art of the Comeback,” published in 1997. “From the moment I laid eyes on it, I was mesmerized by its beauty and its splendor.”  Or, referring to his 110,000-square-foot private club in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump writes: “My love affair with Mar-a-Lago began in 1985.”  Or, of one of his longest-standing properties: “Trump Tower, like a good friend, was there when I needed it.”

[ Did Ann Coulter’s new book help inspire Trump’s Mexican “rapists" comments? ]

These relationships seem no less meaningful, and are certainly far more lasting, than those with, say, his two former wives. For all the gushing over his properties, Trump is hard-headed when it comes to married life, one of the few arenas he cannot fully control, where it is by definition not all about him. “My marriage, it seemed, was the only area of my life in which I was willing to accept something less than perfection,” he writes in “Surviving at the Top,” released in 1990. He reflects at length in several books on the necessity of prenuptial agreements, which he says served him well with Ivana Trump, his first wife, and Marla Maples, his second. (“The Art of the Comeback” even includes a chapter titled “The Art of the Prenup.”) And he tells a friend with a “nagging” wife that he’s better off leaving and cutting his losses. “If he doesn’t lose the ballbreaker, his career will go nowhere.”

Trump has some experience at cutting those personal losses. Though he assures readers that he’ll “never say a bad thing” about Ivana, he proceeds to paint his ex-wife as cold and duplicitous, even mocking her accent when he describes a phone call she made to him during their legal wranglings: “I vant my money now. I have decided to honor the contract, and I vant a check for ten million dollars and all the other things immediately.”  It’s hard to know how intentional this is, because Trump disparages even when offering praise. “There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than portrayed,” he confides. “They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!” Boy.

To be fair, it is not just his wives, not just women — it’s everyone. Trump’s books are sprayed with insults, like he’s trying to make sure we’re still paying attention. He trashes a former Miss Universe for gaining weight. When he meets a one-star general, he asks, “How come you’re only a one-star?” The Rolling Stones are “a bunch of major jerks.” He dismisses Paul McCartney, “the poor bastard.” (That was for not getting a prenup. Obviously.) Trump also slams complete unknowns — random banking executives or real estate types, lawyers or community activists, anyone who dared cross or disappoint him. “If someone screws you,” he writes, “screw them back.”

Trump’s world is binary, divided into class acts and total losers. He even details how physically unattractive he finds particular reporters, for no reason that I can fathom other than that it crossed his mind. The discipline of book writing does not dilute Trump; it renders him in concentrated form. Restraint is for losers.

Streaks of insecurity run through the books. Trump constantly reminds readers that he studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a concession to the credentialism he purports to despise. (“I went to the great Wharton School of Finance and did well” . . . “I learned at the Wharton School of Finance that the economy runs in cycles” . . . “I have had friends, many friends, who went to the Wharton School with me who were very smart.”) Everything he owns is the best, biggest, hottest. His apartment: “There may be no other apartment in the world like it.” His yacht: “probably the most beautiful yacht ever built.” His living room: “While I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I get a kick out of having one.” And his third wife, Melania: “considered by many, including me, to be one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

[ How Donald Trump plays the press, in his own words ]

Trump claims to dislike parties and socializing, but he can’t help but boast about his star-studded galas, exclusive dinners and celebrity friendships. His books double as a wall of fame, stuffed with pictures of the Donald with notables from Liberace to Tiger Woods to Hillary Clinton. (“The First Lady is a wonderful woman who has handled pressure in­cred­ibly well,” reads the caption.) He’s not above betraying their confidences, either. Trump reports that at a dinner with Frank Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board went on a rant about “f—ing broads” being “the scum of the earth.” And recalling the time Michael Jackson and his then-girlfriend Lisa Marie Presley stayed at his Palm Beach club, Trump puts all doubts about their liaison to rest. “People often ask me whether or not the relationship was a sham. . . . I can tell you, at least for a period of time, those two folks were really getting it on.”

Trump’s books tend to blur together, with anecdotes and achievements enhanced with each retelling. Did you know, for example, that Trump renovated the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park in the mid-1980s? (If not, pick up any of his books and you’ll find the story there.) By the new millennium, Trump had moved on from autobiographies to business-advice books, adapting elements of his life into bite-size financial wisdom. “Don’t let the brevity of these passages prevent you from savoring the profundity of the advice you are about to receive,” he writes at the beginning of “How to Get Rich” (2004).

I’m no billionaire, but much of the advice usually falls between obvious and useless. Stay focused, he says. Hire a great assistant. Think big. Where he gets specific, it’s stuff like: “The best way to ask for a raise is to wait for the right time.” Or this gem from “Think Like a Billionaire” (2004): “People should always be encouraged to follow their dreams (my children have) but realize that a lot of time and money can be wasted chasing dreams that just weren’t meant to be true.”

Even if your dreams aren’t meant to be, Trump’s are, because his dream is the American dream. Throughout the books, he conflates himself with New York City (“When I’m attacked, in a strange way, so is New York”), and because the Manhattan skyline embodies the country’s aspirations, he becomes, by the transitive property of Trumpness, America. “When you mess with the American Dream, you’re on the fighting side of Trump,” he warns. He accuses regulators — or “burons,” a cross between “bureaucrats” and “morons” — of “Dreamicide.”

Trump’s dream, however, is born of a narrow view of America. They say presidents struggle to break out of their bubbles, but Trump has designed his quite deliberately. “The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don’t have to deal with the elements,” he explains. “I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I’m either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter, or my private club in Palm Beach Florida. . . . If I happen to be outside, I’m probably on one of my golf courses, where I protect my hair from overexposure by wearing a golf hat.” Even when Trump tries to relate, he can’t pull it off. In one instance, he complains about awful traffic on the way to the airport. A common gripe. “Luckily,” he adds, “it was my plane we were heading to, my plane, so it’s not as if I could have missed the flight.”

Beyond his bubble, Trump has other aspects of the commander in chief role down. He is reluctant to admit mistakes, for instance. When he does, he usually says he miscalculated how awful other people would be. Or it’s the Trumpiest remorse possible: “I have only one regret in the women department — that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer. . . a dream lady.” His confrontations with the news media (“a business of distortions and lies”) would make Ari Fleischer’s and Jay Carney’s press shops look cuddly. After questioning whether Ronald Reagan had “anything beneath that smile” in his first book, Trump eventually shifts to the standard GOP Gipper worship. Finally, he struggles to delegate. As president, he would appoint himself U.S. trade representative, for example, and “take personal charge of negotiations with the Japanese, the French, the Germans, and the Saudis,” he writes in “The America We Deserve” (2000). “Our trading partners would have to sit across the table from Donald Trump and I guarantee you the rip-off of the United States would end.”

Yes, Trump has a pretty serious savior complex, a common affliction for presidential hopefuls. “Look, I do deals — big deals — all the time,” he writes in “Time to Get Tough” ( 2011). “We need a dealmaker in the White House.” The first Republican presidential debate this coming week should help clarify whether Trump is a real candidate or merely a sign of the GOP’s disenchantment with its options. Either way, his rivals should brace themselves. “I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” Trump writes. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

But, judging from these books, I’m not sure how badly he really wants the presidency. To win it — yes, I think he’d love to close that deal and, of course, write another book about it. But to actually be president, day to day? Trump has always been about the next big thing, whether the next deal, spouse or fight. “The same assets that excite me in the chase, often, once they are acquired, leave me bored,” he writes. “For me, you see, the important thing is the getting, not the having.”

Books cited in this essay:

• Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz. Ballantine Books, 1987.
• Trump: Surviving at the Top by Donald J. Trump with Charles Leerhsen. Random House, 1990.
• Trump: The Art of the Comeback by Donald J. Trump with Kate Bohner. Times Books, 1997.
• The America We Deserve by Donald J. Trump with David Shiflett. Renaissance Books, 2000.
• Trump: How to Get Rich by Donald J. Trump with Meredith McIver. Random House, 2004.
• Trump: Think Like a Billionaire by Donald J. Trump with Meredith McIver. Random House, 2004.
• Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life by Donald J. Trump and Bill Zanker. Collins Business, 2007.
• Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again by Donald J. Trump. Regnery Publishing, 2011.

Read more from Book Party , including:

What it’s like to write speeches for a rude, rambling and disgraced politician

Millennials see the GOP as old-fashioned and prejudiced. Here’s a plan to change that.

The case for conservative civil disobedience

Why we may never have a millennial president

'Chicken scratch' notes, Trump's book, and a 2006 picture: See evidence in hush money trial

By time Donald Trump 's hush money trial concluded its fourth week, witness testimony swung drastically from accounting processes to Stormy Daniels ' blockbuster story about sex with Trump.

Trump has been indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors say he covered up reimbursements to Cohen, who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep her story under wraps ahead of the 2016 election. More than a dozen people have taken the stand, and they all come with tidbits of evidence to explain to the jury.

Prosecutors appear to be using that evidence to show jurors Trump's approach to business and how that led him to signing checks to Cohen himself, while also propping up Daniels' alleged sexual encounter with the former president in 2006. (Trump denies it happened).

Coupled with courtroom sketches , transcripts of the trial and on-the-ground reporting from USA TODAY, the following evidence gives insight into what the jurors are seeing and considering:

Trump trial live updates: Michael Cohen set to testify as star witness in hush money trial

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

The paper trail: Michael Cohen's checks and 'chicken scratch' numbers

Who introduced the evidence: The prosecution. The checks and accounting documents form a central part of the case as prosecutors try to show Trump was reimbursing Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels and falsifying records to cover it up. The defense has denied the payments were reimbursements.

Associated witness: The paperwork has come into play across a few testimonies, as prosecutors try to show the jury the accounting processes behind Trump's organization approving and issuing checks. The documents above were verified by Jeffrey McConney, the former controller at the Trump Organization and Deborah Tarasoff, an accounts payable supervisor at the Trump Organization.

Testimony: McConney calculated how the $130,000 allegedly netted out to $35,000 monthly payments for Cohen's for a "retainer." The $130,000 paid to Keith M Davidson Associates PLC, plus $50,000 paid for technology services, doubled to pad for taxes, plus a $60,000 bonus, equaled $420,000. At a monthly rate, McConney testified, that came to $35,000. Tarasoff testified the check from Trump's personal account was signed by Trump.

Trump Organization junior bookkeeper Rebecca Manochio and former presidential aide Madeleine Westerhout later testified about how checks were signed in 2017, once Trump was in the White House. They had to send them via FedEx back and forth.

Quote from the transcript: "Allen (Weisselberg) said we had to get some money to Michael, reimburse Michael. He tossed a pad towards me, and I started taking notes on what Allen said," McConney said of his "chicken scratch" notes during a January 2017 meeting.

He also testified the hand writing on the bottom left of the First Republic Bank account statement belonged to Weisselberg, the former Trump organization CFO convicted of tax fraud and falsifying business records.

'I sign all my own checks, so I know where my money's going'

Who introduced the evidence: The prosecution.

Associated witness: Sally Franklin , a senior vice president and executive managing editor in publishing at Penguin Random House.

Testimony: Franklin read loud several portions of Trump's books, in which Trump outlines his approach to business, which includes closely checking invoices and checks. The defense team raised the fact that he used a ghostwriter in cross examination.

Quote from the transcript: "As I said before, I always sign my checks, so I know where my money's going," Trump wrote in his book "Trump: Think Like a Billionaire." "In the same spirit, I also always try to read my bills to make sure I'm not being overcharged"

Photos of Trump and Stormy Daniels at Lake Tahoe golf tournament, 2006

Associated witness: Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who allegedly had sex with Trump in July 2006 at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament.

Testimony: Daniels testified she met Trump while she was working for adult film company Wicked Pictures, a sponsor for the tournament. Trump has denied a sexual encounter between them ever occurred. These photos demonstrated that the two were at least in the same place at the same time.

Transcript excerpt: "So, Wicked sponsors one of the holes on the golf course, which, yes, I know it's very funny. We are an adult film company sponsoring one of the holes," Daniels said on the stand, before describing being introduced to Trump, along with several other golfers. "The owner of the company was like...'this is my contract star and director Stormy Daniels.' And that's when he acted like, oh, you actually direct too? You must be the smart one. And there is a picture and they moved on."

'Oh my god': Stormy Daniels testifies on spanking Trump, his gold tweezers, and silky PJs

Stormy Daniels book and merchandise

Who introduced the evidence: The defense.

Associated witness: Stormy Daniels.

Testimony: Defense lawyer  Susan Necheles pressed Daniels on how she has profited from telling her story. Daniels confirmed a post on social media saying that she made $1 million from her 2018 book "Full Disclosure ," which covered her life story, including the interaction with Trump. Daniels also has other themed merchandise for sale like a candle and a comic book, she confirmed on the stand. Necheles suggested Daniels made up the story of having sex with Trump.

"If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better," Daniels shot back. "I didn't have to write this one."

Contributing: Aysha Bagchi, Bart Jansen

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us

Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over

• I Alone Can Fix It: Trump as wannabe Führer

T his week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.

Five years on, as America digests a string of bombshell revelations about the last days of Trump’s presidency pulled from a string of new books, Russia’s judgment seems born out.

Taken together, these Trump books show just how close the US came to disaster amid stark warnings from military leaders and almost unprecedented fears of an attempted coup. They also revealed new and shocking claims about Trump and his inner circle, including praise for Hitler and an apparent desire to have protesters shot.

In Nightmare Scenario , Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how Trump failed to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, they report, wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and seemed to hope Covid would take out his national security adviser.

In Landslide , Michael Wolff’s second sequel to Fire and Fury , the book that birthed the genre, Trump is shown isolated and unhinged in the White House, pushed to extremes by Rudy Giuliani before, during and after his supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol. He also reports – and Fox News denies – that Rupert Murdoch personally approved the early call of Arizona which signaled Trump’s defeat with a pithy “Fuck him”.

In Frankly, We Did Win This Election , Michael Bender reports the 2020 campaign in exhaustive detail. He also tells us Trump believed Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things”, wanted to “ execute ” whichever aide leaked news of his retreat to a White House bunker as anti-racism protests raged last summer, and told his top general to “just shoot” those demonstrating in Lafayette Square outside.

In I Alone Can Fix It , Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker show that general, Mark Milley, resisting Trump but fearing a “Reichstag moment”, a coup by supporters of a president preaching “the gospel of the Führer”. Four days later, on 6 January this year, Trump supporters did storm the US Capitol, seeking to overturn the election, looking for lawmakers to capture and kill.

The two Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporters also report that Vice-President Mike Pence defied his own Secret Service agents and refused to leave the Capitol as it came under attack. They even show Milley reassuring the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that Trump will not be allowed to use nuclear weapons. So, on Friday, did Susan Glasser of the New Yorker , whose Trump book will come out next year. For good measure, Glasser also reported Milley’s efforts to stop Trump attacking Iran.

To the reader, America really did come to the brink of disaster.

Asked for Trump’s thoughts, a spokesperson directed the Guardian to a statement issued on 9 July, before some of the most alarming revelations were public. The interviews he sat for were “a total waste of time”, Trump said, as the authors were “bad people” who “write whatever they want to write”.

But Trump did respond to Leonnig and Rucker – also authors of a bestseller on the start of his presidency, A Very Stable Genius . Denying their reporting, he said Gen Milley should be “impeached, or court-martialed and tried” and called Pelosi “a known nut job”.

Tara Setmayer, a former Republican strategist now a senior adviser with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the Guardian such statements were “the rantings of a raving madman”.

“But he’s a madman with millions of followers, including powerful elected members of the United States government.”

Therein lies the rub. Many Trump books report important news. Many trade in salacious gossip. But all in some way document a moment in US history that is unprecedented – and which has not ended.

Trump retains control of a party committed to advancing his lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud and to attacking the voting rights of opponents . It is therefore important, Setmayer said, for the media to continue to cover both Trump and the avalanche of books about him.

“It is unconscionable given his behavior that the Republicans would give him the time of day,” she said. “He should be a political pariah. But it’s important to frame it all in the proper context, to point out when he’s not telling the truth. And as long as that’s done, then I think you have to continue to show what he’s doing.”

Trump is not a reader but he knows what is written about him. According to Politico , earlier this month he woke to news – broken by the Guardian – of the passage in Bender’s book in which he is reported to have praised Hitler.

Trump again denied the remark, Politico said , but also told an adviser: “That doesn’t mean [former chief of staff] John Kelly didn’t tell Mike Bender that. That doesn’t mean other people didn’t say it.”

Former aides jockey to tell their sides of the story. Pence and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law-cum-adviser, have signed deals for memoirs. Trump has even claimed to be writing his own book, news that prompted leading agents and publishers to reach for their very longest bargepoles, with which not to publicly touch it.

Most influential Trump world figures have spoken on or off the record. As one former aide told Politico: “It’s fraught right now as to who is telling the truth. They’re all trying to go back in time and curate their own images.” All have reason to be cautious. Trump remains powerful – and angry.

“Nobody had ever heard of some of these people that worked for me in DC,” he said in yet another statement this week, adding: “For the first time in their lives they feel like ‘something special’, not the losers that they are – and they talk, talk, talk!”

Portrayals of key meetings and moments fuel the new Trump books, all written in a style made famous by Bob Woodward, the Post veteran whose own third Trump book is due out in September. Drawn from anonymous sources, scenes are reproduced as if the reporter is in the room, quotes reported verbatim. It all adds up to a tempting prize for other journalists, jockeying to scoop the hot new read.

Keith Urbahn is a former speechwriter and Pentagon chief of staff who co-founded Javelin , a leading Washington literary agency. He told the Guardian: “Over the last year, various editors have told us they’re skeptical, that the demand that we saw in the last few years of the Trump presidency for political books was necessarily going to decline as soon as he was out of office.

“And our thesis was that it wouldn’t. Maybe it would diminish a little bit. But that the desire to understand this critical period of history was going to continue. And I do think that’s been proven.”

A glance at the Amazon bestseller list suggested Urbahn was right. Leonnig and Rucker led the way, days before publication, with Wolff third and Bender fourth after a few days on sale. Pro-Trump books by Mark Levin and Jesse Waters filled out the top five.

The presence of the two Fox News hosts echoed a note of caution from Setmayer. Deep reportage of the excesses of Trump, she said, “further confirms to the 80-plus million who voted for Joe Biden that they made the right choice. Clearly.”

“But you had over 74 million people who still voted for Donald Trump . Does it make a difference to them? I fear that for the large majority of those people, it does not. If anything, it further entrenches them in this idea that Donald Trump was somehow the victim, that the ‘deep state’ was indeed after him. And I’m not quite sure how you ever break through to those people.”

Most likely, the publishing world never will. But as Urbahn said, plenty of other readers “look back on the Trump era with a mixture of anger, surprise and shock. I think the books are a great way to make sense of that history in ways the daily drumbeat of news stories and tweets does not. It’s not possible. Only books are really a way of doing that.”

Journalism, so the cliche goes, is the first draft of history. Books based on journalism are therefore seen as the second.

Setmayer said: “I think that the books by the more credible journalists are doing that, versus the more salacious ones. We can let history be the judge.”

Asked to judge, the historian Sidney Blumenthal , a Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer , warned that the history the books are trying to write is not yet over.

“It would be complacent to regard this as something comfortably in the past,” he said. “The insurrection Trump organised and coordinated and had paid for revealed weaknesses in the system that the entire Republican party now is devoted to exploiting, through not only voter suppression but future election suppression.

“All this demonstrates how dangerous Trump remains.”

And why books about him sell.

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Trump's 'multitasking' defense is falling apart in court

• Trump's lawyers say he was too busy in office to pay attention to his hush-money reimbursement.
• But Trump Organization and White House employees say he was discerning about the checks he signed.
• And in his books, Trump says he meticulously monitors his finances.

Imagine it's early 2017. You have never held office before. You are now the president of the US. You didn't really expect to win the election, but here you are, at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.

For decades, you have been in charge of a multibillion-dollar real-estate company run by a staff of about 20 people. And even though you're now the president, you still have to deal with unfinished business. One of your employees in New York sends you a pile of checks to sign.

You have North Korea to worry about. You're paranoid that the FBI director is out to get you. People are talking about Russia. The checks. The checks! What do you do with the checks?

You sign them. You get them mailed back to New York. You have more important things to worry about.

This is one of the arguments former President Donald Trump's lawyers have advanced in his defense for his hush-money trial: Trump didn't do anything wrong. It was Michael Cohen who paid the hush money.

And if Trump's signature was on a few checks? Well, he was trying to run the country and wasn't really paying attention to every check he signed.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has indicted Trump on 34 counts of illegally falsifying business records . Prosecutors say Trump disguised records reimbursing Cohen — then his personal lawyer and a Trump Organization executive — for a $130,000 hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels in the chaotic final days of the 2016 election.

The purpose of that payment, prosecutors say, was to keep Daniels quiet about an affair she says she had with him, keeping that information away from American voters as Trump's campaign was bruised by the revelations of the "Access Hollywood" tape.

Witnesses have testified and records shown at the trial, held in a chilly 15th-floor courtroom in downtown Manhattan, have indicated Cohen fronted the hush money out of his own pocket in October 2016 using a shell company he created. Trump then reimbursed him, prosecutors say, in a series of 11 checks, nine of them bearing his handwritten signature.

Some of the payments to Cohen came from his personal bank account, others through a Trump Organization account.

Trump's lawyers have sought to pin all the blame on Cohen. In testimony, Trump's former press secretary and aide Hope Hicks said that after The Wall Street Journal in 2018 first published articles about the hush-money arrangement, Trump said Cohen "did it out of the kindness of his own heart" to "protect him" but "never told anybody about it."

When questioning his former employees, Trump's lawyers consistently ask whether he was "multitasking" while signing checks. And under questioning from a prosecutor, Hicks offered that Trump would have a constant flow of people coming in and out of his office.

"He is a very good multitasker and a very hard worker," she said. "He is always doing many things at once."

Trump's attorney Susan Necheles drilled into the question Friday while Madeleine Westerhout, Trump's White House executive assistant who kept a desk right outside the Oval Office, was on the witness stand.

Trump didn't use a computer and requested hard copies of everything. He "felt that if someone was getting his signature, they deserved his real signature," Necheles said.

Westerhout agreed Trump was "a person who multitasked" and signed "commissions, proclamations, executive orders, memos, and other documents" throughout the day.

It wouldn't be unusual, she said, if Trump signed a stack of documents while meeting with members of his administration or even foreign leaders.

To secure a felony conviction, prosecutors need to convince jurors that Trump knew what the money was for: that whenever he signed a check to Cohen, it was for the purpose of reimbursing him for the Daniels hush money.

And while Trump may not seem like the most detail-oriented person, prosecutors say there's something he's always watching: the bottom line.

Trump was discerning about which checks he signed

Trump has made no secret of his parsimoniousness. He has bragged about not paying vendors for his buildings. And he's using political donor money to pay his lawyers .

Prosecutors presented excerpts from Trump's book "Think Like a Billionaire," which includes a chapter titled "How to Pinch Pennies." In it, Trump relays a famous story where he cashed a $0.50 check from Spy magazine, winning its "cheapest millionaire" contest. Every check counts.

"I always sign my checks, so I know where my money's going," Trump says. "In the same spirit, I also always try to read my bills to make sure I'm not being overcharged."

In the book — which defense attorneys were sure to point out was written with the help of a ghostwriter — Trump reflects deeply on budgeting, even musing about the innate ethics of room decorators.

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"When you are working with a decorator, make sure you ask to see all of the invoices," Trump writes. "Decorators are, by nature, honest people, but you should be double-checking regardless."

The books that prosecutors presented were written when Trump was a businessman, not yet best known as a political figure. But prosecutors suggest his thoughtfulness about his bills continued into his presidency.

Cohen met with Allen Weisselberg , the now former Trump Organization CFO, in January 2017 to hash out how he'd get reimbursed by Trump and the Trump Organization, according to records shown at trial.

Ultimately, Weisselberg agreed to give Cohen $420,000 in multiple payments over the course of 2017, which would cover taxes and include a bonus, Weisselberg's deputy Jeffrey McConney testified.

When Trump was running the Trump Organization every day, it was easy to get ahold of him in his Trump Tower office to approve expenses and sign checks paying for them.

But with him in the White House, employees had to figure out another way to have him sign off on expenses. They devised a system where they'd cut the checks and print invoices in New York, then FedEx a pile of them to Washington, DC, a few times a month. They'd pass through the hands of Trump's bodyguard turned White House employee Keith Schiller, then make their way to the Oval Office. Trump would review and sign them, then send them back to Manhattan — all with the logistical assistance of taxpayer-funded government employees.

But Trump didn't automatically put his signature on every check. Occasionally, he'd write "VOID" on one he didn't want to be paid, the Trump Organization employee Deborah Tarasoff said.

"It was signed in a Sharpie in black," Tarasoff testified. "That is what he usually uses."

While Trump was making life-or-death decisions in the Oval Office, the billionaire was also discerning about trivial-seeming expenses. Prosecutors presented an invoice from the Winged Foot Golf Club, north of New York City, for Trump's dues that was sent to the White House from New York. Rhona Graff, his executive assistant at the Trump Organization, asked whether he wanted to suspend his membership for four years — or "continue paying annual dues + the food minimum."

Trump wrote in felt-tip pen, "Pay- ASAP OK," and signed, "D."

"This was included in the stack of checks, so I passed it along," Westerhout, Trump's White House executive assistant in 2017, testified at the trial.

Westerhout didn't send back every single check to the Trump Organization. Sometimes, Trump didn't pull out his Sharpie (sometimes a Pentel felt-tip pen, she testified) to sign them.

Rebecca Manochio, the bookkeeper at the Trump Organization who was first to handle the checks when they came from the White House, testified that sometimes checks would be missing. When that happened, she checked with Westerhout.

"Either it got lost, or he had questions about it, and he had to speak to someone," Manochio said.

If Trump had a question about a check, he'd talk with a Trump Organization employee about it, Westerhout testified.

"I think I remember, maybe, a couple times him having a question about a check and then calling Allen Weisselberg or somebody else in the Trump Organization to ask for clarification," she said.

Graff, for her part, testified that "it wasn't unusual" to see Trump on the phone while signing checks.

"Am I correct that when he would sign checks, he was often multitasking?" Necheles asked her.

"It happened on occasion," Graff said. "It would depend what was going on at the moment and how important the checks were that needed to be signed."

Trump — now a commensurate multitasker as he defends himself from multiple civil and criminal cases — employed a similar legal defense in his civil fraud case last year, where the New York attorney general's office accused him and his company of fudging numbers to commit insurance, bank, and tax fraud.

In a deposition, Trump said he was too busy saving the world "from a nuclear holocaust" to be paying close attention to the Trump Organization's finances.

The judge in that case didn't buy the argument , ultimately ordering him to pay nearly half a billion dollars in penalties.

Trump perhaps said it best himself.

In the trial, prosecutors have trotted out passages about his thriftiness from several of his books.

You can negotiate every bill, even when shopping at "high-end shops," he once wrote. You need to watch out for "computer error" in billing, he says. The only solution, he says, is to personally review and sign "as many checks as possible."

"When you sign a check yourself, you're seeing what's really going on inside your business," Trump writes in one book. "And if people see your signature at the bottom of a check, they know you're watching them, and they screw you less because they have proof that you care about the details."

Correction: May 13, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a Trump Organization employee who testified at the criminal trial. It's Deborah Tarasoff, not Tarassoff.

Watch: Trump fights back as fraud trial begins

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Barron Trump Will Not Be a Delegate at the G.O.P. Convention After All

Two days after the Florida Republican Party selected Barron, 18, to be an at-large delegate, Melania Trump’s office said he “regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments.”

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By Michael Gold

• May 10, 2024

Barron Trump, former President Donald J. Trump’s youngest son who has stayed out of the spotlight since his father entered politics, will not serve as one of Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention, the office of Melania Trump announced on Friday.

In a statement released two days after Barron, 18, was selected to be an at-large delegate by the Florida Republican Party , Mrs. Trump’s office said that Barron was “honored” to be chosen but that he “regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments.”

The Trump campaign referred a request for comment to a spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump, who did not immediately respond to questions about what those commitments might be.

Barron, who will graduate from high school next week and who plans to attend college in the fall, has largely not participated in his father’s political career.

Mrs. Trump has fiercely guarded her son’s privacy, even as some of his older siblings have been in the spotlight, campaigning for their father during the Republican primary while he and Mrs. Trump were largely absent from the trail.

Hours before Mrs. Trump’s office released its statement, Mr. Trump suggested in a radio interview that Barron, whom he called “good-looking” and “on the tall side,” was among his political advisers.

“He’s really been a great student. And he does like politics,” Mr. Trump said on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT in Philadelphia. “It’s sort of funny. He’ll tell me sometimes, ‘Dad, this is what you have to do.’”

Barron’s older brothers, Donald Jr. and Eric, campaigned for their father this year during the Republican nominating contest, and both have become popular political figures in their own right. Both of them, as well as their sister Tiffany were among the 41 at-large delegates chosen by the Florida Republican Party for the national convention in July. Another sister, Ivanka Trump, who has not taken part in her father’s political ventures since she left the White House, was not.

The Florida Republican Party did not immediately respond to questions about how Barron had been chosen as a delegate.

All four of Barron’s siblings gave speeches at the party’s conventions in 2016 and 2020, when Barron was still a minor. The Trump campaign and Mrs. Trump’s office did not respond to questions about whether Barron would attend or otherwise take part in the 2024 convention in some fashion, and Mr. Trump did not address them in his radio interview.

Mr. Trump has said for months that his wife would join him on the campaign trail, though she has remained absent from rallies, speeches and victory celebrations. She did attend a fund-raiser last month for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of L.G.B.T. conservatives.

Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

At a rally in Wildwood, N.J., former President Donald Trump declared that his campaign would “officially play” in a state he has lost twice by double digits .

Paul Manafort, who was the chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and also served time in prison, abruptly stepped aside from an unpaid role  advising Republican officials on the nominating convention.

Barron Trump, the former president’s youngest son, will not serve as one of Florida’s delegates  to the Republican National Convention, the office of Melania Trump announced.

Dodging the Question:  Leading Republicans, including several of Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to say flatly that they will accept the outcome of the election .

West Virginia Senate Race:  Gov. Jim Justice’s companies have long had a reputation for not paying their debts. But that may be catching up to them  as Justice campaigns for a seat in the Senate.

Ohio Senate Race:  Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, tells a riches-to-rags-to-riches tale. But the reality isn’t so tidy .

Maryland Senate Race:  The Democratic Senate primary between Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, and Representative David Trone has grown tighter  as they vie to take on Larry Hogan, the popular former two-term Republican governor.

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Michael Cohen testifies in Trump hush money case

Jim mattis gave absolutely brutal description of donald trump, new book claims.

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Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ’ contempt for his onetime boss Donald Trump is laid bare in a new book.

Mattis tried to stay away from the White House as much as possible during his time serving in the Trump administration, according to an excerpt from ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos’ upcoming “ The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis .”

“Anybody with sense — somebody like Mattis or [former Trump Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson — they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Stephanopoulos quoted former Trump Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert as saying.

“I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House,” Bossert added, per the book. “His view was, ‘That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.’”

The Guardian shared an excerpt from the book last week.

Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, served in the Trump administration from 2017 until the end of 2018. He resigned after disagreeing with Trump’s decision to withdraw all American forces from Syria.

In 2020, Mattis broke his silence and shredded his former boss in an open letter to The Atlantic, saying Trump “is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”

“Instead he tries to divide us,” he continued. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

Maggie Haberman Names Moment Trump Judge ‘Finally Just Had Enough’

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