The Most Essential Books of the Trump Era are Barely About Trump at All

(This essay is adapted from ‘What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era’ by Carlos Lozada, to be published October 6 by Simon & Schuster.)

As the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic, I’ve read well over 150 works covering Donald Trump and the major debates of his presidency, and that’s just a small fraction of the canon. Dissections of heartland voters. Manifestos of political resistance. Polemics on the fate of conservatism. Works on gender and identity. Memoirs of race and protest. Reports of White House chaos. Studies on the institution of the presidency. Predictions about the fate of American democracy.

Just as Trump’s election shocked the country’s political establishment, it jolted America’s intellectual class. Writers, thinkers, activists, academics and journalists have responded as they know best: with lots and lots of books. One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads has inspired an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency.

These works have succeeded as a publishing phenomenon, dominating bestseller lists. As an intellectual project, they’ve been decidedly less impressive. Too many of the books of the Trump era are more knee-jerk than incisive, more posing than probing, more righteous than right, more fixated on detailing or calling out the daily transgressions of the man in the Oval Office — This is not normal! He is unfit! — than on understanding their origins or assessing their impact. The works are illuminating in part because they reflect some of the same blind spots and failures of imagination that gave us the Trump presidency — and that will almost certainly outlast it.

America’s intellectuals have done what many of us do in times of crisis and disorientation: They have retrenched to their comfort zones, finding solace in old arguments, familiar enemies, instinctive outbursts and easy certainties. Individually, the books of the Trump era try to show a way forward; collectively, they reveal how we are stuck.