COVID-19 craziness. Toddler tantrums. Unnerved staffers. What the lunacy in the Trump White House reveals about the degradation of America’s democratic values.
www.theatlantic.com
150 Books Show How the Trump Era Has Warped Our Brains
COVID-19 craziness. Toddler tantrums. Unnerved staffers. What the lunacy in the Trump White House
I blame Michael Wolff.
Not just for the typos and minor errors littering
Fire and Fury, his early-2018 best seller on the chaos coursing through the Trump White House. Not only for the dubious renditions of reality his book offers. (“If it rings true, it is true,” Wolff said in an MSNBC interview about the book, a standard as journalistically appalling as it is perversely apropos of the times.) Not even for the unsupported suggestion—which the author casually drops into his epilogue—that Donald Trump and then–United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley were carrying on an affair. Haley had become a “particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers,” Wolff writes, adding that the two had been spending “a notable amount of private time” together aboard Air Force One. (When not enough people picked up on the hint, Wolff drew attention to the supposed liaison in a television interview: “Now that I’ve told you, when you hit that paragraph, you’re going to say, ‘Bingo.’”)
No, I blame Wolff above all for setting a template for so many Trump books to follow—a template that former White House aides, administration officials, and even journalists far superior to Wolff have emulated to varying degrees, consciously or not.
Fire and Fury featured so many stunning moments from the first nine months of the Trump presidency that even meticulously reported accounts of this White House in the years since have devolved into a contest for the most explosive, chyron-ready anecdotes—anecdotes that, while shocking in their specifics, have grown entirely commonplace in their regularity.
Since 2015, as a book critic for
The Washington Post, I’ve pored over some 150 books on the Trump era, trying to keep pace with the intellectuals, journalists, insiders, partisans, and activists grappling with the turmoil it has wrought. Among all the dissections of the white working class, debates over immigration, and polemics on the fate of American democracy, perhaps the most popular subgenre has been the Chaos Chronicles—those books that document the actions of the president and his aides, and reconstruct the major controversies of the Trump White House.
Reading through the Chaos Chronicles, we learn that Trump and a White House staffer sat in the president’s study and compiled a list of enemies serving in his administration. We discover that Trump mused about building a moat with alligators at the southern border to fend off immigrants. (Yes, alligators. And yes, a moat.) We realize that senior aides steal sensitive documents off the president’s desk, hoping he will forget about them (which he does). We are told that multiple senior officials almost quit at the same time (but didn’t). We learn that Trump and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, exchanged letters so gushing that a reporter deemed them “almost romantic” in their prose. (“I’m the only one he smiles with,” Trump told Bob Woodward of his pen pal, in
Rage.) And we watch as the president struggles to read portions of the Constitution out loud, stumbling over the words and complaining that they sound—metaphor alert!—like a foreign language to him.
David Frum: Trump made a bag bargain with Woodward
I believe it. I believe all of it and more. That’s the trouble with writing about the Trump White House, and reading about it too: The lunacy is appalling yet unsurprising, wholly unpresidential yet entirely on-brand. The president’s COVID-19 diagnosis and hospitalization last weekend are a perfect distillation of Trumpian chaos, packed with misinformation and contradiction, national-security risks and constitutional implications, and all with the man himself commanding every last speck of attention. When he needs oxygen, so do we. When his temperature rises, the nation’s does too.
The authors of the Chaos Chronicles strive for memorable imagery to distill the events they’re recounting: It’s a devil’s bargain! A team of vipers! It’s a nervous breakdown! It’s the White House as a pinball machine, or as an Etch A Sketch—no, wait, as a Tilt-A-Whirl! Yes, the mayhem is integral to the Trump story, and the deployment of outlandish symbolism is understandable when one is describing an administration that gives off a reality-show vibe, that feeling, as James Poniewozik puts it in
Audience of One, “that you were watching a thing that you were not supposed to be able to see on TV—and yet here it was.”
Trump, of course, has loathed the Chaos Chronicles since the beginning. “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos—chaos,” the president complained during a White House news conference less than a month into his term. “Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” No, it is the exact opposite of the exact opposite; on this score, the scribes of the Trump era are more credible than the president. So Trump goes on Twitter tirades about these books, only boosting their sales and confirming their narratives. For publishers, a Trump tweetstorm is a key marketing objective.
Yet White House chaos is not the full story, and it should certainly not be the main story. While well-sourced reports and insider memoirs provide a vital historical record, the books that tell us what the chaos means and why it matters are most needed, even if not always the most memorable. When the fire dies out and the fury subsides, what is the true American carnage wrought by and in the Trump White House? If these volumes are any indication, it is the decline of America’s preparedness for truly complex crises—ones that can’t be intimidated on Twitter, wished away as “fake news,” or redrawn with a Sharpie. It is the remaking, to lasting detriment, of the limits and powers of the American presidency, and the degrading of our expectations for—and devotion to—public service. And it is the erosion not of personal decorum or policy process, though there is plenty of that, but of the democratic values to which the country should aspire.
more...
www.cnn.com
