Whether over immigration, over race, over voting, over who really counts and belongs here. Especially in the books by historians that obviously are in conversation with the moment and aware of the moment, you can see that all the fights that we’re having are eternal fights in the American experience. I think some of the most compelling and important books on the Trump era aren’t really about Donald Trump at all. The Trump era is shorthand for all of that, but it didn’t begin when he went down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his. The “Trump era,” as I say, is suffused with conflict, crudeness, and mistrust, but all those are characteristics that predated Trump-that he has stoked and exacerbated and capitalized on-but that we were ripe for. I think it’s about us more than about him. That’s something that through the course of reading all these books, I came to be a little dubious about. There’s a risk with Trump-and I’m susceptible to this as well-to think that it’s all about him, and to think that this era is unique because of the man who seems to be at the center of it. “There’s so much material, right? It’s this great irony of the period that a president who rarely reads has propelled this avalanche of books about him.” “ What Were We Thinking is, I hope, a snapshot about how our academics and activists, our intellectuals, grappled with Trump in real time,” he said in a recent phone interview. In his new book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, he provides a Rosetta Stone for anyone trying to make sense of the last few years of public debate and discourse. He collected what he found into an essay, and instead of retreating to more comfortable reading material, he decided to lean in.Īs the Trump years wore on, producing dozens of insider accounts, anti-Trump screeds, and books written by various members of Trump’s circle, Lozada widened his mandate and attempted to read all of the “Trump books” he could find-more than 150 of them. He read all eight books published under Donald Trump’s name, from The Art of the Deal to 2011’s Time to Get Tough, in an attempt to understand how the man who would eventually become president built and manipulated his image over the years. During the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic, Carlos Lozada, took on an inevitable task.

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