Interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. All after words programs are also available as podcasts. It is so good to talk to you. Another book journalist. How do you primarily think of yourself these days . Guest i still very much see myself as a book critic. This book is just sort of an extension of that work. These days i feel like i am a political journalist and just using books as a means to that kind of work. Is that something that you steered clear of . I didnt have a sense that i wanted to necessarily be an author or write a book. Reading other peoples books was plenty and i learned a little bit if i went through the process of writing a book it would be sympathetic to the authors and ruin me for my day job but i think that its been useful to see that side of the process and all the work that goes into creating that product i usually get at the tail end. Do you think its going to change . I think it almost has to. I want to see i suspected it had to in some ways beyond just sympathy for authors. I hope that it will give me a better sense of the decisionmaking that goes into what a book covers. How many chapters, why did you devote attention to this or that. So, i hope that it will make me better at my main job. Now you know all the answers. This book obviously you are too far away from what it is you do during the day then you read 150 books about the trump era for the book. Do you think of this as a book about books or is it just Something Else . At the basic level i think it is a book about books. I think of it like the Coffee Table Book about coffee tables from seinfeld. But i hope that it simply uses books to try to understand a moment, to try to get a snapshot of the moment so i think in that sense it could have been a lot of things. It could have been film, theater, fiction because i focused mainly on nonfiction and so i think it is mainly a book about this moment in American Civic Life and books just happened to be the prism through which i understand them. You call this a book about an intellectual era a subtitle some people might consider to be, you know, sort of an oxymoron. But what do you mean by an intellectual history . There are a lot of ways to imagine. Theres been a common exercise during the trump years trying to find that one book from like 1973 that anticipated everything. And ive done some of that myself, guilty. But that isnt the kind of book i wanted to write. I wanted to grapple with how americas public intellectuals and writers and insiders and academics and journalists, how they were thinking about this moment in real time, so may b ma better way to explain it is to think of it as a snapshot of an intellectual moment that i hope future intellectual historians can look at to get a sense of how we thought about trump in the moment. Its interesting that you talk about books that oversimplify things and this is how we got here, this is how it happened then after the 2016 election there was this increased interest in the sales of novels that preface the moment and all of these postapocalyptic novels that somehow became bestsellers again. Then you had the books that sort of said this is what this means. This is what is happening in the current moment. Now are we moving into a sort of third phase this is what its going to mean Going Forward and this is what is going to happen next, these are the implications . I hope that we will be guiding that new wave of books. The quantity of books i have read and reviewed and thought about is testament to this obsession with trying to understand how we got here, why donald trump was elected and what the future can hold. I do hope that that we might try to move beyond a sort of singular obsession with the occupant of the oval office and do a little better at grappling with the forces that brought trump into american life. That is the title presumably. Theres been enough psychoanalyzing. I didnt want to do more of that and the original discussion of the title was included and started with what were they thinking that i wanted to be more encompassing. I didnt want to absolve anyone and it certainly isnt a book about whether the Administration Officials were thinking though there is some of that but i wanted it to be as broad as possible with this sort of sweep of thought. What did you make of the fact that early interest and folks started to turn to to explain what was going on were mostly fiction novels and memoirs . I did some of that myself. I went back and read it can happen here and that sort of soul searching through fiction, but i think that it spoke to how so many people thought it seemed kind of impossible. If its about what were we thinking, we were not thinking that hard. There was the sense that he wouldnt be elected. Even his own campaign didnt necessarily think that it was going to happen so i think that when we drew on fiction early on because it fit into that sense of unreality like a sort of weird time displacement where people talk about how weeks feel like months and months feel like years and i think all of that is part of the sense that this is not normal. This isnt something that really should be happening so fiction was the outlet for that even though we sort of quickly moved beyond it. Speaking of quickly and abnormal tempos, the pattern in a particular administration is people leave office, the cabinets disband and five or ten years later someone writes a memoir. Now you have in this Administration People writing memoirs and tell walls out the door. What do you make of that and to what extent do you devote to reading these quick memoirs from people who were in the trump circle and left . Remember how insane it seemed when George Stephanopoulos wrote his memoir the clinton years while clinton was still in office. There was a controversy about how dare he do that and he was a sort of exile for a long time. That is just now absolutely like the moment you are fired or resigned you go to the literary agency. I did try to read a lot of those books. I didnt read all of them. As soon they were out, i came to others later on and theres a certain urgency and immediacy that is great and helpful. They sort of give you an instant sense of what it was like inside, but i think that also it makes them a little whats the word, it makes them feel they are not going to last very long and they are going to be superseded by the next immediate insider tellall memoir of the trump administration. Also, with all these books, they just make you they obviously present themselves in the best possible light. Everyone is the hero of their own story and of course all those cannot be exactly true. A. I was going to say did you get this same experience where you are like okay now we are switching the angle and switching from this persons point of view. There was a lot of that in fact there was even one particular meeting of trump early on in the presidency meeting at the pentagon with a bunch of senior officials basically stating an intervention trying to get him to see the world their way and multiple books including insider memoirs but also journalistic accounts of the early trump period did the same thing. They just all obsess with one meeting or one moment or one conversation. And as you put them together you basically get a running transcript of the meeting and it feels almost cinematic. Theres an introduction where you say individually the books show us a way forward collectively they show how we are stuck. What did you mean by that . What i meant is that i think a lot of th books of the trump a reflect the same blind spots and sort of favors of imagination that gave us trump in the first place. So, people bring to all these stories and all these accounts their own blinders and all the political scientists they say stuff of truth. The international, theres different alliances. And to say weve been here before. Weve always seen this. And so, you also see people finding validations for their longheld beliefs and theories about the world and thats everyone from naomi klein whose book know is not enough says trump has proven everything ive said all along to your colleague at the time who wrote a really entertaining book called audience of one where he says trump is the ultimate television character and proof of all the Things Writing about tv culture for decades and so theres an easy tendency to retrieve into the familiar arguments. To evaluating this period and also frankly to speak to whatever silo you are in. The books that came out of the general resistance writing fall into that. They are entirely inward looking. They look at trump and see a broken moral compass and assume it always points north so i found that a little worrisome. You are coming to this book with your own lens, and your background is largely in foreign policy. Did you find yourself kind of looking at things through your own lens and did you try to resist that in your assessment . Im sure that i did. I will leave it to critics and reviewers to identify my lens. Certainly i came to the United States but only recently became an american citizen. 2016 is the first election i was able to vote in, and so i think that that certainly as to have an impact on how i see this period and read books about the immigration debates at this time. But i also think that becoming a citizen, you know, emigrating and becoming a citizen is an act of faith. I think in whatever is the place you are going to is this notion that you have confidence in the experience that suddenly you are part of and so i think underlining my writing of this book is a sense of faith in the American Experience and despite all the mayhem and fighting and controversy that it takes you someplace, but i also think thats just one identity. We carry multiple identities that come to the floor at different moments. My faith not just in america, but in reading i think was significant in my writing this book and they come together when you think about how this is a country thats always defined itself in writing from common sense on. All the big battles are litigated on paper. Not only on paper, but on paper. What can books do in trying to give a sense of the current moment that essay journalism or the internet cant do, what does it do better . This is going to be unfair to journalism and to the internet. There is possibly a little bit of greater staying power, or there can be, in the act of committing words to book form. I think even our colleagues for example who are talented journalists whove covered this presidency in great detail through the daily ongoing journalism. Not many of them felt the need to try to take a step back and go deeper in book form. Im glad they are doing that. Ive read a lot of those books and so i feel if journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, the books are a first draft of how we think more deeply about the history and see ourselves in that history and decide what it means. We are going to be rewriting those forever. I can only imagine that the best books on the trump era have yet to be written. A. A commentary on the qualities of the books you had to read. They were terrific books, but theres going to be a lot more to think through, and a lot more to understand. Even just new information to obtain. As the documents and new investigations come forward, i think we are going to be learning a lot more. Theres a lot of memoirs. We talked about how many have been coming up with trump officials. Its goinits going to be a lot d on some of the debates, i want to read Anthony Faucis memoir if he writes one and kristin nielsens time in her Homeland Security time. Those are some of the essential narratives that have yet to be fully told. And so, theyve been wonderful books about the trump era so far. I just think we are going to be with them for a long time to come. I know you were not writing about the man donald trump himself, nonetheless, he is an unavoidable figure in all of this, and one of the things i think it seems the writers have been saying in one way or another is he is a difficult figure to pin down to get the understanding of whats going on inside of him and in the same way that i think biographers and famously had trouble writing about ronald reagan. Did you have that trouble . I had a slightly different perspective on that. This whole project for me began when i decided i would be writing all of these books it started in the summer of 2015 when trump was first a candidate for the nomination and was suddenly doing really old so i went back and read some of his books even ghostwritten books that wish how someone wishe some perceived so i read eight books including the foundational document the art of the deal and several others and its all there, like everything weve seen about donald trump is there. Its kind of petty grievances and his obsession with wealth and sex and his insecurities and his mistrust of the press. Constant quest for its approval and willingness to lie, it was all in his own books and so trump can be shocking but if you just spend time with his own words, it couldnt have been all that surprising. Was there anything surprising that you thought people dont realize this about him . One thing i caught on too early on and you start seeing it in a lot of the books, and maybe it isnt surprising now nearly four years in, but he did not, he liked acquiring things, he liked winning, getting the notoriety and attention that came with a big deal. Then to managing it and running it, he got bored really quickly. I remember early on i thought i cant imagine him wanting to win the presidency were really enjoying being president because it is a lot of work and it doesnt seem to be his mo in the book. He likes to just kind of go to the next thing. You see that in his personal life and all sorts of ways so i remember thinking this is a guy that really wants to win the presidency. His world is you know, you are a killer or a loser but i couldnt imagine him really enjoying the presidency which is why we have seen the parts he has been drawn to the most that have been the sort of theatrics. He loves signing stuff because that is what presidency do. He likes rallies because he feeds off of that adulation. But he hasnt been a dealmaker. He hasnt been able to do all those things, the daytoday job such as even getting the Intelligence Briefings and digesting them so that struck me back in the summer of 2015 and then ive seen validated throughout the past four years. I have another question about the subtitle because what you are talking about its easy to think of historical precedents to the trump era and it would depend obviously on your political leaning. But how did you define that era because a lot of people when Donald Trump Took Office sort of went back and they read earlier biographies of what they would be considered authoritarian regimes. People went back and looked at world war ii figures. How would you define sort of when these start in terms of looking at the trump era . That was a big challenge for me early on because i felt that there was the risk of being narrow in how i defined the period but then i felt opening up too much there was always going to be Something Else i would have to read and incorporate and so i decided to just be kind of ruthless and fast my own focus like i am just going to look at books that came out between 2016 and 2020. And even that is unfair because the books that came out in 2016 were not written in any way to make sense of donald trump. It became a trump book but it wasnt a trump book to begin with. And so, i decided, and that will be for you and the critics to determine if it was wise or not. To just be focused on this particular period because i knew that opening the door would bring the deluge of different works that i would want to explore. I did that sometimes just for myself as i was reading and writing i would write other books on the periods i thought were relevant but i decided to keep the focus of the books on largely books people were writing to grapple with this thing that was in front of us. Lets talk about hillbilly elegy for a moment because that is the first of what i think had become a sort of sub genre of books on something thats happened in journalism after the election. Everybody said would send reporters out to the heartland, send reporters out to these industrial cities and rural areas and figure out who are the trump voters. That was kind of the one first book latched onto. Are there others that did it equally or even better . I think hillbilly elegy told jd vances story very well. I think it was a very wellwritten book. It was a very effective book to read, but i think a lot of it was timing that made people seize on it like this is a tough to explaitestto explain book ant was unfair to the book itself and to the trump voters in the sense that he tells a very personal story of growing up between kentucky and mainly in ohio and his own rather conservative politics, you know, color the way he sees that experience. But it had such a broad appeal as the sort of quintessential trump voter book because i think it had a very bootstrapped thing like dont blame anyone else for your troubles, you know, that is a very loser thing to do. His grandmother told him that and so you know, he goes to the marines and that shakes him up. But it also had a very so thats more the kind of conservative feel but it had the appeal to the left because he worked to the meritocracy of Yale Law School and also affirms liberals suspicion of the White Working Class and the social pathologies of the community so it had something for everyone and thats why i think it became kind of across the spectrum this book people relied on. A book like heartland by sarah marsh. Its about her experience growing up in kansas, foreign country, but very much from the left, from a totally different political perspective. And it was its own books. In fact it was in the works for a long time before that. It wasnt in any way a response to jd vances not in a temporal way anyway. And these are its not like just the difference between the mountains and the planes. These were not just different ideologies that came to bear on this one political reality that is the struggle of the White Working Class. I think we put these books in conversation with each other. I certainly did that in my book. I start the opening chapter of the book is about all these books that i call the heartland genre and i spend a lot of time contrasting jd vance and sarah. A lot of the authors that are more these journalists that you talk about who dove into every rust belt town and diner they could find, often they brought their own preconceptions to what they were covering which is sometimes inevitable. Here is another oversimplification. It strikes