Like im a political journalist use the book says a means to that kind of work. Obviously this is your first book did you know you always wanted to write a book as a critical or is that something you steer clear of . I do not have a sense i wanted to necessarily be an author or write a book reading other peoples books plenty in the process of writing a book to be far too much sympathetic warning me for my day job that has been useful to see with that side of the process is like and all the work going to finish that finished product i get at the tail end. With that change your approach is a book critic . I think it has to i know how it will. I want to see when im back into the swing of reviewing books but in some ways just beyond sympathy for authors i hope you will give me a better sense of the decisionmaking of where the book covers or how many chapters. I hope will make me better at my main job. Now you know the answers but before you get too far away he ran on read 150 books. What do you mean n intellectual history . There are a lot of ways to imagine theres been this common exercise trying to find that one book from 1973 that anticipated everything and ive done some of that myself but thats not 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. You talk about books that oversimplify things into this is how we got here, this is how this happened, and its right after the 2016 election there was an increased interest in sales and particular novels and all of these sort of postapocalyptic novels suddenly became bestsellers again then the one that said this is what this means, this is what is happening in the current moment. Now are we moving into this sort of this third phase of this is what its going to mean Going Forward these are the implications . I hope so. I hope we will be getting that new wave of books. The quantity of books that i read and reviewed and thought about is the sort of testament to this this obsession with trying to understand how we got here, why donald trump was elected and what the future can hold in american politics. I do hope that we might try to move beyond a sort of singular obsession with the occupants of the oval office and do a little better at grappling with the forces that brought trump into american life. A. I have done enough psychoanalyzing in book form i didnt want to do more of that and the original discussion of the title was included and started with what were they thinking, but i wanted to be more allencompassing. I didnt want to resolve any one oabsolve anyoneof responsibilit. And its certainly not a book about whether Administration Officials were thinking though there is some of that but i want it to be as broad as possible with this sort of sweep of thought and writing. What did you make of the fact that early interest 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 Sinclair Lewis it can happen here so i certainly engaged in that but i think it spoke to how so many people thought it seemed kind of impossible. No one, if it is about what were we thinking, we were not thinking that hard. Even his own campaign didnt think it was going to happen so we drew on fiction early on because it fit in with that sense of reality and theres been a time displacement vibe that the years have given us this wasnt normal. This wasnt something that really would be happening so i think that it was the National Outlet for that even though we quickly moved beyond it. The usual pattern about a particular administration is people leave office and their cabinets disband and maybe five or ten years later somebody in retirement rights and memoir now we have in this Administration People writing memoirs out the door. What do you make of that and writing those memoirs from people who were in the circle and left . Remember how insane it seemed when George Stephanopoulos wrote his memoir while clinton was still in office that is the moment you are fired or resigned you go to the Literary Agency and so 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 theres a certain urgency with them that is great and helpful and they sort of give you an instant sense of what it was like inside. But i think that also makes them a little whats the word, it makes them feel ephemeral, like they are not going to last very long and they will be superseded by the next immediate inside tellall memoir of the trump administration. Also, with all of these books, they just make you, they present themselves in the best possible light. Everyone is the hero of their own story and of course they cannot all be consistent and exactly true. I was going to say did you get this kind of experience where you are like okay now we are switching the angle there was one particular meeting early on in the presidency meeting at the pentagon with a bunch of senior officials multiple books including the inside memoirs and journalistic accounts of the early trump period. You put them altogether and alld basically get a running transcript of the meeting and it feels almost cinematic. Individually these books try to show us a way forward collectively they show how we are stuck what did you mean by that . A lot of the books reflect the very same blind spots and failures of imagination that gave us trump in the first place. So, people bring to all the stories and all of these accounts their own blinders. To say weve been here before. Weve always seen this. 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 he is pleased then everything ive all along to your colleague at the time that wrote audience for one where he said trump is the ultimate television character and proof of all the things ive been writing about for decades. It doesnt mean that they are all wrong it just means that there is an easy tendency to retrieve into the familiar argument when it comes to evaluating this period and to speak to whatever silo you are in. A lot of the books that come out of the what i call general resistance writing fall into that category. They are entirely inward looking. They look at trump and see a broken moral compass and assume they always point north. I found that a little worrisome. You are coming to this with your own lens, and recent immigrant, citizen rather, not a recent immigrant, but new citizen and your background is largely in foreign policy. Did you find yourself looking at things through your own lens and did you try to resist that . Im sure i did. I will leave it to the critics and reviewers to identify. I came to the United States as a child but only recently became a citizen. 2016 was the first election i was able to vote and so, i think that that certainly had an impact on how i see this period and read books about the immigration debates of this time. But i also think becoming a citizen, emigrating is sort of an act of faith in whatever is the place you are going to, this notion that you have confidence in the experience you are part of and so underlining my writing of this book is a sense of faith in the american experiment that despite the mayhem and fighting and controversy that it takes you someplace but that is just one identity. We carry multiple identities that come to the floor in different moments. My faith not just in america but in reading i think was a significant in my writing of this book and they come together when you think about how this is a country thats always defined itself in writing from common sense 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 cannot do, what does it do better . This will be unfair to journalism and to the internet, but i think theres 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 at the Washington Post and the new york times, for example, who are very talented and have covered this presidency in great detail through the daily ongoing journalism many of them have felt the need 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 it is supposed to be the first draft of history as the books are a first draft of how we think more deeply about that history and how we see ourselves in that history and decide what it means, we are going to be rewriting those forever. I think that i can only imagine the best books on the trump era have yet to be written. On the commentary and the quality of the books to read. They were terrific books, but theres just going to be a lot more to think through, and a lot more to understand. And even new information to obtain as the documents are classified. There is going to be a lot more and on some of the key debates, i want to read anthony about fas memoir. They are the sort of essential narratives that are yet to be told. They have 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 are not writing about the man donald trump himself, nonetheless, hes an unavoidable figure in all of this and one of the things that i think it seems at least the writers have been saying in one way or another is a difficult figure to understand whats going on inside of him and i think the biographers famously had trouble writing about ronald reagan. When trump was first a candidate for the republican nomination doing really well, so i went back and just read a bunch of his books that reveal about how someone wishes to be perceived and so i read eight books including the foundational document the art of the deal and several others. Everything we have seen is there his willingness to lie and deceive. It was all in his own books. If you just spend time with his own words it can be that surprising. This ceases to be surprising but he liked acquiring things and winning and it was some big deal. He got forward really quickly and i thought i cant imagine him enjoying being present because thats a lot of work because that seems to be his mo in the books. I couldnt imagine him enjoying the presidency and thats why they see the parts that have been drawn through the most have been the sort of theatrics and atmospherics. He loved signing stuff because that is what presidency do. He likes rallies because he feeds off that adulation but he hasnt been a dealmaker in office, he hasnt been able to do all those things that the daytoday grubby job of presenting such as getting the intelligence briefing. So that was something that struck me that i wrote about him first in 2015 but that 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 the preface that you would go to on your political leanings how do you find the era because a lot of people when Donald Trump Took Office and they read earlier how did you define when these start in terms of looking at the trump era. That was a challenge early on because i felt that there was the risk of being too narrow and how i define the period. But then i felt that opening up too much to read and incorporate and so i decided to be ruthless and cast my own focus narrowly like im going to look at books that came out and even that is unfair because they were not written in any way to make sense of donald trump. It became a trump book but it wasnt to begin with and so that will be for you and critics to determine if it was wise or not to 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. They are 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 has become a sub genre book that reflected what happened in journalism which is everybody said lets send reporters out to the heartland and to these industrial cities and the rural areas and find out who wore the trump voters. That was kind of the one book or the first book people latched onto. How well do you think it told that story and are there others that did equally or better . I think that it told the story very well. It was effective to read. It was unfair to the book itself and to the trump voter in the sense that it holds a very personal story of growing up between kentucky and mainly in ohio and his own rather conservative politics color the way he sees that experience. But it had a broad appeal to the sort of quintessential book and had a very kind of bootstraps thing like dont blame anyone for your troubles. His grandmother told him that and he goes to the marines and that shapes him up. But it also has a very in a rough sense more of the conservative feel, but it has the sort of appeal to the left as well because he works his way up to the meritocracy it kind of affirms the liberal suspicions of the White Working Class and so it had something for everyone and thats why i think that it became across the spectrum this book that people relied on. Its about her experience growing up in kansas, foreign country, and very much from the left. Very much from a totally different political perspective. It was in its own books. For my understanding it was a long time before that. It wasnt in any way a response to a temporal way. These are, its not like its just between the mountains and the planes. These were different ideologies that came to bear on this reality that is the White Working Class and so i think that we put these books in conversation with each other. I certainly do that in my book. I start the opening chapter about all these books that i call the heartland genre and i spend a lot of time contrasting jd vance and a lot of the authors that are not memoirs like the journalists that you talk about who dove into every rust belt town they could find often in their own preconceptions to what they were covering which is sometimes inevitable. Heres another oversimplification but it strikes me that a good portion of the book that you described in your book are those of explosively set out to say okay here i am going to explain to you what is happening here. Then there are books like this that do not set out to do that but you found to be perhaps in many ways better ways to explain this period than the books that were sort of going at it directly. I think that is right. I think i felt good books have to accept when everything is too tied up i always worry like whats been left out of this. What am i not getting. And i found in this pair of the books that did that that went out to look at the trump voter and in some cases even profiled the same people, which was bizarre like theres this one voter in pennsylvania who was a lonlongtime Democrat Labor organizer who switched in 2016 and is prominently featured in two different books and the crazy thing is they give him significantly different motivations for supporting donald trump. In one book, he has is a populist that worries that they forgot in the working class and hes the same guy i suspect through the prism that they bring to the story we havent talked explicitly about the most obvious one which is ideological that we live in a polarized period right now in america. Did we have to try to find books for trump or in the resistance. I dont know if it is the middle that we are looking for because you may end up its not like you have to be in the middle between resistance and the base to get a clear perspective. You just have to sort of not be in the tank one way or another. You may end up in a different place. So, what i often did as i is i obviously read a bunch of books over the course of the years that i was reviewing for the Washington Post. But then when i realized i was going to try to take out a bigger sweeping look at these books, i went back and sort of backfilled different areas. Maybe i read five books on this but i want to read five more and there i could kind of pick and choose different perspectives. That was a luxury for me to have the time to do that. On these books about the White Working Class i found these books i missed the first time called we are still here and at first i thought it would be similar to the others. She spent time in pennsylvania talking to people and i found that she was able to, she pointed out that the heartland is not entirely White Working Class is not just the White Working Class that has been sort of branded and this debate we have had about the motivations of the heartland which has always been narrowed down to our prejudices or struggle. Her book helped me see how these are intertwined. It showed how theres no place for them at all. They mocked her for thinking for daring to believe the preferences and to her voice it is a different insight that stayed with me as i read it. There are the disillusioned conservatives, the people that are questioning what happened to my republican party. I am assuming that there was a whole kind of separate book, tomac. What was this like . I read maybe four or five of the books by the more prominent conservatives and then in my book i put those in a broad chapter about the divide among the right. Were focused on what happened to my party and this movement ive been a party of for so long i dont believe they fully wrestled with their own role in what had come to pass they had been flying feeding this base or ignoring the intense base of support that the party increasingly was an embodied by suddenly it is like what have we done, what have we created and that to me felt a little insufficient as a reckoning. I think theyve done a good job that respecting the evolution of the conservative movement and showed the inability now to do what the past generations of done which is kind of like the most extremist voices from the ranks. Theyve taken over and have left the writers outside looking in. One of the ways to view the line of the timeline of the trump era. This huge and and bar go to hear about the book thats going to come out everyone writes about it and jumps about it and its gone from the first book to bolton but the one that i think started it all was probably michael wolf fire and fury. You start a chapter about that book. The first line is i blame michael wolf. What have you done and why does it matter . I hate reviewing those books where i have no time i have to stay up at night reading them