Guest i still think i very much see myself as a book critic. This book is just sort of an extension of that work, but these days i feel like im a political journalist also in many ways and just using books as a means to do that kind of work. Host also an author, obviously. This is your first book. Did you know you always wanted to write a book as a book critic or is that something you steered clear of . Guest i did not have a sense i wanted to necessarily be an author or write a book. Reading other peoples books was plenty for me and i worried a bit that if i went through the process of writing a book i would end up far too sympathetic to authors and ruin me for my day job, but i think its been useful to see what that side of the process is like and all of the work that goes into creating that finished product usually just get at the tail end host do you think it will change your approach at all as a book critic . I think it almost has to. I dont know how it will, though. I went to see when i am sort of back in the swing of reviewing a lot of books, but i suspect that it has to in some ways beyond just sympathy for authors. I hope that it will give me a better sense of the decisionmaking echoes into what a book covers, you know how many chapters, why did you devote attention to this or that, so i hope it will make me better at my main job, which is as a book critic. Host now you know all the answers, but this of book you didnt steer too far away from what it is you do during the day you read to 150 books about the tramp era for this book. Do you think of this as a book about books or is it Something Else . Guest at a basic level i think it is a book about books. I think of it like cramers Coffee Table Book about coffee tables from seinfeld, but i hope its simply using books to try to understand a moment to try to get a snapshot of the moment and so i think in that sense it could have been film. It could have been theater. It could have been fiction because i focused mainly on nonfiction and so i think its mainly a book about this moment in American Civic Life and books just happen to be the prism through which i understand it. Host you called this a book also about an intellectual history of the trump era come a subtitle that some people may consider to be sort of inherently oxymoronic, but what do you mean by intellectual history . Guest theres a lot of ways to imagine intellectual history. Theres been a common exercise during the trump years trying to find that one book from like 1973 that anticipated everything or this one essay that side coming and i have done some of that myself , guilty. But, thats not the kind of book i wanted to write. I went to to grapple with how americas public intellectuals and writers and insiders in academics and journalists, how they were thinking about this moment in real time, so maybe a better way to explain it is to think of it as a snapshot of an intellectual moment that i hope for future historians to look at to get a sense of how we thought about trump in the moment. Its interesting you talk about books that oversimplify things and this is how we got there, this is how this happened and right after the 2016 election, there was this increased interest in sales of in particular novels that profits the current moment, 1984, brave new world post apocalyptic novel suddenly became bestsellers again. Then, you had books that sort of said this is what it means, this is whats happening in the current moment. Now are we moving into this sort of third phase of this is what is going to mean moving forward . These are the implications . Guest i hope so. I hope we will be getting that new wave of books. I think that theres been this, i mean, the quantity of books that i have read and reviewed and thought about is sort of testament to this. Its this obsession with trying to understand how we got here, you know why donald trump was elected in 2016 and what the future can hold in american politics. I do hope that move beyond an obsession with occupant of the oval office and do a little better at grappling with the forces that brought it into American Life appeared theres been enough that analyzing of donald trump in book form and i did not want to do more of that and in fact the original discussion of the title was included and started with what were they thinking, but i wanted to be more allencompassing without. I didnt want to absorb anyone of responsibility or agency and it is certainly not a book about what Administration Officials were thinking though there is a some of that in some of the insider memoirs, but i wanted to be as broad as possible with this sort of sweep of thought. What did you make at the fact that that really interest, those early books that people started to turn to to expand what was going on were mostly fiction novels and memoirs . Guest i did some of that myself i went back and read it cant happen here in the plot against america and wrote about those so i certainly engaged in that the sort of soul searching through fiction, but i think it spoke to how so many people thought that this seemed kind of impossible. You know if its about what were we thinking, we werent thinking that hard. There was a sense in which trump could not be elected. Even trumps own campaign didnt really think it was going to happen and so i think we do on fiction early on because it fit in with that sense of unreality, of this sense of theres been this sort of weird like time displacement vibe that trump years has given us where people talk about how, you know, weeks feel like months and months of feel like years and all of that i think is part of the sense that this is not normal at this is not something that really could be happening and so i think fiction was the natural outlet for that even though we sort of quickly moved beyond it. Host speaking of quickly and speaking of abnormal tempos, the usual pattern with about a certain, you know, administration is that people leave office. Their cabinets a disband and maybe five, 10 years later someone in retirement rights a memoir. Now, in this Administration People are writing memoirs sort of two minutes and tell walls out the door. What do you make of that and to what extent do you devote yourself to reading those kind of quickie tellall memoirs from people who were in the trump circle and left . Guest remember how insane it seemed when George Stephanopoulos wrote his memoir of the clinton years while clinton was still in office and it was a huge controversy about how dare he do that and he was sort of exiled from clinton world for a long time. Thats just now absolutely like you know , the moment you are fired or resign you go to a literary agency. I did try to read a lot of those books. I didnt read all of them as soon as they were out. Sort of came to others later on in there is a certain urgency and immediacy with them that i think is helpful. They sort of give you an instant sense of what it was like inside, but i think also makes them a little whats the word cracks . Makes them feel like you know they arent going to last long and they will be superseded by just the next immediate insider tellall memoir of the trump administration. Also with all of these books, they just make you everyone is the hero of their own story and of course all those stories can be exactly true. Host out is going to say did you get this sort of russia monde experience to you are switching angle and see this particular meeting from this persons point of view . Guest there was a lot of that. In fact, even one particular meeting of trump early on in the presidency meeting at the pentagon with a bunch of senior officials who are basically staging an intervention trying to get him to see the world that their way and multiple books including insider memoirs, but also journalistic accounts of the early trump period did the same thing. They just all obsessed with one or one moment or one conversation and you put them all together and basically get ik running transcript of the meeting. It feels like a most cinematic. Host you say individually these books try to show us a way forward collectively they show how we are stuck. What did you mean by that . What i meant with that is that i think a lot of these books of the trump you are reflected the very same blind spots and sort of imagination is that gave us trump and trump is him. So, people bring to all these stories and all these accounts their own blinders come on these political scientists at the step democracy, internationalist [inaudible] historians adjust say we have been here before. We have always a seen this and so you also see people finding validation for their longheld beliefs and theories about the world in trump and thats everyone from naomi klein whose book know its not enough says look trump has proven everything i have been saying to your colleague at the times who rode a entertaining book called the audience of the wine where he says trump is the ultimate television character and proof of all the things i have been writing about tv culture for decades. Doesnt mean they are all wrong. It to just means that there is an easy tendency to retreat into familiar arguments when it comes to evaluating this period. Also, frankly, to justice think to the converted, to speak to whatever silo you are in a lot of the books that came out of what i called generally resistance writing fall into that category. They are entirely inward looking. They look at trump and see a broken moral compass and therefore assume theres always points north, so i found that a little worrisome. Host you are coming to this book probably with your own lens as a recent immigrant and a new citizen, not a recent immigrant, but new citizen in 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 . Guest im sure i did. I will leave it to critics and reviewers who are identifying my lenses. I think certainly i came to the United States as a child but only recently became an american citizen. 2016 was the first election i was able to vote in and so i think that certainly has to have an impact on how i see this period. Certainly how i read books about immigration at this time, but i also think that becoming a citizen you know immigrating to a new country and becoming a citizen is sort of act of faith, i think, in whatever it is the place you are going to. Its just this notion that you have confidence in that experiment that suddenly you are part of and so i think underlying maybe my writing of this book is a sense of faith in the american experiment, faith that despite all the mayhem in the fighting and controversy , that it takes you someplace but i also think thats just one identity that i think we share multiple identities. My faith not just in america, but in reading i think was 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 on you know all the big battles are litigated on paper, not only on paper, but on paper. Host what can books do in trying to give a sense of this current moment that say that internet cannot do . What is it to better . I think this is going to be unfair to journalism and the internet, but i think thats okay. Theres 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 at the Washington Post and New York Times for example who are very talented journalists who have covered this presidency in great detail through just daily ongoing journalism many of them have felt the need to try to take a step back and go deeper in book form and im glad theyre doing that. I read a lot of those books and so i feel that if journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history as phil gramm said, the books are a first draft of how we think more deeply about the history, how we see ourselves in the history and how we decide what that history means. We will rewrite those forever. I think i can only imagine the best books on the trump euro have yet to be written and yeah. Host i hope thats not a commentary on the quality of the books you had to read for this book. Guest they were terrific books, but there will be a lot more to think through and understand and even just knew information to obtain as documents are declassified and new investigations come forward. I think we will keep learning a lot morning we talked about how many memoirs have been coming out from Trump Officials took there will be a lot more and on some of the key debates, i mean, i went to read doctor Anthony Faucis memoir, kristen nielsens memoir at her time at home and security. Those are essential narratives that have yet to unfold and so there have been wonderful books about the trump euro so far. I just think we will be with them for a long time to come. Host 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, i think, it seems writers have been playing in one way or another is that he typical figure to pin down given an understanding of whats going on inside him in the same way i think biographers and famously Edward Morris had trouble writing about ronald reagan. They just couldnt get a sense. Did you have had trouble guest you know i had a slightly different perspective on that. This whole project for me even before the book just deciding this was my beat that i would read all these books started in the summer of 2015 when trump was first a candidate for the nomination and suddenly he was doing really well so i went back and just read a bunch of his books even ghostwritten books revealed a lot about how someone wishes to be perceived. I read even the foundational document the art of the deal and its all they are like everything we have seen about donald trump is there, his kind of petty grievances and his obsession with kind of wealth and sex and insecurities and you know ms. Trust of the press and constant quest for approval, willingness to lie and deceive was all in his own books and so trump can be shocking, but if you just to spend time with his own words it could not have been all of that surprising. Host is anything in their surprising . Anything that you thought people dont realize this about him . Guest one thing that i caught on to early on and then you start to see it through a lot of his books and maybe it is surprising now nearly four years in, but he liked acquiring things. You liked winning, like getting the notoriety and attention that came with some big deal then to managing that things into running it, he got bored really quickly, he got bored and i remember early on mike i didnt imagine him wanting to win the presidency. I cant imagine him really enjoying being president because thats a lot of work and it didnt seem to be his mo in the book. He just kind of like to go to the next thing and you see that in his personal life, and all sorts of ways and i remember thinking a guy who really wants to win the presidency. Winning is everything. You are a killer or you are a loser, but i can imagine him really enjoying the presidency, which is why we have seen the parts that he has been drawn to the most has been the sort of theatrics and atmospheric of the president. He loves to sidestep because thats what president s do. He likes rallies because he feeds off that adulation, but he has not been a dealmaker and been able to do all those things that the day today grubby job of President Team such as even getting the intelligence [inaudible] that was something that struck me when i wrote about him first in the summer, 2015 and ive seen sort of validated throughout the past four years. Host i have another question about your subtitle because what you are talking about is easy to think of how historical precedent to the trump era how do you define the era because some people in Donald Trump Took Office went back and read earlier biographies of what would be considered a authoritarian regime and went back and looked at world war ii figures. How did you define when these books started looking at the trump era . Guest writes. That was a big challenge for merely on because i felt that there was the risk of being too narrow and how i defined that period, but then i felt opening up too much or there would always be Something Else that i would have to read and incorporate and so i decided to just be kind of ruthless and cast my own focus ordinarily like im 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, i mean, it was not a truck book to begin with. And so and that will be for you and critics to determine if it was wiser not to just be very focused on this particular period because a new opening the door would just, you know, bring a delusion of different works that i would want to explore. I did that sometimes for myself as i was reading and writing i would read other books on periods or experiences i thought were relevant, but i decided to keep the focus of the books in my book on largely books people were writing to grapple with this thing in front of us. Lets talk about hill bill elledge is the for a moment because i think it was a sub john wrote on the books, something that happened in journalism after that election which was lets send our reporters to the heartland, to these you know industrial cities and rural areas and figure out who are the trump voters and that was kind of the first book that people latched onto. How well do you think that book kind of told that story and are there others that did it equally or even better . I think that book told jd dance is a story very well. I think it was a very well written book. It was a very affecting book to read, but i think a lot of it was timing that made people seize on it well this is the tropics explain her book and i think it was probably unfair to the book itself and to the trump of voter in the sense that vance tells a very personal story of growing up between walkin mainly in ohio and his own rather conservative politics the way he sees that experience, but it had such broad appeal as this sort of you know quintessential trump voter book because i think it had a very kind to bootstrap a thing like blame anyone else for your troubles, thats a very loser thing to do. You know his grandmother tells him that and so he goes to the marines and that shapes him up, but it also had a very thats more like maybe in a rough sense the conservative the feel, but it had the appeal to the left because he worked his way up to the meritocracy and of it, hell law school and ended also affirmed some some liberal suspicions of the White Worki