Monday, November 2, 2020

Eight of the best books about Trump

Peter Conrad taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford, for four decades. He has written more than twenty books, including Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life; The Hitchcock Murders; How the World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere; Creation: Artists, Gods, and Origins; Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century; and Mythomania: Tales of Our Times from Apple to ISIS.

At the Guardian, Conrad tagged eight of the best books about Donald Trump. One title on the list:
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America
Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

A while ago, updating his claim to be a genius, Trump invited us to admire his “magnificently brilliant” answers in a television
interview; I’d rather trust his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who viewed him as “a fucking moron”. This book is the blackest of comedies, nihilistically hilarious in its documentation of Trump’s incompetence. Rucker and Leonnig also give us a glimpse of his sulphurous cynicism as he sneers at the suckers who voted for him. “I’m a total act,” he told his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, “and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.”
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue