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Book Review: What Were We Thinking

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on Election Day, November 3, 2020.

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

Carlos Lozada

Simon & Schuster

272 pp.

In July 2015, early in Donald Trump’s campaign for president, Carlos Lozada — himself early in his role as nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post — proposed a project in which he would “binge-read a selection of the candidate’s books published since the 1980s.” (Apparently, 12 books bear the president’s name as author. Who knew?)

As it turned out, Lozada has ended up reading around 150 books written about Trump and the Trump era, which he notes is “just a fraction of the Trump canon.”

The resulting collection of critiques forms What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. Since so many of these books were banged out quickly in order to capture the immediate zeitgeist — and to cash in on the outrage felt by the portion of the population that would actually read books — Lozada notes that a good percentage of them lack solid analysis or a longer view of the lasting effects on our American experiment.

Of the various categories, he notes, “The resistance lit can be among the least inspiring subgenres of this era.” Still, he has found a number of books to have gained a bit of gravitas as time goes on, and to have proven worthy of further thought and consideration. In fact, “The most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.”

Lozada’s focus in pulling this book together is to “preserve a snapshot of how we grappled with the Trump era in real time. I want to remember what I thought about it, too.” So the title isn’t a form of asking, “How stupid could we be?” Instead, the author is genuinely trying to capture what we, collectively, were thinking as these events unfolded over four years.

He uses his chapters to organize books by theme, such as “Heartlandia” (a romp through earnest and lengthy dissections of “the Trump voter,” native to “Trump country” — wherein a single Trump voter, Ed Harry, is featured in three books), “True Enough,” and “Russian Lit.”

In the chapters, Lozada weaves together discussions of the books grouped under that particular heading, comparing and contrasting, playing them off each other, or seeing how they coalesce to form a larger argument. Most helpfully, at the end of each chapter, he lists the bibliography of all the titles he’s been discussing.

That Lozada is an immigrant adds an extra dimension to his critique of these Trump-era works. He describes himself as having “the zeal of a new American” and notes:

“The 2016 presidential election was my first as a U.S. citizen and voter, and Trump’s rise in national politics has coincided almost exactly with my time as a book critic. The demands of both literature and citizenship will forever shape the way I view this presidency.”

Fans of Lozada’s critiques in the Post can look forward to a longform version of his cogent, thoughtful, and comfortably familiar tone, as though he is exploring his thoughts on these books over a leisurely lunch with friends. He doesn’t give a pass to lazy, self-indulgent writing or poorly supported arguments from either side of the partisan divide. Authors need to bring their A-game for their efforts to get Lozada’s approving nod.

One that does is Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build, which Lozada calls “that rare work of the Trump era — the book I didn’t realize I was hoping to read.” Levin argues that we should be rebuilding institutions for the value of the normative behavior they impose on their members.

That might seem a counterintuitively restrictive argument, but the overarching question Levin feels those members should ask is, “Given my role here, how should I act?” It’s a question we might beg our attorney general or senate majority leader to ask himself, as much as we would the president.

Another book Lozada points to is A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, whose antidote to what ails us is similar to Levin’s: Get back to the basics of how our public processes are supposed to work:

“This is the Trump presidency as a teachable moment for a democracy that has forgotten its civics lessons or, remembering them still, has decided they don’t matter.”

In “The Conservative Pivot,” Lozada voices my exact thoughts in considering the flood of books from Never Trumpers. He notes that “it took the nomination, election, and presidency of Donald Trump” for them to “think to interrogate the conservative dogma they’d long defended. Only with Trump did they begin to reconsider their roles in feeding a frenzied base.”

Indeed, I have often imagined that if we had dodged the Trump bullet in 2016 and were currently in election season for Hillary Clinton’s second term — an alternate reality in which we would now be down to six SCOTUS justices given Mitch McConnell’s pledge never to bring a Clinton nominee to a vote, and faced with a U.S. covid-19 death toll of, say, 3,000 — these same folks would still be employing the scorched-earth tactics against Democrats they’ve used for years and telling themselves it’s for the greater good.

I’ve read only a tiny minority of the books Lozada cites, including two I reviewed for the Independent: Katy Tur’s Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History and Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’ Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office. The latter finds its way into Lozada’s epilogue, in which he lists the dozen books he finds most illuminating of their subject, the “works that have best helped me make sense if this time, the ones I suspect I’ll revisit long after the Trump era has become a subject for works of history.”

Here’s hoping that period starts at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2021.

Book Review: Enemy of the People

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 21 September 2018.

Book Title: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

Recently, I had occasion to use a quote from Washington Post executive Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” He uttered those words last October while he and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were at the National Press Club filming an edition of “The Kalb Report” with the host, veteran journalist and author Marvin Kalb.

The topic under discussion was freedom of the press, and Baron was responding to the idea that his newspaper is “at war” with the current administration. While Baron, famously unflappable, appeared almost sanguine about the state of U.S. journalism in the face of endless presidential vitriol, his interviewer, Kalb, was not. In fact, he was clearly alarmed.

That sense of alarm comes through palpably and unapologetically in Kalb’sEnemy of the People: Trumps’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. The author makes this clear right up front, answering in the affirmative to his own question, “could I, after all these years, drop my usual dedication to objective journalism and, for probably the first time in my professional life, tell the public what I truly felt about Trump and his approach to the press?”

In fact, he does not confine his opinion to that singular element, as evidenced by such passages as this one: “The partisan split, which had divided American politics for decades, only widened further as Trump and his troops stormed into Washington, taking the nation and the world hostage to his chaotic, authoritarian style of leadership.” When it comes to throwing off journalistic objectivity for the first time in a 60-year career, Kalb has decided to go all in.

Arguably, if any living journalist deserves to do so, it’s Kalb, who interrupted work on his three-part memoir to produce this slender volume. Old enough to have met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the brief post-Stalin “thaw” of 1956, when Kalb was a young translator at the U.S. Embassy, he has witnessed and reported on enough modern history to have earned the opportunity to offer his unvarnished perspective.

In a stunning bit of timing, Kalb had already decided to offer his opinions on the president and the press in a speech he was to give at the Cosmos Club on February 16, 2017. That was the same day Trump tweeted that the press “is the enemy of the American People.” For Kalb, those words, “enemy of the people,” favored by dictators throughout world history, served as his red line. He rewrote the opening of his speech, and the battle was joined.

It’s worth noting that Kalb was a target of the last U.S. president who had an especially ugly relationship with the press: Richard Nixon. Nixon had Kalb’s phone wiretapped and his office ransacked, and yet Kalb feels strongly that there is something more dangerous about this administration even than that one.

Another crucial entry in Kalb’s bona fides is his distinction as being the last of the journalists recruited by Edward R. Murrow — “Murrow’s Boys” — to join CBS News. The bulk of this book focuses on the parallels between junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, and examines the determined reporting led by Murrow and his team to shine a scalding light on McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, which eventually led to the senator’s downfall.

Beyond sharing the no-holds-barred lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump share any number of other unsavory traits and abetting environmental factors, including a legislative branch that has misplaced its spine. Both men use the press to their advantage, lie egregiously, and play to the darkest impulses of their listeners. Both are wildly popular with their followers, seemingly untouchably so.

It’s as though Cohn is describing his later client when he spoke of McCarthy as being “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse…He would neglect to do important homework…He was selling the story of America’s peril.”

The parallels are useful, but they only go so far. Murrow had a long-standing relationship of trust with the American people, having brought the Blitz alive for them — almost single-handedly creating on-location radio and later television reporting as he did so — and then giving them on-the-ground reporting during World War II. And he kept his powder dry until he felt his team was fully prepared to make the case against McCarthy and his tactics.

And though McCarthy hitched his fortunes to the hottest topic of the time to ride to prominence, he was in the end a one-trick pony. This allowed Murrow and others the relative luxury of having a single area on which to focus audience attention. In contrast, the current president has journalists playing daily — even hourly — Whack-a-Mole, where the shifting, unending outrages lead to a sort of numb exhaustion.

It’s been a long time since America has had an Ed Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to speak to the entire nation from a place of trust. If McCarthy’s moment had come in an age of social media and 24-hour cable news playing to splintered, partisan audiences — well, that would be what we have now, the raging demagogue, but this time with no trusted Murrow-like newsman to bring him to heel.

The other unfortunate parallel between McCarthy and Trump is that both are exceedingly good at selling newspapers and driving up TV news ratings. Kalb quotes political reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune saying, “McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn’t off page one for four years.”

In Kalb’s discussion with Baron and Baquet, both guests acknowledged their respective papers’ return to solid financial ground after a number of rocky years; neither one addressed the role that Trump’s virtual ownership of the news cycle may have played in the health of the papers’ balance sheets. Could Trump be right that the media needs him as much as he needs them?

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent. On August 15, 300 newspapers nationwide published editorials to push back against this idea that the news media is the enemy of the people, rather than being one of the pillars of democracy.

Which brings me back to why I was using Marty Baron’s quote. It was for a poster I carried at a march, in memory of my oldest friend and long-time newsman, John McNamara, one of the five people killed at the Capital Gazette for the sole reason that he worked for the newspaper. So it’s not a big stretch for me to agree with Kalb’s final sentences: “And, so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the ‘enemy of the people’ is not the press. It is you.”

Book Review: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History