The Best Books About the Trump Era, According to the Critic Who Read 150

From resistance literature to administration memoirs, Carlos Lozada read them all

Photo illustration; image source: Richard Baker/Getty Images

So many books have been published on Trump, Trumpism, and the flurry of issues surrounding his time in office, you could never possibly make a dent in them. Unless you’re Carlos Lozada, Washington Post book critic, who read and wrote about 150 of them for his own book, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.

If journalism is the first draft of history, What Were We Thinking is perhaps a third draft, a meta-analysis of the deep dives from Trump’s advisers and adversaries, the activists, philosophers, and sociologists of our era, and everyone else who thinks they have a way to explain this period in American history. GEN caught up with Lozada ahead of the book’s October 6 publication to talk about what he found.

GEN: Some of the books you cover, like Fire and Fury, are specifically about Trump, and others, like Hillbilly Elegy, less so. What is it that makes a book a Trump era book?

Carlos Lozada: There are the obvious books that are either about Donald Trump’s life, his career, or his time in the White House. A lot of those are very interesting, sold very well, and I certainly read a lot of them. But what I tried to do in my book is to read about the major debates that the Trump era in American politics has brought up for all of us. Books about immigration, books about truth in politics and truth in our culture, books about identity. To me, all of these can be Trump books.

Depending on the moment, books that aren’t really even about Trump at all end up getting wrapped up into debates over Trump. Hillbilly Elegy was one of those. J.D. Vance wrote it before Trump was a candidate; it was not a “Trump book,” but it became one. When we look back on this time, we will think of Hillbilly Elegy as a book that is part of this whole conversation about the white working class and where Trump’s support came from.

You write, “One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads… has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency.” Why do you think that is?