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
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…
