Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving. His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear, Rage, Unhinged and Fire and Fury. Together, they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president.
Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees. Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters, whether highbrow (Bob Woodward) or lowbrow (Michael Wolff). One is by a member of Trump’s own family: Mary Trump who put her estranged uncle in the psychiatrist’s chair.
To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character, personality and mental state.
Here are six categories to guide you through the canon:
Sex and race
“Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” was the bold prediction of Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on The Apprentice, on PBS Frontline in 2016. Fired from the White House the following year, she turned on Trump in a book that proved single-word titles are deadly: Unhinged.
“It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist,” Manigault Newman writes. “Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”
This year’s Republican convention devoted a segment to working mothers at the White House, seeking to cast Trump as an improbable feminist. The literature tells a different story. A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, reports the president complained that Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security secretary, did not “look the part”, and that he “abused”, “harassed” and “pestered” her over immigration policy.
The demonization of immigrants is a constant theme. A Warning, by Anonymous, alleges Trump proposed classifying all undocumented migrants as “enemy combatants”, the same status as captured members of al-Qaida, which would thus have dispatched them to Guantánamo Bay.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
