A Very Stable Genius? No, a narcissist and a racist – a portrait of Trump from a vast library of books
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 singleword 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.
The unknown author, an administration official, quotes the president: “We get these women coming in with like seven children … They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”
A recurring motif is Trump’s lack of empathy. In Rage, Woodward reflects on his own white privilege and asks if Trump understands the anger and pain of Black Americans. The president scoffs: “No. You really drank the KoolAid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
Lies
Thanks to the factcheckers at the Post, we know Trump has lied more than 20,000 times in office. Helpfully, those factcheckers compiled a book, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, although as it came out in June it’s already a few thousand fibs out of date.
Infamously, the whole presidency started out with a lie, characteristically Trumpian in being so provably a whopper: that the crowd for his inauguration was bigger than for Barack Obama. It is not enough for Trump to lie – others must lie for him. This one was delivered by Sean Spicer.
In his masochistically fawning memoir, The Briefing, the former press secretary admits knowing he “didn’t have hard and fast stats” to hand. On day one, his credibility was gone. In Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims, a communications aide, laments a “senseless, unrecoverable act of self-sabotage”. As the former Republican strategist Rick Wilson titled his first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.
In his memoir, A Higher Loyalty, James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired, showed how Trump rules like a mob boss, which means “lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth”. Trump duly lied about why he fired Comey, pitching himself headfirst into the Russia inquiry and on towards impeachment.
And yet Trump lies like something even more terrifying than a mob boss. Parents will concur with Daniel Drezner’s observation, in The Toddler in Chief, that whenever Trump is found out in a lie – climate change is a hoax; voter fraud is rampant; I didn’t sleep with then pay off that porn star – he doubles down, lies about the lie, thus creating a horrendous feedback loop breakable only by ice cream and screen time.
Family
The books depict a president who relishes discord, watching staff fight likes rats in a sack. But his family – especially his daughter Ivanka – remain untouchable.
The first Trump blockbuster was Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Among its revelations was that the president argued with the Secret Service over whether he could have a lock on his bedroom, “the first time since the Kennedy White House a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”.
Wolff also told how Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, struck a deal about which would run for president one day: “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
In Fear, Woodward chronicles a furious argument between Ivanka and Trump’s then chief strategist. “‘You’re a goddam staffer!’ [Steve] Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka. ‘You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!’
“‘I’m not a staffer!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter’ – she really used the title – ‘and I’m never going to be a staffer!’”
Omarosa was a witness to the relationship between Trump and Ivanka. She writes in Unhinged: “For as long as I’d known Trump, I’d observed the way he hugs, touches, and kisses Ivanka; the way she calls him Daddy. In my opinion, based on my observations, their relationship goes up to the line of appropriate father/daughter behavior and jumps right over it.”
Other children fare even less well. Michael Cohen’sDisloyal claims Trump repeatedly told the author his eldest son, Don Jr, has the “worst fucking judgment” of anyone he had ever met. When Trump sees a photo of his sons hunting big game in Africa, he roars at Don Jr: “You think you’re a fucking big man? Get the fuck out of my office.” For what it’s worth, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s Melania & Mesays the first lady influenced Trump against his sons’ hunting exploits.
Although Ivanka is the favorite, Cohen writes, “all three kids were starved for their father’s love”. Some of the most revealing insights, however, come from a time long before Trump entered politics, before his children were born or when they were still young. In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump characterizes the president’s father Fred as a sociopathic bully who encouraged him to be a “killer”. Chillingly, she suggests that in 2016, voters chose “to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”.
Narcissism
The New York Times’ enormous scoop on Trump’s taxes will no doubt form the heart of a bestselling book. In the meantime, its revelations have prompted familiar incredulity and hilarity. Take the news, for example that Trump claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for “hairstyling for television”.
Even Ivanka, Wolff writes in Fire and Fury, “made fun of [her father’s] comb-over”, describing “the mechanics behind it: an absolutely clean pate – a contained island after scalp reduction surgery – surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”
A Higher Loyalty also passes comment on Trump’s appearance. “His face appeared slightly orange,” Comey writes, “with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles.” Comey also says he checked the size of Trump’s hands – about which the president is known to be very sensitive – and found them to be “smaller than mine … but not unusually so”.
More than 20 women say Trump used his hands to sexually assault them. In What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, the Washington Post literary critic Carlos Lozada discusses a telling passage in one of Trump’s own ghost-written books, The Art of the Comeback.
Trump claims to have been groped and propositioned himself, by “a lady of great social pedigree and wealth”, advances he says he turned down politely. Lozada isn’t buying.
“As with so many things Trump says and does,” he writes, “the old story has an air of projection about it … I don’t harass women, he is saying – look, they harass me!”
Strongmen
Why does Trump pander to authoritarians – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Mohammed bin Salman – but give the cold shoulder to allies? The literature offers some clues.
Woodward’s Rage includes “love letters” between Trump and Kim. The North Korean dictator describes meeting Trump as a “precious memory” that demonstrates how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force”. Trump brags that Kim “tells me everything”, including a vivid account of having his uncle killed.
The president also tells the celebrated reporter: “I get along very well with [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says, ‘What a horrible guy.’ But, you know, for me it works out good.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You’ll explain that to me someday, OK? But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
In The Room Where It Happened, the former national security adviser John Bolton recalls that Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favors” to dictators. Bolton alleges Trump pleaded with Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected by buying more American agricultural products, and even encouraged the Chinese leader to continue to build concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs.
Bolton’s account of Trump’s approach to foreign diplomacy is not reassuring. “It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine,” he writes.
Ignorance
In his new memoir, Battlegrounds, the former national security adviser HR McMaster critiques Trump on policy, but does not dish on the president’s resistance to being briefed, or even reading anything at all. Others, among them Bolton and the classics-quoting Anonymous of A Warning, are quite happy to do so.
At a meeting at the Pentagon in
July 2017 which crops up in many Trump books, the defense secretary, James Mattis, and secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, tried to coach the president on the need for alliances and traditional statecraft. As A Very Stable Genius shows in excruciating detail, the meeting did not go well, leading to Tillerson offering perhaps the most lasting tribute to Trump by a member of his own cabinet.
The president, the secretary of state said, was “a fucking moron”.
In Trump’s mind he is beyond advice, the smartest guy in the room, an idea encouraged by toadies and terrified advisers alike, even if Trump famously mispronounced Bannon’s description of his appeal and said, according to Woodward: “That’s what I am, a popularist.”
The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie wrote a particularly selfserving book, Let Me Finish, about how Trump did not let him finish work on the transition. But reporter Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk contains the most telling quote from Trump to his sidekick-cum-tackle bag: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.” It turned out they couldn’t.
Trump’s symbiotic relationship with television, and the channel he prefers to any adviser, Fox News, is the subject of Audience of One by James Poniewozik. According to the New York Times TV critic, Trump’s addiction to TV and Twitter meant that even before he won the presidency, he “had essentially become a cable news channel in human form, loud, short of attention span, addicted to conflict … a meshing of man and machine”.