An intellectual history devoted to a dimwit who once struggled to read aloud an extract from the American constitution, stumbling over big words that sounded, he groused, “like a foreign language”, as if the founding fathers spoke the lingo of undocumented aliens? A chronicle of a so-called era that has lasted less than four noisy, nerve-racking years and with luck is about to end? A book that solemnly analyses 150 often trashy books about someone who is not known to have read a single book and hired stooges to write the 20 self-puffing volumes published in his name? Yes, Carlos Lozada’s survey of what he archly calls “Trump Studies” is all of those paradoxical things and it is an utter marvel: sober though frequently very funny, fairer minded than the subject deserves, in the end profoundly troubling even as it looks ahead to America’s recovery from the Trump malaise.
Lozada, a book reviewer for the Washington Post, approaches his binge-reading chore as an exercise in cultural criticism. Trump may be thoughtless but he is also unthinkable: no one could have anticipated such an affront to institutional precedent, legal restraint, civic decorum and human decency. Some of the writers discussed by Lozada therefore seek the ogre’s origins in the abyss that gave birth to Prospero’s Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster and Batman’s Joker. For one sociologist, Trump emerges from a “deep story” – AKA a myth – about the festering grudges of the white working class in the disaffected American heartland; another traumatised commentator describes him as “the confirmation of all past fears, like a recurring childhood nightmare”. Seen this way, Trump is archetypally coughed up from our psychic sludge. Imagine King Kong with a strawberry-blond comb-over or, according to the eyewitness testimony of Stormy Daniels, an abominable snowman whose penis, like a dwarfish toadstool, nestles among “yeti pubes”.
Trump’s electoral promises in 2016 mapped a monster-ridden fantasyland. Hence his obsession with a border wall that was never more than a concept, an excuse for him to brag about his prestige as a builder of skyscrapers that likewise seldom made it into the third dimension. Lozada argues that the wall “began as a gimmick, morphed into a symbol and grew into a war”. But Trump fervently believes in its impenetrability and patient aides had to explain to him that an airborne virus could float over this non-existent barrier. The wall, like everything else in Trump’s worldview, is an extension of him, “big and bombastic”, as Lozada says, and also entirely bogus. However, it usefully cancels another more optimistic national myth: the border, according to the historian Greg Grandin, is “the negation of the frontier” and it enables Trump to shut out migrant hordes by declaring that America “has no more room – we’re full”.
At its most primitive, this kind of conjuring resembles voodoo. The political philosopher Timothy Snyder points out that dictators rely on dictating slogans and catchphrases, repeated until they become “shamanistic incantations”; Trump’s rallies, with their choral shouts from the MAGA-capped mob, are just such a retreat into mindlessness. It’s no surprise that, when outlining his magical prescription for overcoming Covid-19, Trump extolled “herd mentality” rather than “herd immunity”.
Other analysts emphasise Trump’s reliance on slippery fiction, not atavistic myth. Amanda Carpenter, a conservative speechwriter sickened by Trump’s betrayal, contends that “he can’t compete in everyone else’s reality, so he creates his own”, usually in the form of retweeted conspiracy theories about paedophile cabals that have Hillary Clinton as their den mother and set up shop in the basement of pizza restaurants. Compounding lies or replacing them with ever more outrageous whoppers, he follows the logic of television soap operas or reality shows, which adjust the “narrative” as they go along. The MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid, a Trump opponent, views the current election as a programming matter. “America,” she says, “will decide what story it wants to tell about itself”. Should The Trump Show be renewed next season or do we need to “fundamentally change the script”? What we need to fundamentally change, as Lozada demonstrates, is the way we think.
Many of the writers cited by Lozada refer a little tremulously to “the American experiment”, a project that after more than two centuries is still provisional, put at risk by Trump’s bigoted isolationism and his authoritarian thuggery. The need for a reckoning seems particularly urgent to Lozada, who was born in Peru and gained US citizenship just in time for the 2016 election. Trump imperils the American dream of such aspirants, which is why Lozada applauds the philosopher Yuval Levin when he summons voters on to the streets to “enact democracy”.
That rallying cry resonates across the ocean. Embodying a soft, flabby fascism, Trump authorises campaign ads in which he sports a Superman T-shirt and, as the Fox News harpy Jeanine Pirro purrs, exhibits his “Kryptonite-proof aura of invincibility”. It will take more than a few desultory push-ups to make a muscle-bound bruiser out of Boris, but he too equates performance on camera with leadership and mistakes his own narcissism for national pride. What were we (by which I mean some of us) thinking when we sentenced the UK to a future of impoverished insularity, elected a Trump-tongueing charlatan to govern it and then expected him to bother about saving our lives in a pandemic? Or, to further abbreviate the title of Lozada’s brief history, WTF?
• What Were We Thinking by Carlos Lozada is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
