Michael Wolff's new book about Donald Trump is called Landslide. The new Trump book by Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal is called "Frankly, We Did Win This Election." A Trump book that will be published next week, by Carol Loennig and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, is titled I Alone Can Fix It.
Based on the excerpts we've read, these books aren't particularly flattering to Trump. The subtitles of the books make clear that the titles are ironic. (The subtitle of "Frankly, We Did Win This Election" is The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. Wolff's subtitle is The Final Days of the Trump Presidency; Loennig and Rucker's is Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.)
But the fact that so many of these books are titled after Trump boasts suggests that the boasts got into the writers' heads and became the baseline for their assessment of Trump. It's as if we have to start any discussion of Trump by first refuting the proposition that he is, say, a very stable genius (the title of Loennig and Rucker's previous Trump book).
You probably think I'm reading too much into this -- and, of course, not every Trump book has a title based on a boast. (The new Trump book by The Washington Post's Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta is fociused on the coronavirus pandemic and is called Nightmare Scenario.)
Trump was an awful president and is an awful person, a man with no redeeeming features. When we talk about him we should start there, not with his chest-thumping egomania, which is key to his brand, and which too much of the country regards as not hyperbolic at all.
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