Donald Trump

Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power by Michael Kranish & Marc Fisher

Tier 5

History is the study of the past. This book was released six days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It does not cover any of his presidency, and he doesn’t even have the time to reflect on his campaign. Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher are accomplished and skilled reporters, but this book is a poor entry in the long line of presidential biographies.

What this book does provide is a good background into Trump’s early years. It details his relationship with his father, who clearly shaped him in many ways. It shows how the two men were similar and how they differed. This section of the book is informative and exciting, but even it feels lacking.

And that is the best section of this book.

Once it moved into the 1980s, when Trump became a household name and basked in his fame, they broke up his projects by chapter. This is not an approach I enjoy. One of the things I love about a good biography is how it weaves the moments of an individual’s life into a unified tapestry. It can show humanity in moments of failure and demonstrate to the reader how those failures shaped their later successes. When I think of Chernow’s wonderful book on Grant, it’s that narrative arc that stands out. Grant was not one thing. He failed as much as he succeeded, but he never would’ve reached the heights he achieved without those early failures.  This is not to say that there isn’t room in a biography to dive deeply into a topic. I enjoy that. But this section of the book is far too disjointed, and, honestly, they add little to the story that I did not already know.

I think there lies one of the primary issues with a biography of Donald Trump. We know him too well. We’ve all formed an opinion on him, and no biography is going to sway that. He is the single most divisive public figure of my lifetime. I have never met a person who is indifferent to him. The result of his extreme polarity is that there are only two types of books on Trump. One is hagiographic. I could not stomach reading one of those. The other is a hit piece. And, while there were moments that I was nodding my head along with the authors’ evident hatred of Trump, the act of reading this kind of book is masturbatory at best.

I find much of the coverage around Trump to be this way. People seek out the media that confirms their opinions on the man and his administration. This is one of the defining aspects of his still unfinished legacy. The nation has always been bifurcated, and it's wrong to act as if party-driven media is a new thing, but the tenure has undoubtedly been ramped up in the past decade or so. And Trump is the result, not the cause, of that bifurcation.

This book spends a laughably short amount of time discussing Trump’s election. I don’t necessarily blame the authors for that. As I mentioned, it was released in the days following his inauguration, and it was clear they wanted something on the shelves for the angry and the scared to devour. The 2016 election is likely to go down as a seminal moment in American history, and I would love a good, well-researched, somewhat unbiased account of it, but I’ll have to wait. The same is true of any version of Trump and his presidency.

I have my opinion of Trump, and I’m sure you have yours. The truth is we cannot fully judge a presidency until we have decades of distance. I felt this way with the Obama books I read, and Trump is obviously a more recent president than him. But unlike Obama—who appropriate reflections of his strengths and weaknesses have already begun—I worry that we will never have a distanced accounting of the Trump presidency. I think the passion that he inspires (in both directions) makes him an almost impossible person to reflect on. What writer who lived through his tumultuous four years could give an honest accounting of his administration?

But, likely, I am being hyperbolic. People always believe they live in singular times. They think that what is happening to them has never happened before. They believe their great leaders are the greatest and their bad leaders are the worst. They believe that after them, nothing will ever be the same.

If I have learned one thing in this project, it is that it’s all happened before. Not exactly, and we shouldn’t downplay the dangers of our current age, but we’re not alone.

I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you want to get your fix of anti-Trump writing. If that is your wish, this is a good read. At least, it is for part of it. Going further, I wouldn’t recommend reading any Trump books right now. I don’t think I’ll read another one for at least ten years, likely longer. I hope one day there’s an exhaustive text on him that meets the standard of some of the great biographies I’ve read in this project. For better or worse, Trump is an important figure in American history, and I’d like to have an accurate accounting of his life and administration.