What Were We Thinking
A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this “crisp, engaging, and very smart” (The New York Times Book Review) work, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic digs into books of the Trump era and finds that our response to this presidency often reflects the same polarization, contradictions, and resentments that made it possible.
It is an irony of our age that a man who rarely reads has unleashed an onslaught of books about his tenure and his time. Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on identity, gender, and migration. Memoirs on race and protest. Revelations of White House mayhem. Warnings over the future of conservatism, progressivism, and of American democracy itself.
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read just about all of them. In What Were We Thinking, he draws on some 150 recent volumes to explore how we understand ourselves in the Trump era. Lozada’s characters are not the president, his advisers, or his antagonists but the political and cultural ideas at play—and at stake—in America.
Just as Trump’s election upended the country’s political establishment, it shocked its intellectual class. Though some of the books of the Trump era skillfully illuminate the challenges and transformations the nation faces, too many works are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. Lozada offers a provocative argument: Whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, true believers or harsh critics, the books of Trump’s America are vulnerable to the same failures of imagination that gave us this presidency in the first place.
In What Were We Thinking, Lozada’s selections range from bestselling titles to little-known works, from thoroughly reported accounts of the administration to partisan polemics, from meditations on the fate of truth to memoirs about enduring—or enabling—the Trump presidency. He also identifies books that challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points, the books that best help us make sense of this era.
The result is an “elegant yet lacerating” (The Guardian) intellectual history of our time, a work that transcends daily headlines to discern how we got here and how we thought here. What Were We Thinking will help today’s readers understand America, and will help tomorrow’s readers look back and understand us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post book critic Lozada debuts with an incisive survey of the 150 nonfiction books he's read "on the Trump era." Noting the irony "that a man who rarely reads... has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency," Lozada breaks down the "Trump canon" into insightful categories and concludes each chapter with a list of works discussed. "Chaos chronicles" such as Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury compete for the most "explosive, chyron-ready anecdotes," Lozada writes, yet often confirm what readers already know. Titles in the "heartlandia" genre (The Forgotten; Hillbilly Elegy) typically reveal more about the authors' own "prisms and biases" than they do about the struggles of the white working class. And while "Never Trump" conservatives (Jeff Flake, Rick Wilson) push for a rethink of the Republican Party's methods and priorities, they "fail to reckon with their own complicity in Trump's rise." Lozada concludes with a list of 12 books he's found most helpful in "mak sense of this time," including We're Still Here by Jennifer Silva, America for Americans by Erika Lee, and The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin. Readers will appreciate this useful guide to a bookshelf that grows more crowded by the minute.
Customer Reviews
Dissecting the Irrational
“We knew well what Trump was before we let him in. Nearly four years into his presidency, all of us are implicated in the costs of his assault on [everything].” This statement appears about halfway in and perfectly distills the premise of the book. Carlos Lozada read all of the key Trump Era books and smartly sums up that Trump was just the living and walking mouthpiece of issues and problem ideologies that were there before him.
No one issue or perspective can define the Trump voter or the Trumpist movement. It’s one big smelly cesspool of racism, classicism, greed, isolationism, and every other fear driven justification to vote for a demagogue. So, it would seem that reading the countless accounts of analysis on what defined 2016 to 2020 would be wasted time. Unless you wanted to know how to prevent that period from repeating. Unless history still matters to you and an idealized vision of what America could be.
The roadmap that Lozano provides to the most worthwhile books about the Trump era is probably the best part of this book. A way finder through the madness and cliff notes on the collective ideas grouped by key topics. The best of them highlight how Trump was a means to an end which allowed supporters and enablers to bend the truth and reality as necessary. To an extent, we are all guilty of committing the thought crimes that led to fertilizing of the ground ahead of his election.
Another waste of $$$
Tell me what was I thinking buying this??? Should be in the comedy section, there is absolutely nothing “intellectual” in this book.