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OPINION

Do the books on Trump qualify as exposé?
As of this writing, the United States is currently in the final weeks of its most partisan and controversial presidential election in 150 years, in which the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, has been forced to do most of his campaigning online or in carefully-masked and managed events, and his rival, Republican President Donald Trump, has resumed holding crowded indoor campaign rallies despite the warnings of his own government that such gatherings are potentially deadly super-spreader events.
When a political contest is therefore clearly not so much a battle of ideologies as a clash of realities—Biden is campaigning in a US racked by plague and resulting economic depression, Trump is campaigning in a US that’s largely put the virus behind it—there can be no neutral corners. This is reflected in the giant glut of books flooding the election season. Two of the best-selling and most-discussed of those books are Rage , an inside account of the Trump White House by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward, and Too Much and Never Enough , an inside account of the Trump family by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump (both are published by Simon & Schuster, which also published former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s bestselling The Room Where It Happened ).
Woodward’s style will be familiar to readers of his previous Trump-centred bestseller, Fear , but the actual contents of Rage will be familiar for an entirely more recent reason: Woodward and his publisher leaked audio portions of the interviews Trump gave to Woodward back in March, interviews in which Trump can be heard confessing that he knew exactly how deadly COVID-19 was and deliberately chose to lie about it to the American people.
Likewise Too Much and Never Enough , Mary Trump’s much-debated exposé of the Trump family’s sordid psychological history, in which her grandfather Fred Trump mercilessly harassed and abused her father Fred Jr while at the same time ruthlessly creating the family atmosphere that would turn his younger son Donald into the kind of twisted sociopathic monster Mary Trump has subsequently been describing on every cable news show, political fundraiser, and podcast that will have her. Mary Trump, too, has occasionally been criticised for the timing of her book by people who naturally wonder why she didn’t warn the American people about Donald Trump, say, back in 2015 when many of them were first making up their minds about whether or not to vote for him.
Both Woodward and Mary Trump have offered defenses. Woodward has said he doubts his revelations would have made any difference back in March. Trump has said it was only when her uncle’s administration started putting immigrant children into chain-link cages on the southern border that she was prompted to write a tell-all.
This kind of snivelling has been a hallmark of Trump’s first term. At every turn, the responsible people, the “adults in the room,” have seen Trump’s narcissistic imbecility at close range, heard him talking about using nuclear weapons against hurricanes or admitting on national television that he’s perfectly open to receiving foreign interference in US elections, and they said nothing publicly, did nothing publicly, and meekly waited to be fired by tweet. People like former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former National Security Advisor HR McMaster, General James Mattis, and even Bolton, who announced that he would defy a Congressional subpoena in order to safeguard his book’s payday—all of them held their tongue rather than sound an alarm when it might have done some good.
The law of the 2020 election holds for books like Bob Woodward’s or Mary Trump’s, regardless of the outcome at the polls: there are no innocent bystanders. Both of these authors stayed silent on what they knew until it could most benefit them financially, regardless of the harm it did to the country. They are not exposés of Donald Trump; in other words—they are Donald Trump.
Steve Donoghue is a book critic whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe , the Wall Street Journal , the Christian Science Monitor , the Washington Post , and the National .
PHOTO DESIGN: Kazi Akib Bin Asad
Steve Donoghue