Books for Thinking About President Donald Trump in Context

Where to Start? Four books worth reading on their own, as offering perspectives on Trump and Trumpism and what they might become…

Karl Marx (1852): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://amzn.to/2Fk3E0E
Ronald Syme (1939): The Roman Revolution http://amzn.to/2BuQSKA
Thomas Piketty (2013): Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://amzn.to/2DCIBGp
Michael Wolff (2018): Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House http://amzn.to/2GlFxQr

Marx: 18th Brumaire

Karl Marx (1852): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://amzn.to/2Fk3E0E
Marx in transition from German Idealist philosopher to French-style political activist to British political economist…
Expects “normal” politics:
- Overthrow of entrenched hierarchies that hold back prosperity in the interests of a parasitic few…
- Growing democracy…
- Growing equality…
- Growing prosperity…
- And it all goes horribly wrong...
Napoleon I’s nephew wins election to the presidency of the French 2nd Republic...
Establishes himself as the Emperor Napoleon III…
Marx tries to understand how things went wrong...
Does not really succeed, but gives it a good try…

Syme: Roman Revolution

Ronald Syme (1939): The Roman Revolution http://amzn.to/2BuQSKA
Extremely cranky, contrarian, and cynical: unwilling to take anything that smacks in any way of government propaganda or obsequious flattery at face value…
Writing a history of the rise of the Roman Empire—of Augustus’s Principate—in Italy between World Wars I & II…
Writes the story of Augustus-as-if-he-had-been-Mussolini:
- Like in Jurassic Park: filling in the missing parts of dinosaur DNA with that of other organisms…
- How a republic—a broken republic, but still a republic—surrenders itself to one man, and those who please him…

Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty (2013): Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://amzn.to/2DCIBGp
The “normal” state of an advanced market economy is not the social democracy we got used to between Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Reagan Revolution…
The normal state has the rich using their ability to buy speech in the public sphere in order to distract attention from the concentration of income…
The normal state has the rich working the lobbying machine and the revolving door to keep the average rate of profit at 5%/year…
If you are more than so rich, it is very difficult to spend 5% of your wealth every year…
- And the rate of economic growth is something less than 3%/year…
- All this has consequences…

Wolff: Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff (2018): Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House http://amzn.to/2GlFxQr
Whatever you heard? That seemed unbelievable? It probably is true.
Wolff’s working title: “The Great Transition: The First 100 Days of the Trump Administration”
- JMM: “sycophancy journalism under the guise of access journalism… buttering up the highest level Trump insiders… publicly lambasting reporters… pos[ing] as the only reporter who got the true nature of Trump’s greatness—not just publicly, but far more importantly in his private presentation and pitch. If the Trumpers were aggrieved with the ‘fake news’ ‘lying’ press, here was a prestige journalist who got it and could help….
- “Trump got the biographer he deserved. Wolff is shamelessly manipulative and hasn’t the slightest hesitation about deceiving his sources to ‘get the story’, as he puts it…

Catch Our Breath…

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Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong