OPINION

Opinion/The Observer: Throw the book at him

Ron McAllister
Ron McAllister

I stopped counting the number of books written about the current U.S. president when it passed 100 — and I only counted books published since 2019. New books are still hitting the shelves at the rate of about one a week. The president may not be a reader himself, but he does seem to have stimulated lots of reading by others.

I have not waded through many of the books myself but I have sampled the genre and read numerous summaries and published reviews. And even though the main character of these 100+ books is the most fascinating person in the world to the president, we are pretty much assured that he hasn’t read them either, though he did confess to reading a recent one which he found “boring.”

The books expose the fault lines of the deep and widening divisions within the country. They fall into two main stacks. The first stack — the larger of the two — contains books that analyze, criticize and lay bare the president’s business record, politics, governance style, private life and public persona.

Prominent among these are books by John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Jeffrey Toobin, Mary Trump, and Bob Woodward (twice). Taken together they paint a picture of a man who has built his career on corruption, ignorance, bad decisions and self-aggrandizement. To many Stack One authors, the president is a con man, a white collar criminal and a threat to our democracy and our world. Among these, my award for best title goes to former Republican strategist Rick Wilson: “Everything Trump Touches Dies.”

In contrast, the president’s apologists paint a picture of a man with drive, principle, compassion and achievements. Lou Dobbs, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ralph Reed (among others) describe a very different person from the one scrutinized by the first group of authors.

Stack Two authors argue that the president’s first term has been filled with noteworthy successes and with the advancement of his righteous agenda. Here the best title goes to Mark Taylor: “The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story of the Man Who Saw Tomorrow ... and What He Says Is Coming Next.”

A surprising number of these books deal with God, religion, faith communities and why Christians should support the president’s reelection. Is he destroying America or bringing about a new age? Is he the anti-Christ or the Messiah? Is it the end of the world as we know it or is it the Second Coming?

This line of thought led me to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. “The Second Coming" is a perfect poem for the current moment, partly because Yeats wrote it in 1919. The Spanish flu pandemic was still raging. A terrible war had just ended. The world was transforming — economically, socially, politically. Yeats’ first stanza describes his crumbling and chaotic world:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The second stanza is an apocalyptic vision of revolution and rebirth.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand ….

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So, what is it? Is the president the greatest threat to the nation since the Civil War or is he our greatest living patriot? The books that mock him have one answer. The books that valorize him have another.

Much as I love books and rely on them to shape my viewpoint, I know I must form the answers to these questions with my own mind and in my own heart. At this point, nothing useful is going to come from somebody else. Every voter must decide for herself/himself.

We’ve all watched the man. We have listened to him. We have seen the people he surrounds himself with. We know where he stands on the major issues from climate change to international trade, from immigration to domestic terrorism, from inequality to COVID-19.

I believe I understand what kind of man he is and have concluded that Donald John Trump has no business being president of this great country. To reelect him will be to imperil the nation. As you prepare to vote, don’t rely on what others have written about him — including op-ed pieces like this one.

Examine your own heart … then throw the book at him.

Ron McAllister is a sociologist and writer who lives in York.