The best books on the first Trump presidency
These are the essential books for understanding the events and enduring significance of the first administration of Donald J. Trump, the 45th (and soon to be 47th) president of the United States.
In the 9 years since he descended his golden escalator to announce his first presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump has been the subject of literally hundreds (if not thousands) of books. With the benefit of some hindsight, we can see that the many books written about the 45th president of the United States during his time in office fell into a few categories. There were books that took us inside the Trump White House, sparked by Michael Wolff’s fly-on-the-wall tell-all Fire & Fury. There were testimonies from the personal and professional inner circles of President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. And there were the big picture analyses of what it all means—and might end up meaning. Then in the months and years following the events of January 6, 2021, many books set out to assess Trump’s political and cultural influence through the 2020 election and the single term of his successor Joseph R. Biden.
To give readers a path to understanding what this era was all about—and what it might lead to—we've grouped the most essential of these books under the following headings:
- Who is Donald J. Trump?
- The view from inside the Trump White House
- The tumult of 2020
- The present and future of the MAGA movement and Trumpism
Who is Donald J. Trump?
Books on the biography and background of the favorite son of Manhattan real estate mogul Fred Trump. Here you'll find personal testimony from people who at different points in his storied career were invited to Donald J. Trump's inner circle along with studies of the former president's words and actions.
Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth—The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention
Originally published in 1991, shortly after the release of Donald J. Trump's own ghostwritten book Trump: The Art of the Deal, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett's study of the real estate mogul focuses on how he made Trump Tower happen, which was at the time Trump's crowning achievement. Barrett shows Trump operating in a domain he knows well—Manhattan real estate—employing every available tactic to get the deal done. Barrett digs into Trump's biography to paint a portrait of the mogul at the peak of his powers, just before his run of bankruptcies in the 1990s—and more than a decade before his comeback via The Apprentice TV series.
Long regarded as the definitive account of Trump's real estate dealings in Manhattan, the book was updated and re-released in 2016, following Trump's entry into the presidential race. Wayne Barrett died at age 71 on January 19, 2017, the day before Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States of America.
View eBookConfidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman covered the White House throughout the 45th presidency, and in this lengthy 2022 book she reveals insights from hundreds of interviews with Trump's personal and professional associates. The picture that emerges is of a person whose most enduring relationships are transactional, and for whom organizational chaos brings comfort.
View eBook View AudiobookAll in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way
Fred Trump Jr., Donald's brother, didn't take up the family real estate business, opting instead to work as an airline pilot: this earned him the scorn of the family, which was transferred to his children Mary and Fred III when he died in 1981 at the age of 42. Despite Fred Trump Sr.'s establishment of a foundation to pay for the medical expenses of every member of the Trump family, the surviving elder Trumps, led by heir Donald, sought to remove Mary and Fred III as beneficiaries—even when the latter's youngest child was born with a condition requiring lifelong medical care. Authored by Donald Trump's nephew, Fred C. Trump III, this is the story of the black sheep of the Trump family and his legacy.
View eBook View AudiobookRage
When renowned Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward released Fear, his first book on Trump, the president immediately got him on the phone to say that the book would be “bad” on account of Woodward failing to penetrate the defenses of White House staff that kept the president out of the reporter's reach. In Rage, Woodward takes up Trump's offer of access; this book includes lengthy and revealing passages of the president musing on everything from his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the day-to-day experience of Black Americans.
Then in 2022...
The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump
... Woodward took the unprecedented step of releasing the actual audio recordings of his nineteen interviews with the president in this audiobook (and an interview from the 2016 campaign trail) so listeners could hear his words directly.
View AudiobookThe view from inside the Trump White House
People who served in senior positions under President Trump between 2017 and 2021 share their perspectives on how the president ran his administration and developed his governing style.
I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham resigned from her post on January 6, 2021 in response to the president’s response, or lack thereof, to the attempted insurrection. Well-known for restricting access and taking no questions in the nine months she held the top communications job in the White House, Grisham purports here to be telling it like it is about the administration, the Trump family, and the goings on during her tenure. While readers should take all of this with a grain of salt, it’s remarkable testimony nonetheless.
View Audiobook View eBookThe Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021
Journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser team up to present an exhaustive account of the Trump presidency through interviews with foreign officials, legislators, and even the Trump family. Through these accounts they argue that rather than following whimsy and impulse, President Trump was learning day by day how to emulate the foreign dictators he most admired. Meanwhile, those around him drew and redrew their moral boundaries while working to limit the harm caused by a man they considered unfit for office.
View eBook View AudiobookA Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
When it was first published, the main question readers wanted the former FBI director to answer was, “why announce a re-opening of the investigation into candidate Hilary Clinton’s emails just days before the election, and when previous investigations turned up nothing illegal?” With such electoral tactics now absorbed into the fabric of history, Comey’s book offers readers the perspective of a senior government official with years of practice in prosecuting mafia dons and celebrities as he gets to know his new boss, President Trump. Comey’s shock is palpable in his narration of the audiobook.
View Audiobook View eBookThere Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
In 2017, Fiona Hill was appointed deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on President Trump's National Security Council staff, a position she held until mid-2019. In November of that year she testified before a congressional committee during the first impeachment. As an English coal miner's daughter and scholar of contemporary Russia, Hill knows first-hand the danger and political force that can be exerted by forgotten and desperate people. In this book she warns of how a widening economic gap threatens to transform American society into something more like Russia's kleptocratic oligarchy.
View eBook View AudiobookA Warning
Here is a first-hand account by an anonymous source who was billed only as “A Senior Trump Administration Official” at the time of publication—who was later revealed to be Miles Taylor, the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2019.
View Audiobook View eBookThe tumult of 2020
In the final year of his first term, the COVID-19 pandemic presented President Trump with a rare challenge which he would have to meet while campaigning for a second term.
The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright tells the story of COVID-19 in America, covering the early days of the CDC’s troubled test kit development, as well as the researchers whose foundational work allowed for the rapid development of vaccines. This is a broad view of the pandemic that includes the perspectives of scientists and healthcare professionals as well as small business operators and financial prognosticators. Wright shows the impact of the White House’s action and inaction throughout this historic year.
View eBook View AudiobookI Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
From the reporting team that delivered A Very Stable Genius here is a portrait of how the Trump White House handled the COVID pandemic and the protests of summer 2020. From the earliest whispers of something concerning happening Wuhan, to the president’s promise that everyone will be able to attend Easter church services safely, to his desire to squash civil unrest using the US military, to the launch of the campaign to deny the outcome of the 2020 election, Leonnig and Rucker paint a damning portrait of an administration lashing out blindly and those who enabled it.
View eBook View Audiobook“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost
Wall Street Journal reporter Michael C. Bender covers the period spanning Trump’s two impeachments, which includes the 2020 election that resulted in Trump’s loss and the ensuing fight to overturn the results. Bender combines interviews campaign advisors and senior administration officials with memos and emails from the campaign to illustrate how the president and is campaign staff were thinking about the electorate and their competition. And Bender connects the dots from key campaign messaging to the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
View eBook View AudiobookPeril
For his third book on Trump, Bob Woodward enlisted the help of his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa. The pair conducted interviews with more than 200 people and collected confidential documents and emails to give readers a view into the final days of the Trump administration and the first 100 days of the Biden presidency. Readers of Fear and Rage will want to hear this final word from Woodward.
View eBook View AudiobookFind Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election
On January 2, 2021, Trump instructed Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who had publicly attested to the integrity of Georgia's electoral process which indicated that Democrat Joe Biden had won the state in the 2020 presidential election, to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In August of 2023 a grand jury indicted former president Donald J. Trump (and others) for leading a “criminal racketeering enterprise” with the intention of altering the outcome of the 2020 election.
Written by a pair of investigative journalists—each with years of experience in investigating and writing critically on presidents from both parties—this book provides crucial background on how Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis assembled the case, as well as what exactly was going on inside the Trump camp after the election was lost.
View eBook View AudiobookThe present and future of the MAGA movement and Trumpism
Books that seek to explain how Trump and the MAGA movement that twice brought him to power have permanently altered the US political landscape. Together these books explain where that movement came from, how it has sustained and grown, and how it might carry on even after Trump—the oldest person ever to win the presidency—has faded into history.
The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment
Princeton University historian Julian E. Zelizer has published a "first historical assessment" of every president since George W. Bush, assembling writing by scholars working in a variety of fields and from different political leanings to provide a balanced and critical view (in the most serious sense) of these presidents' terms. This book contains some of the first analysis of the Trump presidency written by scholars after he left office in January 2021.
View eBookThe Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
Reporter Jeff Sharlet attempts to untangle the contradictions of contemporary America, in which religious leaders preach materialism and prepare for armed conflict, political movements coalesce not around shared policy interests but to persecute out-groups, and patriotic martyrs are made from participants in an insurrection. For Sharlet, "fascism" isn't the dirty word that most mainstream media outlets treat it as, but rather an accurate label for a political movement with deep American roots.
View eBookThe Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
Historian Timothy Snyder sets out to explain one of the biggest questions looming over geopolitics over the last decade: why is Russia interested in influencing and undermining the electoral processes of western countries? Snyder explains how Russia exercised power in the past, how the end of the Cold War created a new set of incentives and opportunities, and what Russian oligarchs stand to gain from a world destabilized by anti-democratic populism.
View eBook View AudiobookThe Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020
As White House Bureau Chief of the online magazine Politico, Jonathan Lemire has overseen investigations into political figures on both sides of the aisle. Here he analyzes the former president's history of sowing seeds of doubt in the electoral process, documenting how he spoke openly of his intent to disregard election results in speeches given at rallies in 2016 as he campaigned against Hillary Clinton, apparently laying the groundwork for the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Lemire outlines how lying—and responding to lies—has become a central strategic factor in American politics.
View eBook View AudiobookWhy We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell
For decades Tim Miller worked as an operative for the Republican Party, most recently as communications director for Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign. In the past he'd worked on the 1998 Colorado gubernatorial election, served as an Iowa staffer for John McCain in 2008, and national press secretary for Jon Huntsman's 2012 presidential campaign. In this darkly comic book, Miller narrates his own political career, and how the rise of candidate Donald Trump challenged his core beliefs about the party's values—leading him to leave in 2020.
View eBook View AudiobookHolding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department
Geoffrey Berman was honored when in 2018 he was appointed by President Trump to the office US Attorney for the Southern District, a leadership role overseeing federal cases of the highest profile. But he soon learned that the famed independence of this institution was going to be challenged constantly by a White House seeking to prosecute political foes on thin pretenses. At the same time, Berman was being pressured to drop substantial cases that challenged the president or his allies. While Berman held the proverbial line, even butting heads with the US Attorney General, this book can be taken as an informed guess at what the Department of Justice under a second Trump term might bring.
View Audiobook View eBookDefectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America
There was a time that “the Latino vote” was an asset the Democratic party could bank on. But journalist Paula Ramos argues that this is no longer true, and in Defectors she illustrates through first-person accounts a decade-long trend of voters in the Latino community finding their political homes on the right side of the political spectrum. Ramos digs into the motivating factors, including a fear of losing their place in American society so acute that these children and grandchildren of non-white non-English speaking immigrants are now identifying with far-right movements such as white nationalism.
View eBook View AudiobookHow to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism
In this brief book, award-winning journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies how democracies turn anti-democratic through a series of steps, which can be observed playing out in Eastern Europe, South America, and arguably the United States as well.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J. D. Vance once called the former president “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler,” but in preparation for his campaign for a senate seat, hoping for a Trump endorsement, he claimed to have been “wrong about the guy.” When Trump launched his 3rd run at the White House he eventually selected Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate.
Hillbilly Elegy is Vance's personal story of growing up in rural Ohio and it includes the author's analysis of the causes and cures for the kind of poverty he experienced. While readers may argue with his conclusions, it's nonetheless a notable document written by an author who stands “a heartbeat away” from the presidency in Trump's second term.
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