Political tell-all books aren't great
Testimonial literature by former White House staff and cabinet members is dominating the political book scene. Almost ubiquitously, the books describe Donald Trump as an asinine, bungling fool who struggles to finish a day without making childish mistakes or vulgarities. Every time Trump fires someone, it’s safe to assume that they will be writing a book about their experience, further milking the liberal outrage that has surrounded the entire Trump presidency.
While renowned journalist Bob Woodward is not a White House staffer, his recently released book “Rage” covers and analyzes multiple on-the-record conversations with Donald Trump and his blundering failures as a governing figure. Notably, Woodward discloses that Trump acknowledged COVID-19’s deadliness as early as February of this year. Trump also conceded – through sporadic, skewed rants – that his alleged miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, may not function as a treatment for COVID-19. But despite these private admissions, his rhetoric in public allowed the pandemic to become politicized, and the nation was strung along into a state of feverish political warfare.
However, controversy arose as Trump’s admissions became public, as the timing of the release of “Rage” was much, much later than the onset and rapid escalation of the pandemic in the U.S. If Woodward was aware of the president’s duplicity back in February, why did he not immediately tell the press? Obviously, telling the public could have caused mass panic, but at least people could have taken action earlier.
The book covers a much wider range of topics and factoids about Trumpian misfires and mistakes than many confessionals, but Woodward still arrives at the same conclusion many politically savvy Americans have touted for a while: Trump isn’t a good leader and he should not be president. Disregarding the lethal tax cuts and rampant xenophobia, this administration’s total lack of centralized and coherent politics shocks Woodward. As a critic from the Daily Maverick put it, “Woodward describes a presidency devoid of anything approaching a moral center.”
The gut reaction to Woodward’s delay is to blame to the market. In other words, some say “Rage” is emblematic of a bigger problem within the publishing industry, where authors or journalists are bound by profit-maximizing release periods. However, critics of Woodward’s decision are split on a shortsighted binary: one side says that Woodward should’ve told the public what he knew; the other side argues that coronavirus’ deadliness was documented well before the book’s release, so there’s no fault on Woodward specifically.
If the information in “Rage” had been published with concern for public health, it would be a quick newspaper article – not a drawn-out book. It’s no coincidence that “Rage” was released right before the height of book sales. However, Woodward doesn’t have the blood of 200,000 people on his hands. The real blame for the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 can be placed on a group of rich and powerful people who maintain their positions in society through electoral and partisan propaganda. Woodward’s books are a product of a new, highly digitized system that relies on creating and consuming books to feed into an illusion of civic engagement. The exposure of Trump’s negligence is necessary, but I struggled to learn anything new from Woodward’s book.
In contemporary history, America has never been a country that favors its citizenry. Testimonials like “Rage” are not written for those who are most vulnerable to changes in policy. Instead, they are for the coastal bourgeois whose only stake is petty emotionality and nostalgia for a “better past.”
The so-called objectivity of information that journalists cling to is inherently divisive, and people are grasping at straws for a singular figure to blame for the pandemic. As such, center-libs like Woodward and other individuals churning books out about Trump’s idiocy are not your friends, no matter how “heroic” they are for putting their stories in print.
