
No writer can explain Trump – and it's fuelling a useless genre
Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf – reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, respectively – have assembled their sources to retell the campaign from start to finish. Their book is structured around a series of what-ifs, moments in which the political wind might have changed course, and consequentially so. What if Ron DeSantis had gathered more support and donations and beaten, or at least threatened, Trump in the primary? What if the Democrats had been beaten in the 2022 midterm elections?
This approach feels remarkably similar to the Democrats' coping strategy during the first Trump administration. With each setback or accusation lodged against Trump – Russiagate, impeachment hearings, his diagnosis with Covid – a pleading wish emerged: 'Is this going to be the thing that finally takes him down?' (It was the same, after his administration, with the sexual assault allegations, the indictments, the felony verdicts…) No controversy seemed to ever stick or even slow him down considerably.
So, in 2024, we get retreads of those familiar what-ifs: Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf dig into the accusation that Trump was hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as rumours about his manoeuvres against rivals such as DeSantis and Nikki Haley; they also explore Biden's indecision about running in 2024, which the Democrats so grossly mishandled.
And yet instead of explaining the backstory of such what-ifs, mostly we only get useless details – ones that seemingly signal just how many people these award-winning journalists have spoken to, rather than providing any real insight. We hear about the time Trump's senior adviser Chris LaCivita mistakenly bought a woman's coat for himself while on the campaign trail, as well as the time when he had his picture taken holding a cigarette, in front of a hotel's 'No Smoking' sign.
Without such necessary context, the book also misses opportunities to clear up misinformation – particularly with the attempt to assassinate Trump in July last year. We might have heard about the security failures that allowed Thomas Crooks – a figure who remains obscure, because the authors dig up no new information about him – to go unobserved that day. All we get is an anecdote about Trump's eccentric request for a head CT, because 'it's like an IQ test. They tell you that your brain is good, so I just want to have that.' (At the least, the book can be quite funny.)
Some of the book's revelations have also been broken already, by other books in this relentless genre. Details about the efforts to hide Biden's decline in health will be wearingly familiar to readers of Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper's Original Sin, which made headlines in May and does a more substantial job of reporting on the election. But there's little new on that cover-up here. The book is cluttered with such filler.
But the skimpiness of context most shows through with the authors' account of October 7. The authors are, impressively, the first to take the war's effect on the election seriously. Gaza was never a marginal issue, as some like to claim – and the authors convincingly argue how it affected the Democrats' ability to recruit grassroots volunteers and to motivate the reluctant youth vote.
But they leave the war as a problem that rocked the campaign rather than analyse responses to it. There's an interesting story to be told here about how the US has gone from harbouring widespread, casual Islamophobia post 9/11, to ambivalence towards what felt like never-ending wars in the Middle East, to increased support, in the past few years, for the Palestinian cause. The prominence of universities, changing perspectives on American imperialism and the exhaustion of a generation of soldiers have all changed attitudes towards Israel-Palestine relations considerably – though you would never know this reading 2024.
That lack of analysis means the subtitle – 'How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America' – vastly over-promises. I'm not sure the authors know. With little analysis and scattered attention, the reading experience of 2024 resembles that of scrolling through headlines, opinion pieces and faulty polling. It wasn't a fun experience last year, and I can't say I would recommend it here either.
★★☆☆☆
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