"Never Again Trump" by Michael Barron
Like the rest of America, I spent most of the first week of November on news sites looking at interactive maps of the country, its states piebald in alternating blues and reds. Refreshing the New York Times demonstrated the asymptotic math of counting votes, forever approaching enough in a candidate’s favor. I fell into a habit of watching CNN’s John King pinch and analyze a chart. An SNL skit later featured a parody of him holding up hands without fingers.
It was not through any media, however, that I heard that the election had been called in Biden’s favor. That Saturday, five days after the election, news arrived by car horn, by whoops and claps and clacking pots. Not since the Front Line Worker cheers that erupted every evening this past spring had Brooklyn been so cacophonous with applause.
That day, November 7th, was also my birthday. I had already planned a picnic in Fort Greene, and by late afternoon it turned into a block party. Spike Lee was there too—his jubilation caught on film—jumping up and down as he tried to uncork a champagne bottle, its pop setting off a raucous ovation.
My birthday has always been tied to election week, sometimes falling a day before or after, or even on Election Day itself. At no time was this more significant than when I turned eighteen in 2000, still a high school senior, and thus joining the youngest voters in the notorious Gore v. Bush race. Back then I politically aligned with my (at the time) conservative military family. My father was a military aide to Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House. I voted for Bush.
That regrettable vote would, in college, prompt my search for a political identity independent from that of my parents. I came to discover democratic socialism and have aligned with it since. More surprising was my parents’ own migration from the Republican Party. They made their tentative steps toward centrist democrats, first in 2016, and then firmly in 2020. Like a number of other eventual Biden voters, they had become people who could no longer identify with what the Republican Party had become: the Trump party.
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In 2017, I attended Trump’s inauguration after convincing a British media company to let me cover it. While friends went to protest marches later smoke-bombed by cops, a photographer and I ventured into John Marshall Park, which abuts Pennsylvania Ave, and where the presidential motorcade first comes into public view.
I arrived to find someone waving a flag with the Iron Cross, a white supremacist symbol, on one end of the park; on the other, there was a man on a makeshift stage demanding a return to martial law and public hangings. In the middle, two protesters holding anti-Trump signs had become surrounded by hecklers. They seemed on the verge of pouncing when the motorcade came rolling right along and everyone watched to catch a glimpse of Trump waving his tiny hand from inside a limo.
The four years that have followed that moment have been unrelentingly bleak. Though Biden’s victory brings much-needed hope for this country’s future, crawling out of the mudslide of bad policy and malevolence brought upon us by the Trump administration won’t be easy. One need only to note Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud, the support of this bogus claim by rank-and-file Republicans, and the millions of people who believe the election was stolen, to see that it’s a long way out of the muck.
Of course, the muck sells. Like any figure of controversy, Trump supports an entire industry, not least of all books about him. Carlos Lozada, the non-fiction critic for the Washington Post, not only read 150 of them, but wrote a book about doing so. What Were We Thinking is a good title for a book I don’t plan to read in any great depth, but what caught my eye is that Lozada categorized each chapter by the kinds of books that get written about Trump. These include, but are not limited to, analyses of his presidency, of his rise to power, of the people who voted for him, of the people who were gutted by his election, of the controversies surrounding him, of the country he has left in his wake, etc.
In regard to books about Trump’s Russian connections, I must admit active participation. A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia. There was a proposal: a summary of proposed chapters covering Trump’s alleged multiple collusions with Russian or Russian-adjacent business people. The manuscript read like a dossier of these figures. My job was to find a narrative thread that connected all of them, to make smoke rise from an un-fired gun.
Assembling it was a messy affair. It wasn’t that Trump, or the people close to him, didn’t have dealings with shady Russian characters during his presidential campaign (the infamous Trump Tower meeting and social media hacking among them), but rather that most of the author’s findings had already been reported (the Trump-media industry is cobbled out of second-hand material). We found something fresher and more foundational in providing historical context to Russia’s underworld and oligarchy, which Trump has long flirted with in hopes of erecting a tower in Moscow, hopes that remain unrealized.
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What’s next? Trump in court? Trump in jail? Trump 2024? The possibilities aren’t just being speculated, they are already being reported. Page Six recently reported that Trump could net a whopping $100 million dollars for his presidential memoir. When asked by the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner whether she would be committed to publishing his future books, Dana Canedy, senior VP at Simon & Schuster, where Trump’s books have previously found a home, stated:
I think that would be not only appropriate but important… Every President who leaves office writes their memoirs, their personal histories, what have you. And it becomes part of American history. And I don’t see that that’s going to be any different with a Trump book.
There is a Simpsons spoof about the memoir of another single-term president, George H.W. Bush. We see H.W. at his typewriter, mouthing the final line: “Since I achieved all my goals as president in one term, there was no need for a second.” That about sums up how I imagine Trump to conclude his own memoir. What I can’t imagine is its readership.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
