Midway across the Trumpian solar system were the books by pro-Trump intellectuals. Ever careful not to acknowledge their own complicity in having created him, they constantly tried to retrofit their ideology onto a quickly moving downwardly aimed guided missile that jerked from self-aggrandizement to self-enrichment as it sputtered its way towards a new lower bound in American politics.
Then, in the orbit furthest out, somewhere in the neighborhood of Pluto, were books by the "never Trump conservatives," who saw Trump as the death of their movement and their party, even as they too admitted having enabled some of his worst tendencies.
The two things these rarely intersecting orbits had in common were: dishonesty about the meaning of Trump to America, and remaining in denial about what that dishonesty says about us and our ultra fragile democracy.
Indeed, how did we allow such a weak vessel overpower and divide us enough to almost destroy democracy as we know it? The author has an answer that will surprise you. Pulitzer Prize wining books usually do.
He takes the example of Ed Harry, as a case in point. Ed is a salt of the earth Pennsylvania Air Force veteran.
Ed is depicted in one book as mild-mannered as Clark Kent, and in another as a scorched-earth Trump lunatic.
Ed Harry didn't change from book to book, the authors' attempt to explain him as a political phenomenon did. Which Harry is the real one?
Old Harry became a "literary and sociological device" advancing the political interpretations of the writers and intellectuals suddenly fixated on the working class white demographic.
The theme being framed is similar to that of many others, including Anton's: It is, retrofitting white tribalism to a simpler, whiter more separate but equal time.
Is this zeitgeist, captured in a Silver Diner and pin-pointed by writers as the bull's eye of the Trumpian revolution, the real Ed Harry? Or just a sociological construct a figmentation of overactive literary minds? That is the question Mr. Lozada poses and answers here. Five stars
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