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Your guide to what the 2024 US elections mean for Washington and the world
The Confidential Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Collapse of America
by Maggie Haberman
During the Trump presidency, The New York Times’ Haberman established herself as Trump’s chief observer — managing to report bluntly on the president, while maintaining a relationship with him. Here she delivers the definitive biography of Trump and his improbable rise from real estate mogul and television personality to president. His deep understanding of New York in the 1970s and 1980s helps explain what motivates Trump.
No Trade is Free: Change Course, Confront China, and Help American Workers
by Robert Lighthizer
Lighthizer served as U.S. trade representative during Donald Trump’s first term, when the United States imposed tariffs on China, effectively ending the post-1945 geoeconomic order. This position hawkishness toward Beijing has continued under Joe Biden and is now expected to intensify during Trump’s second term, during which Lighthizer is widely seen as a possible future Treasury secretary. His book, published in 2023, seeks to explain the logic behind this political position, arguing that America’s original greatness was “built behind a wall of protection and often with government money.” In her FT Review Rana Foroohar noted that while many will disagree with the economic aspects of his arguments about the need to rebalance the U.S. trade deficit, “his arguments about the need for a large, diversified economy like the United States to produce and to consume in order to stay strong resonate. at a time when the risks of financialization and the fragility of global supply chains are all too evident.”
Hillbilly Elegy: memory of a family and a culture in crisis
by JD Vance
Vance’s poignant memoir of his childhood in Appalachian poverty struck a chord when it was published in 2016, just months before the presidential election victory that took Donald Trump to the White House. His book revealed an often overlooked world of white America that would become a national electoral force. As Edward Luce wrote in his criticism of the FT“Vance holds up a painfully honest mirror to America that offers no help to left or right. Every group is a victim. Eight years later, Vance, who served as a Marine, attended Yale Law School and was elected to the U.S. Senate, is now vice president-elect. As a candidate, he subtly deviated from the message of Mountain elegy – no longer emphasizing the social pathologies of the culture it describes, instead adopting a Maga message that presents “Hillbillies” as victims of globalism and the liberal elite.
The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021
by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
With Trump now poised to return to the White House, this book is a useful reminder of the “cartoonish chaos” of his first term. Drawing on testimonies from dismayed and disillusioned former Trump officials, two journalists paint a portrait of a dangerous and dysfunctional presidency. The account of Trump’s efforts to cling to power, after losing the 2020 election, is particularly striking and revealing.
Rebellion: How anti-liberalism is tearing America apart – again
by Robert Kagan
A brilliant analyst and polemicist, Kagan argues that the 2024 presidential election could be the last free election held in a unified United States. He justifies this dire warning with a detailed account of the right’s drift toward authoritarianism – and traces the historical roots of Donald Trump’s appeal to a long tradition of illiberal thought in the United States.
Imagining Trump 2.0: Six Scary Political Scenarios for a Second Term
by Célia Belin, Majda Ruge and Jeremy Shapiro
What will a second Trump presidency mean for the world? In a detailed review From the new “Republican foreign policy ecosystem,” analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations imagine six scenarios for American foreign policy. These range from crafting a peace deal in Ukraine to the South China Sea, which could result in the shift of military resources from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region. Other areas of concern include the future of NATO, strategic industrial policy, the Middle East and the emergence of an “illiberal international”. Although the authors note that none of the “scary” scenarios are inevitable, “they all stem from Republican ideas and are at least plausible.” The Europeans, they write, were woefully slow to prepare.
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