The Washington Book review: Carlos Lozada on Trump and other targets

In downtown Washington, at the house where Abraham Lincoln died, there is a three-storey tower of books. Thirty-four feet tall, 8ft round, it is made of 6,800 volumes about the 16th president. The cover of Carlos Lozada’s new book, a collection of the Pulitzer-winning critic’s work from the past 10 years or so, imagines something rather grander: a whole Washington Monument, all 555ft of it, made of books about DC.

It’s an apt image. The Washington Book, Lozada’s second (after What Were We Thinking?, his “Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era” from 2020) makes for a monumental read about a publishing glut. Books about American politics – pre-Trump, of Trump, not yet post-Trump – simply keep on coming.

Once of the Washington Post, now of the New York Times, Lozada is close to having read the lot – “So you don’t have to”, as he writes, in fact in a review of Donald Trump’s own book-length brags about his business affairs. Memoirs of the Bush administration, of Obama, reportage on Congress and the chaos of Trump, Trump tell-alls, examinations of Joe Biden’s first term or expressions of the existential dread a looming Trump v Biden rematch inspires. All are here. Throw in a meaty closing section on political philosophy that lands a little like Tolstoy’s second epilogue to War and Peace – I swear I read this one right through – and you have an authoritative overview of US political publishing in the last decade.

Many Lozada reviews can be read as primers: the sort of thing, concerning multiple books on similar subjects, he calls a “sampling of the sub-genre”. That line comes from The United Hates of America, an essay on “America’s descent into negative partisanship”, Lozada deftly distilling then advising which books to