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TheEconomistposted a list this month entitled "What to read to understand Donald Trump," a list of five "handy books" from the overflowing library of volumes about the man who, as the editors put it, "remains at the center of American politics." These include the first major book about the Trump White House, Michael Wolff's 2018 "Fire and Fury," and several other classics of this mini-genre: "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America"by John Sides, Michel Tesler and Lynn Vavreck; John Bolton's White House memoir, "The Room Where It Happened" and two accounts of the end of Trump's presidency, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," by Michael C. Bender, and most recently "Thank You for Your Servitude:Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission"by Mark Leibovich.

Taken together, those five books about Trump World capture a great deal of the the political intrigue, scandalous gossip and incoherent policy-making of Trump's two presidential campaigns and his chaotic administration. But I would argue they explain far more about the boss' enablers and his MAGA supporters than they do about Trump himself, his 75 years of life or personal history.

If you want to understand Donald Trump's personality and his interrelated behavior in business, politics, and crime, I would recommend this alternative list: five other books that provide meaningful and serious examinations of Trump's social-psychological makeup and his family, emotional and social development:

From the perspective of criminology, which is my field, what is particularly interesting about these 10 Trump books is that with the exception of those by Bolton, Johnston and Cohen, there are no substantive discussions of Trump's evident corruption, or more than cursory examinations of his criminal career in business, politics and government.

Without an appreciation or a less-than-superficial understanding of the nature of the crimes of the powerful, their habitual patterns of lawlessness and the normalization of these crimes not to mention the systemic resistance to holding powerful perpetrators accountable there is palpable jeopardy that people will not understand that, like other criminals, they are created in relation to their personal social status and their social identification experiences. And furthermore, that the types of crimes committed by the most powerful offenders also result from their personal biographies, and particularly their experiences with crime control and law enforcement (if any).

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Without this level of understanding of the etiological voyage of Donald Trump's criminality and impunity, especially in relation to how he became for four years the most powerful person on earth, most people view him through a lens of cognitive dissonance. They are likely to think of Trump as mentally ill or deeply irrational an innately evil individual or some kind of "born criminal." In that view, whatever else Trump may be, he cannot possibly be a "rational" actor.

I would forcefully argue that's not true. More important, this discourse focused on Trump's perceived insanity, ignorance or immorality works to mitigate, both socially and legally, against more accurate perceptions of his rationality, intentionality and level of culpability.

Consider Lloyd Green's book review for the Guardian of Michael Wolff's third Trump book, "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency." Thisis Wolff's best and "most alarming" book, Green writes, and "that is saying plenty," especially since "Fire and Fury" had both "infuriated a president" and "fueled a publishing boom."

Most people view Trump through a lens of cognitive dissonance: His behavior doesn't make sense, so he's mentally ill or deeply irrational or innately evil. None of that is true.

Wolff's new bookdescribes Trump's "wrath-filled final days in power" exemplified by an interview that Wolff held in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago. Wolff simply allows Trump to rant through a classic "exercise in Trumpian score-settling," without even trying to push back against the cascade of lies. As Wolff admits, he was reluctant to interrupt or ask serious questions because he knew that the interview would have come to an abrupt end had he done so. So Trump simply babbles on nonsensically, to no obvious purpose for either man.

As I have written elsewhere about Wolff's conclusions, he "argues non-persuasively that the Donald was too crazy" to be genuinely guilty of plotting a coup or other criminal behavior. Wolff sees Trump as experiencing "swings of irrationality and mania," and as "someone who has completely departed reality. Trump was incapable of forming specific intent, he argues, based "on the calculated and 'coordinated' misuse of power."

Wolff is not alone. Indeed, the slew of books documenting Trump's final days in office tend to agree on this analysis, along with most cable TV talking heads, with the obvious exception of those on Fox News. The consensus, more or less, is that Trump's loss to "Sleepy" Joe Biden broke him, and that his fantasies, as captured in the title of "Frankly, We Did Win this Election,"are evidence that he was seriously deluded, and not just acting deluded.

Here's a similar take fromDaily Kos on Trump books and election delusions:

Losing the election untethered him from whatever scraps of reality his advisers had still managed to tie him to, and up he went like a lost balloon with anger management issues. By the end he was (is) wallowing in delusion, ordering staff to do impossible and/or illegal things, absolutely convinced that everything was a conspiracy and that anyone who didn't tell him what he wanted to hear was in on it.

Let me disagree firmly, and speak from the clinical evidence. Trump has never been tethered to reality but that does not necessarily mean he believes his own delusions. Similarly, while some of his presidential advisers may have resisted to varying degrees or pushed back against his more unhinged desires, they never had him tied up or taken away in a straitjacket. Some of his own appointed Cabinet members saw his behavior as crazy or unstable from the beginning, and reportedly talked about invoking the 25th Amendment at various times but never did so.

For many years, perhaps for his whole life, Trump has been bipolar, irrational, paranoid, narcissistic and sociopathic. Those qualities do not necessarily mean that he is delusional or legally insane, or that he lacks criminal intent. Trump knows as well as anybody does, and probably better than most, the differences between "fake news" and legitimate information.

But here's what's most important: Trump knows he is guilty of all the crimes he has been accused of. He also knows he has no genuine defenses for any of those likely or potential charges, which is why he so persistently seeks to lie, to obfuscate and to delay. He also understands that his best defense, at least in the court of public opinion, is a forceful offense: Always a master of projection, he charges his legal accusers with sinister and conspiratorial motivations.

Trump feels no empathy whatsoever for any of the Jan. 6 rioters and could not care less about their legal travails, adjudications or punishments. Whether we're talking about insurrectionists or FBI agents, Trump simply uses them instrumentally, as he uses everybody else, to satisfy his bottomless narcissism and egotistical needs. It's the modus operandi of a sociopath without the psychological ability to identify with either of those two groups, or literally any other, including the "base voters" of the Trump cult.

Trump is deceitful, but not deluded or delusional. He's a con man, performance artist and demagogue who understands the value of never publicly abandoning his most absurd narratives.

To state this differently, Trump is deceitful, but not deluded or delusional. Unlike Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Trump does not really believe that he won the 2020 election or that it was rigged against him. While he may post on his social media platform that he "loves" the Jan. 6 rioters, he does not really believe they are "nice" people. Nor does he believe for one second that "evil" FBI agents planted classified documents at his office in Mar-a-Lago, or that GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell a "DEATH WISH," political or otherwise.

He is a con man, performance artist and demagogue who understands the value of never publicly abandoning his narratives, no matter how absurd or blatantly false they are. He was able to suck in Michael Wolff, along with a whole lot of other people, to believe he was so deranged as to be incapable of forming the intent to stage a coup, let alone organizing one.

Really? This was the man who conducted cursory presidential business every day while watching the tube, eating fast food and tweeting 24/7, except when he was playing at least 27 holes of golf a week, or was out on the campaign trail delivering "greatest hits" monologues of unadulterated nonsense to the loyal followers he viewed with obvious contempt.

In the immortal words attributed to P.T. Barnum (among others), "There's a sucker born every minute." And the former president who was impeached twice and got away scot-free knows how to spot them.

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on the current predicament of Donald Trump

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Donald Trump's life of crime: Most books are clueless these five explain him best - Salon

Trump's slippage was stark. In 2014, Trumps RevPAR of $296.39 ranked first among the eight hotels, according to STR data. The hotel ranked second in 2015. But by 2018, it ranked sixth, with a RevPAR of $258.38.

The Trump Chicago, which opened in 2008, may also have lost business to new luxury competitors that opened before and during his presidential campaign, according to Detlefsen. Seven upper-end hotels opened between 2013 and 2016, including the Langham Chicago a block away, the Loews in Streeterville and the Virgin and London House in the Loop.

Thats quite a bit of new supply over a short period of time in the upper upscale and luxury chain scales, Detlefsen wrote in his email. However, (Trumps peer group) ekes out a tiny RevPAR gain in 2016 when Trump RevPAR plummets.

The pandemic pummeled all downtown Chicago hotels, with Trumps losing $9 million in 2020 on an EBITDA basis. RevPAR at Trump fell 68% in 2020, versus a 77% decline for its competitors, according to STR data provided to the assessor.

The documents did not include complete data for 2021 or 2022, so it's difficult to determine whether the recent criminal investigations of the former president have hurt the hotel's results further. Through the first eight months of 2021, RevPAR at the Trump Chicago rose 55% over the same period in 2020, versus a 77% gain for its competitors, according to STR data. The downtown hotel market has rebounded further since then, lifted by a pickup in leisure travel.

Trump has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing and has denied allegations that he committed crimes during and after his presidency. He has said the multiple probes are part of a broader effort by his political enemies to bring him down.

Trump owns a majority of the rooms in the Chicago hotel, part of the Trump International Hotel & Tower at 401 N. Wabash Ave. When he developed the 92-story skyscraper, he had planned to sell off all the rooms as condominiums, but sales stalled as the market plunged during the financial crisis, and he retained ownership of 175.

The Trump Chicago has turned out to be a poor investment for many people who did buy hotel rooms in the building. Investors can buy and sell the rooms as they would with residential condos, and many who have sold have taken big losses. In March 2021, a 21st-floor hotel unit sold for $115,000, down from $248,000 in a prior sale in 2016. At the end of September, a bigger unit on the same floor sold for $415,000, down from the $874,000 that the seller paid Trump for the unit back in 2008.

Setting aside Trump's political controversies, a bigger problem for the Trump brand now may be that it represents something different than it did before he embarked on a political career, said branding consultant Allen Adamson. Trump has extremely passionate followers, but they're not the target demographic for his high-end hotels.

"As his political brand has overwhelmed his business brand, his core target is not luxury buyers," said Adamson, co-founder and managing partner of Metaforce, a New York-based brand consulting firm. "He may be better at selling pillows and beer than high-end luxury."

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As Donald Trump took over the White House, his Chicago hotel suffered - Crain's Chicago Business

Newly released sound offers more evidence, as if it were needed, that former President Donald Trump takes credit forRon DeSantisbeing Florida Governor.

New York Times reporterMaggie Haberman released audio from a September 2021 Trump interview for her new book, sound that rehashed Trumps familiar take that DeSantis would have been stuck at just 3% in the polls if he hadnt successfully wheedled an endorsement from the former President in 2018.

He was at 3%, Trump told Haberman. But the people of Florida didnt associate him with the word Governor.'

They saw him defending me on Russia, Russia, Russia,' Trump added. But you know, often times you see that, but you dont say, Oh, hes going to be Governor of Florida.'

He came to me, he said, Id love your endorsement, Trump repeated. I said, Ron, youre at 3%. You cant win. He said, If you endorse me, I can.

Trump resisted: Ron, youre at 3%, you cant win. DeSantis continued to press for the endorsement.

Well, look, you never know, but its not going to be easy, Trump reportedly told DeSantis, before referring to his chief Primary opponent,Adam Putnam. This guys got $28 million. Hes been running for eight years.

Haberman has reported that Trump called DeSantis fat, phony and whiny, offering a unique context for Trumps reiteration of the claim that he made DeSantis, one that he has made before with similar language and narrative details.

Last year, he said he wasnt too thrilled about endorsing DeSantis because people didnt really know who he was.

So when Ron asked me for help, for an endorsement, Trump added, He was at 3(%), and 3(%) means you dont have a chance. He went up like a rocket ship.

Trump noted Putnamtold him the endorsement was like a nuclear weapon went off.

We gave up, we didnt spend our money, it was over, Trump quoted Putnam as saying.

I dont want to brag about it, but man do I have a good record of endorsements, Trump said at aWest Virginia rally in 2018. In Florida, we have a great candidate, his name is Ron DeSantis, and he called me and asked whether or not I could endorse him.

I said, Let me check it out, Trump said he told DeSantis. This was a few months ago. He was at three, and I gave him a nice shot and a nice little tweet bing bing and he went from three to like 20-something.

Trump and DeSantis have maintained a united front publicly, but suggestions have mounted for months that the dynamic could have frayed, especially since Trump lost the presidency.

Trump f***ing hates DeSantis. He just resents his popularity, one unidentified Trump confidant told Vanity FairsGabriel Sherman.

Among the purported grievances: DeSantis prematurely committed Trump to speak at the Florida GOPStatesmans Dinner in 2019, he didnt close beaches in 2020 despite Trumps wishes, and the Governor skipped a Trump rally while appearing instead with PresidentJoe Bidenin Surfside after the Champlain Tower South collapse.

Trumps comments on DeSantis are especially noteworthy in light of the former President continuing to work with adviser Susie Wiles, who famously was exiled from DeSantis orbit after his election.

Wiles, a veteran political consultant who was key to Trump winning Florida in 2016, also is widely credited with being the architect of DeSantis defeat of Democrat Andrew Gillum.

The former President has said DeSantis would not be a challenge.

If I faced him, Id beat him like I would beat everyone else, Trump toldYahoo! Finance, noting that DeSantis likely would stand down.

However, its clear that DeSantis continues to stay on Trumps mind.

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Donald Trump again takes credit for lifting Ron DeSantis from '3%' to the Governor's Mansion - Florida Politics

Citation From the October 5, 2022, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): What do you mean property of the government? What the f are you talking about? Donald Trump is the government. When Donald Trump is the president and he's in charge of the executive, he is the executive. The executive is embodied in that man. This is the writing of our Constitution.

This is what you call a deep state. The deep state is the permanent state that's unelected that exists behind the democratic process, or above or below it - whatever you want to say. In heaven or in hell, definitely hell in my opinion. It exists below in the bowels, beyond our ability to correct it or to have oversight over it. Therefore, it is utterly unconstitutional.

The way that our Constitution is written is the American public, we the people are the arbiters of how our government is run and functions inside of a structure. That structure is being violated here, obviously, by the government saying we are the government we're not accountable to anyone. These documents we don't care who was the president these documents are ours. That's not the way it works. And it's not the way it worked for Obama, Clinton, Bush all of them had private and personal documents. And none of them were treated this way. Very, very interesting how this is going to shake out.

Link:
Newsmax's Benny Johnson on Mar-a-Lago documents: "Donald Trump is the government" - Media Matters for America

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I am taken aback, and not for the first time, that terrible and shocking things now just flow over Americans as if chaos is part of a normal day. We dont have to accept the new normal.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

I began the morning, as I often do, with a cup of coffee and a discussion with a friend. We were talking about last weeks nuclear warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and while we were on the subject of unhinged threats, I mentioned Donald Trumps bizarre statement over the weekend that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a DEATH WISH, with a racist slam on McConnells wife, Elaine Chao, added in for good measure.

Oh, yeah, my friend said. Id forgotten about that. To be honest, so had I. But when I opened Twitter today, The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwells tweet that we are still under-reacting to the threat of Trump jumped out at me. Shes right.

We are also, in a way, underreacting to the war in Ukraine. Our attention, understandably, has become focused on the human drama. But we are losing our grip on the larger story and greater danger: Russias dictator is demanding that he be allowed to take whatever he wants, at will and by force. He is now, as both my colleague Anne Applebaum and I have written, at war not only with Ukraine, but with the entire international order. He (like his admirer Trump) is at war with democracy itself.

And somehow, we have all just gotten used to it.

We are inured to these events not because we are callous or uncaring. Rather, people such as Trump and Putin have sent us into a tailspin, a vortex of mad rhetoric and literal violence that has unmoored us from any sense of the moral principles that once guided us, however imperfectly, both at home and abroad. This is the widening gyre W. B. Yeats wrote about in 1919, the sense that anarchy is loosed upon the world as things fall apart.

For many years, I have often felt this way in the course of an ordinary day, when it seems as if I am living in a dystopian alternate universe. A time of hope and progress that began in the late 1980s was somehow derailed, perhaps even before the last chunks of the Berlin Walls corpse were being cleared from the Friedrichstrasse. (This was a time, for example, when we started taking people like Ross Perot seriously, which was an early warning sign of our incipient postCold War stupor.) Here are some of the many moments in which I have felt that sense of vertigo:

Against all this, how can we not be overwhelmed? We stand in the middle of a flood of horrendous events, shouted down by the outsize voices of people such as Trump and his stooges, enervated and exhausted by the dark threats of dictators such as Putin. Its just too much, especially when we already have plenty of other responsibilities, including our jobs and taking care of our loved ones. We think we are alone and helpless, because there is nothing to convince us otherwise. How can anyone fight the sense that the center cannot hold?

But we are not helpless. The center can holdbecause we are the center. We are citizens of a democracy who can refuse to accept the threats of mob bosses, whether in Florida or in Russia. We can and must vote, but thats not enough. We must also speak out. By temperament, I am not much for public demonstrations, but if thats your preferred form of expression, then organize and march. The rest of us, however, can act, every day, on a small scale.

Speak up. Do not stay silent when our fellow citizens equivocate and rationalize. Defend whats right, whether to a friend or a family member. Refuse to laugh along with the flip cynicism that makes a joke of everything. Stay informed so that the stink of a death threat from a former president or the rattle of a nuclear saber from a Russian autocrat does not simply rush past you as if youve just driven by a sewage plant.

None of this is easy to do. But we are entering a time of important choices, both at home at the ballot box and abroad on foreign battlefields, and the centerthe confident and resolute defense of peace, freedom, and the rule of lawmust hold.

Related:

Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality

Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Floridas Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the Waterfront Wonderland, Americas fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.

Come on. Does this feel crazy? he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the citys population boom, he scoffed: No way.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Read. A new poem by Mairead Small Staid.

Though each night he cried out, each night / no angels came, no ministers of grace to save the son / from the spotlight glare of grief.

Watch. Hocus Pocus 2, on Disney+. The sequel wears its ridiculousness so proudly that its impossible to disdain.

Play our daily crossword.

My colleagues will be writing the Daily for the next few days; Im back on Friday. But I dont want to start off the week on such a grim note, so let me suggest a bit of light reading if youre looking for an escape from the news.

Often, when I see a reference to the Yeats poem The Second Coming (which includes the expression the widening gyre), I think of one of my favorite books, The Widening Gyrean entry in the Spenser detective series by the late Robert B. Parker. Spenser, an urbane and wisecracking Boston gumshoe, was played capably on television by Robert Urich (and later by a woefully miscast Joe Mantegna), but the books are a delight, especially if you read them in order. The Widening Gyre, however, is great as a quick stand-alone read. Written in the mid-1980s, its a political blackmail mystery set in Boston, Washington, and my hometown area of Springfield, Massachusetts. It has some wry laughs in it too: Spenser, good Bostonian that he is, rolls his eyes at Washingtons inability to deal with snow, protects his clients while calling himself a policy implementation specialist, and downs a thug with what he considers maybe the best left hook ever thrown in Springfield. Its a nice visit back to an earlier and simpler timeespecially in politics.

Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump, Putin, and the Assault of Anarchy - The Atlantic