Writing the Trump Years Into History
“All the King’s Men,” the best American political novel ever written, is generally read as a cautionary tale about how power poisons slowly, like arsenic, or cynicism. But it’s also a fable about history, and why, like poetry, it’s so hard to write it fast.
Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel is the story of the rise and fall of a Southern populist, the Louisiana governor Willie Stark—a fictional Huey Long (even if Warren downplayed the likeness)—as told by Stark’s wisecracking, anguished, Hamlet-y henchman, Jack Burden. Warren is the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for “All the King’s Men,” and another, or, rather, another two, for poetry. But he could have equally won a Pulitzer for history, not least because the American-history prizes are so often arbitrarily awarded. (After all, no one remembers James Phinney Baxter III’s “Scientists Against Time,” which won the Pulitzer for history the year of “All the King’s Men.”)
In the strange and mostly forgotten middle of Warren’s novel—a plot entirely left out of the 1949 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards—Burden recounts his journey “into the enchantments of the past.” As a boy, he’d “read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through the thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles.” Tripping into that quicksand is how Burden would one day end up doing Stark’s dreadful bidding: using his formidable research skills to discover the darkest deeds in the deepest past of Stark’s political enemies. But, as Warren insisted, “the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story.” They’re in that quicksand together, up to their gizzards.
I’ve been stuck in that quicksand, too, for what feels like forever. But I first felt myself to be really sinking in dangerously deep only last year, when I tried to write a history of the age of Donald Trump. About ten years ago, I was trying to finish writing a very long book, “These Truths: A History of the United States.” I read and wrote chronologically. On my office floor I kept three stacks of books, each stack a different height, like a set of stairs, but always moving, like an escalator: books I’d read for the chapter I’d just finished writing, books I was reading for the chapter I was in the middle of writing, and books I’d need to read for the chapter I planned to write next. I got into a rhythm, a quick-footed three-step: read a stack of books, write a chapter, return a stack to the library, fetch the next stack; read a stack, write a chapter, return a stack to the library, fetch the next stack.
Sometimes I thought about a scene in “All the King’s Men” where the self-taught Stark tells Burden about his book learning, reading history:
I wanted to know a thing. I wanted to tell a thing. Did I know a thing? I went back to the library and hauled another pile of books back to my office.
“I have drafted ten out of my proposed sixteen chapters,” I reported to my editor in November, 2016. “I’ve now got more than a hundred thousand words and am up to 1897.” I kept an anxious eye on my deadline, a year away. Meeting it would require me to sprint across the twentieth century. I’d allotted myself two hundred thousand words for those frantic, war-wracked decades. I like to write fast, the faster the better, but those final months felt headlong, full tilt, a race against time, a sweaty, gasping-for-breath, hundred-year dash.
I’d always planned to end the book at a moment in time: high noon, January 20, 2009—the Inauguration of Barack Obama, the scene at the Washington Mall, his effervescent audience, a new day on which a new President called on Americans to “choose our better history.” But after Trump’s election Obama’s Inauguration no longer made sense as an ending to a history of the United States. With my deadline looming, I hurriedly tacked on to the final chapter a few pages summing up Obama’s two terms in office and ended the book on November 8, 2016, with Trump’s victory. “The election had nearly rent the nation in two,” I wrote. “It had stoked fears, incited hatreds, and sown doubts about American leadership in the world, and about the future of democracy itself. But remorse would wait for another day. And so would a remedy.” Eh, it sounds awfully lofty to me now—airy, portentous, and pretentious—but at least it follows a pretty good paragraph about pigs in a butcher shop.
Infamously, the plot of “All the King’s Men” does not unfold chronologically. Instead, poor Jack is burdened with the task of telling the story of Willie Stark’s rise from the vantage of Willie Stark’s fall. Burden knows what’s going to happen next; the problem is that he can’t stop it. The novel starts out on a highway, in a car that’s driving too fast. Stark, having been elected governor and already well along in his fateful descent from an idealistic man of the people to an entirely corrupt megalomaniac, is on the way to visit his childhood home. Every time they go there, he shows Burden another memento from his boyhood.
One reason Stark keeps showing Burden artifacts from his past is that Stark himself can no longer reconcile the boy he had been with the man he’d become. Once he’d known too little; now he knew too much.
But Burden is haunted by his own past. Before working for Stark, he’d worked as a reporter. Before that, he’d briefly gone to law school. After he dropped out, he’d gone to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in American history. He’d decided to write a dissertation about his great-uncle Cass Mastern, who died fighting for the Confederacy. He had Mastern’s journals. He had photographs, artifacts, newspaper stories. He knew Mastern’s secrets. He had everything he needed to write his dissertation. But “the day came when Jack Burden sat down at the pine table and realized he did not know Cass Mastern.” He could not write. He dropped out of graduate school. In 1944, Warren had published this story—that is, the story of Mastern’s life and Burden’s inability to write about it—as a short story in Partisan Review. It appears in a chapter of “All the King’s Men.” When Warren’s editor sent galleys of the book to William Faulkner, seeking a blurb, Faulkner refused. “The Cass Mastern story is a beautiful and moving piece,” Faulkner wrote back. “That was his novel. The rest of it I would throw away.”
Last year, my editor asked me to write a new chapter of “These Truths,” to be added to a jubilee edition for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the United States. The new chapter was to pick up where I left off, to run from Trump’s election in 2016 to the beginning of his second term, in 2025. That’s when I sank in the quicksand, up to my knees. Critics of “All the King’s Men” dismissed the novel as simply a chronicle of recent political events; Warren’s defenders called this idea out for the rot that it was. In the words of one of them, “Warren is no more discussing American politics than ‘Hamlet’ is discussing Danish politics.” But I didn’t have that excuse. I was discussing American politics and current events, even as they were happening.
It is nearly impossible to write a history of the very recent past. There’s no way to get a proper perspective. As John Lewis Gaddis once argued, in a little book called “The Landscape of History,” to write about the past, you need to stand on the top of a mountain and look down at the valley and see the whole horizon of time. You don’t want to be standing in the valley, where you can hardly see anything except what’s right in front of you. “I’ll get back to you in twenty years when all this is history,” I wanted to say to my editor. I would like that on a T-shirt. I would get that as a tattoo. But I felt an obligation, a duty, a burden. So I went to the library and lugged a pile of books back to my office and stacked them on the floor, one on top of another. I found a lot of them to be thin, shrill, and useless: most books about the Trump years written during the Trump years are artifacts of that era, not reliable chronicles of it. Was it even possible to write anything that wouldn’t fall to that fate?
There was another problem, too. “Make America Great Again” is a four-word argument about American history, and one of the movement’s aims has always been to press the teaching and writing of American history into the service of that argument. Trump and his Jack Burdens wish to make American history great again by removing all evidence of anything that ever happened that wasn’t so great, not only the great miseries of dispossession, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, and unjust wars but also the everyday sufferings and strivings of everyone from labor activists and small-business owners to religious dissenters and civil-rights leaders. Since 2016, whether by executive orders or by state laws, what can or cannot be taught in the nation’s classrooms has been increasingly subject to scrutiny, censorship, intimidation, and even threats of violence. This has most painfully affected public-school teachers. Last year, the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute published the results of a nationwide study that found that “teachers now approach subjects like elections, the economy, or civil rights with caution if at all.” More than three out of four civics teachers surveyed reported having censored themselves out of fear of pushback or controversy. More than one in three had removed or altered lesson plans. More than one in four had considered quitting. So have I.
“These Truths” came out in 2018. “Some American history books fail to criticize the United States; others do nothing but,” I’d written in the book’s introduction. “This book is neither kind.” But political ideologues from both the left and the right seem to prefer histories in which the United States is either all bad or all good. The New York Times published the 1619 Project in 2019. “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity,” the project’s head, the Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, wrote. By the spring of 2020, the George Floyd year, a 1619 Project curriculum had been adopted in more than forty-five hundred classrooms, including in Chicago, Newark, Buffalo, and Washington, D.C. Trump has sought to propagate the very opposite account of American history, with his Administration’s 1776 Commission and its efforts to erase from history books, museums, and school lessons everything from slavery and segregation to wars against Native nations and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
Beginning near the end of Trump’s first term, some states have both banned the 1619 Project and mandated a different curriculum, something that Trump calls “patriotic education.” For schoolteachers, this is worse than whiplash, because there’s a crucial difference between the American-history-is-all-bad or -all-good preferences of the left or the right. Being offered a new curriculum is one thing; being told by the government that what you are teaching is a crime is something else entirely. In the Trump era, government censorship of American history has been used against not only classroom teachers but also against writers and publishers and librarians and booksellers, in much the same way that the Trump Administration, through both legal action and general menace, has tried to ban journalists from the White House press corps, intimidate broadcasters into touting the Administration’s interpretation of events, and threaten reporters who defy the President. Will history books that refuse to propagate the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen be allowed in red-state classrooms? It’s hard to know.
There’s no real way around historical McCarthyism. My college-textbook version of “These Truths” exists in considerable tension with a Florida law (H.B. 549, 2025) because I refer to a certain sizable inlet of the Atlantic Ocean as the “Gulf of Mexico”—a term that first appears in historical documents in the sixteenth century—rather than as the “Gulf of America.” I’m not going to make that change. But schools have to. Books purchased by Florida public schools, libraries, and universities that use “Gulf of Mexico” now require stickers to indicate that the federal designation is “Gulf of America.” I’ve been told that a school in Texas went through “These Truths” with a highlighter and marked up every objectionable passage, nearly all of which were quotations from primary sources that I use, abundantly, to illustrate and animate ideas. (“My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves,” I wrote in the book’s introduction. “I’ve pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness.”) In a chapter on the nineteen-sixties, for instance, I had written, “The radical women’s movement came out of the New Left, where women had found precious little support for arguments about the oppression of women. ‘Let them eat cock!’ said one Berkeley student leader.” Someone at a Texas high school highlighted “Let them eat cock,” and banned the book on the ground of obscenity. And, honestly, I can see how that might not be great for high-school students, who probably aren’t going to get the Marie Antoinette joke, in any case. But as for what else lies behind that school’s objections, or who objected, or why, I have no way of knowing—or addressing. Mostly, what seems to be out there is just blind fury, or fear. High-school students in Boise who were required to attend an assembly where I was going to give a little history of the U.S. Constitution were relieved of that obligation after some parents complained that I might attempt to indoctrinate them into the values of liberalism.
At scale, the petty-minded bureaucrats implementing an agenda to sanitize American history, and to erase or suppress political dissent, have committed and will continue to commit a great deal of mischief. Gift shops at national parks, including National Historic Sites, have been instructed by the Trump Administration to “review all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners,” which included inspecting all books for ideological conformity to the President’s preferred account of American history. The shop at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, for example, has stopped ordering any new books while it checks its existing titles for any evidence of the suffering and difficulty and misery that are part of the story of any nation and any people, except in the histories written by tyrants and their stooges.
It has been, in other words, a complicated time to try to write a new chapter for a history of the United States, one that would account for the very years in which all this nonsense was going on. But sometimes the only thing to do is to fight. And the only way I know how to fight is to write.
I did my best to get my bearings. I mostly set aside the books I’d lugged back from the library and instead read investigative reporting and political-science scholarship. I rewatched a lot of old news coverage and read a lot of old tweets. I also talked to a lot of people. “What would you include?” I asked everyone I met. The mailman. My sister. My students. Everyone. “What are the turning points?” Even just choosing the pictures was difficult. I’d been allotted eight photographs to illustrate ten years of American history. “What eight photographs would you pick?” I’d ask. Almost to a person, they left out COVID. But COVID, as David Wallace-Wells has argued, changed everything. Then again, January 6, 2021, changed everything else.
One thing I hated about trying to chronicle the past decade is that it was impossible to keep Trump offstage, even briefly. No other chapter of my history of the United States is so dominated by the Presidency. Plenty of Presidents don’t even get name-checked. (I do mention Millard Fillmore, though only to describe him as “unmemorable.”) But I could find no way to make sense of 2016-25 except to place Trump at the center of everything, the eye of a hurricane. I wrote twenty thousand words; almost six hundred of them are “Trump.”
The story of American history has no ending; the nation and its people stagger on. Nor has the story of Donald Trump reached its conclusion. Near the end of “All the King’s Men,” before Willie Stark, like Huey Long, dies by an assassin’s bullet in the lobby of the Louisiana capitol, Jack Burden ruminates on this theme:
Like Stark, Trump is consumed by a fear of history’s judgment. He plasters his name on buildings. He fills his office with portraits of himself. He erects monuments to himself. All is not only vanity; all is in vain. It’s not for him to decide how he will be remembered. In the end, no tyrant ever wins at that. But it is a long day.
With Stark gone, Burden tries to put his life back together; he decides he’s finally ready to write about Cass Mastern. In the book’s final lines, he imagines that, one day, he might be able to leave behind “the awful responsibility of Time.” Yet no historian ever escapes that burden. ♦