{"id":140070,"date":"2025-05-29T00:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T00:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/140070\/"},"modified":"2025-05-29T00:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T00:40:10","slug":"four-books-to-read-during-trump-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/140070\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Books to Read During Trump 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re living in a moment<\/strong> of political and economic upheaval. We asked New Yorker staffers to recommend books to help better understand all that is unfolding around us. Plus:<\/p>\n

These are tense times.<\/strong> Attempts to make sense of contemporary life can often feel fruitless. For some clarity, staffers recommended books they\u2019ve found instructive about our strange shared reality. Their picks examine the power of demagogues, the injustices of the immigration system, the reasons protest movements have failed, and the fear of others.<\/p>\n

By George Saunders<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll bet Saunders wishes he had been less prescient than he was when he wrote this fable, twenty-odd years ago, about a demagogue who exploits his compatriots\u2019 fear of foreigners to launch himself into his nation\u2019s Presidency\u2014inaugurating a new era of cruelty and violence against the weak. The demagogue, Phil, a \u201cslightly bitter nobody\u201d who resides in the large and strong country of Outer Horner, discovers that he has a talent for swaying audiences by disparaging the inhabitants of a tiny neighboring land. Inner Horner can hold, at the most, only one of its citizens at a time, leaving the others no choice but to spill over into Outer Horner\u2014an aggressive border incursion, to hear Phil tell it. Soon Outer Horner begins levying taxes (tariffs, anyone?) on the Inner Hornerites, and physically attacking them when they can\u2019t pay. Phil speaks in a Trumpian register, though with a touch more whimsy: a day that didn\u2019t go his way, \u201cDark Dark Thursday,\u201d is followed by \u201cthe Memorable Friday of Total Triumphant Retribution.\u201d Let\u2019s just hope that Saunders\u2019s prophetic vision holds when it comes to the \u201cbrief\u201d part.\u2014Douglas Watson, copy editor<\/p>\n

By Valeria Luiselli<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, the Mexican American novelist Valeria Luiselli started working as a volunteer interpreter at New York City\u2019s main federal immigration court. She was tasked with asking unaccompanied child migrants the forty questions that are listed on the intake questionnaire, and then translating their answers into a story in English, with the hope that some narrative cohesion could protect them from deportation back to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. \u201cTell Me How It Ends\u201d is a studied, sober examination of the way language\u2014\u201csafe,\u201d \u201calien,\u201d \u201cthreat\u201d\u2014becomes machinery for the state, and how absurd its boilerplate reads during a struggle for survival. In just over a hundred pages, Luiselli paints a grotesque picture of the American immigration system, and forces the reader to replace names and numbers with faces and full lives. The book interweaves an account of her own family\u2019s green-card process with the dark history of U.S. military involvement in the Americas, policy briefings, and excerpts of her interviews with children as young as five\u2014among them a boy who saw his younger brother get shot and killed by gang members and another who, because of his pending bid for asylum, couldn\u2019t attend the funeral of a friend he\u2019d watched die. Published two months into Trump\u2019s first term, it weighs heavier now than ever, as civil protections continue to erode and the rule of law is failing to hold.\u2014Holden Seidlitz, fact checker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re living in a moment of political and economic upheaval. We asked New Yorker staffers to recommend books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[22391,3444,60818,77,22723,60819,60817,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-140070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","13":"tag-textabovecentersmallwithrule","14":"tag-the-daily","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114588340935115022","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}