Excerpt

The utility of “current history” often proves limited in the long run. In the meantime, immediate reports, like Bob Woodward's 2018 book, Fear: Trump in the White House, can be insightful. Despite Woodward's Watergate-tested “deep background” style of reporting, he contextualizes many of the currents running through the populist turn in the United States in the 2010 national midterm elections, which legitimized the key conservative nationalist themes woven into Donald J. Trump's unyielding assault on both the Democratic and Republican parties for failing to protect American jobs, to stop illegal immigration, and to win the war against radical Islamic terrorism…