Opinion | If You Know How to Read It, Washington Is an Open Book

Trump loves to bring up that first memoir — “we need a leader who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he declared in the 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy — but it’s a different Trump book that, to me, captures him especially well. In “How to Get Rich,” published in 2004, Trump provides a lengthy passage about his hair, but it doubles as a damning admission about his life. “The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don’t have to deal with the elements very often,” Trump says. “I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I’m either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter or my private club in Palm Beach, Fla. … If I happen to be outside, I’m probably on one of my golf courses, where I protect my hair from overexposure by wearing a golf hat.”

Political reporters say that the White House traps presidents in a bubble. But Trump lived in a bubble of his own making long before he came to Washington. In a soliloquy about his mane, Trump shows us his deliberately constructed isolation.

Sometimes a book unwittingly emphasizes the central tension of a politician’s ambitions. Here I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 manifesto, “It Takes a Village,” published during her time as first lady. I did not read it at the time, but I picked it up in 2016, during her second quest for the presidency. In the book, I found two Hillary Clintons doing battle: one with progressive instincts on matters like health care policy, the other with a conservative streak on issues surrounding sex and family. She says that both government and the individual “must be part of the solution” and that “most of us would describe ourselves as ‘middle of the road’ — liberal in some areas, conservative in others, moderate in most.”

Her 2016 campaign proved just the right time to read the book. In a debate with Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, Clinton was asked whether she was progressive or moderate, and she responded that she was a progressive — “but a progressive who likes to get things done.” This caveated centrism, this combination of principle and expediency, helps explain why Clinton was so often perceived as too establishment for the left and too big-government progressive for the right. The book gave me the context I needed to interpret that moment, and to understand Clinton’s struggle to reach the White House.

When you’re reading a Washington book, look for omissions and repetitions. In his 2022 memoir, “So Help Me God,” Mike Pence quotes extensively from Trump’s video message on Jan. 6, 2021, when the president finally called on his supporters to leave the Capitol — except, as I pointed out in these pages, Pence leaves out the lines in which Trump reiterated his nonexistent electoral victory. Even when describing the day rioters were calling for his hanging, Pence still massages the facts to make Trump look better. And in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, frequently decries “false choices,” like the choice between supporting law enforcement and holding police accountable, or between the rights of U.S. citizens and of undocumented immigrants. It may sound quite sage, but it also captures Harris’s preference to stay on both sides of difficult questions.