Until it finally opens, there remains much speculation over precisely which artefacts will occupy Donald Trump’s eventual presidential library. My current view is that you could do a lot worse than fill it with all the volumes of text that have been written in the cause of “understanding” him. These increasingly read like the most futile female-targeted self-help books of the 1990s. You Have to Understand He is Very Transactional. Take Him Seriously But Not Literally. Guys, please – no more. We all urgently need rescuing from the Mind, Body & Statecraft section of the bookshop.
As I say, so many gazillions of words have been expended on this cause that Trump reminds me a lot of the men of the 1990s – indeed, he was one. Back then, he had emerged from a decade of valiantly avoiding contracting STIs in 1980s Manhattan – a battle he would later describe as “my personal Vietnam”. For much of the 1990s, the rest of mankind – certainly womankind – felt that personal victories of their own must be just around the corner. It definitely helped that the economy was booming and history had ended. But it was a time when people believed you could change everything through self-control/hard work/the right roadmap. In fact, speaking of roads, one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the 90s in the US was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a hymn to personal growth that was treated by many as the key to all mythologies.
