If you want to understand Donald Trump as a political actor, Jennifer Mercieca's book "Demagogue for President" (Salon interview here) remains the clearest, most illuminating explanation. But if you want to understand the larger story in which Trump plays a part — however large he may still loom at the moment — then Francesca Bolla Tripodi's new book "The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy" offers a stark and clarifying picture of how Trump's political stage was constructed in the first place, and how that project may continue into the indefinite future, with or without Trump.
Tripodi's subtitle calls attention to the central role of algorithmic manipulations in today's media environment, but her account is informed by history as well as her own ethnographic observations, so recent high-tech manipulations are situated in a much deeper and broader context. In 2017, Tripodi writes, she set out "to understand how conservative voters sought out information they felt they could trust. ... My goal was to better understand how Trump voters made sense of the contemporary news environment and how search engine optimization might play a role."
