"Audience of One" by James Poniewozik; Liveright (304 pages, $27.95)
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Shelves upon shelves of books have been published about Donald Trump and his presidency. (For the full sweep, see Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada’s incisive bibliography, “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.”) One of the most illuminating — particularly in the wake of last week’s storming of the Capitol — is James Poniewozik’s “Audience of One.”
Poniewozik assesses Trump through the lens of television — both how it shaped his life and how, in turn, he became adept at using the medium to manipulate audiences. “It’s about how the techniques of reality TV — conflict, stereotype, the fuzzy boundary between truth and fiction — became tools of politics,” writes Poniewozik, television critic for The New York Times. “It’s about how the culture war originated as a proxy for politics and increasingly became politics itself.”
“Audience of One” transcends the genre of political analysis to offer something more valuable: a cultural portrait of the Trump era. Rather than focusing purely on assessing Trump’s character (and lack thereof) or recounting his outrageous norm-breaking, Poniewozik contextualizes it. With all due respect to Lozada’s fine book, understanding the Trump phenomenon is less about what we’re thinking than what our nation is feeling, how it’s living and, yes, what it’s watching.
