‘The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink’
By Thomas Hartmann
Barrett-Koehler Publishers, 224 Pages

“The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth wrote in 1802, “getting and spending.” The same might be said of Thomas Hartmann’s Donald Trump, a ubiquitous Mr. Moneybags who is always on the money trail, monetizing everything from ICE detentions to military occupations of cities that profit private companies in the business of building incarceration centers and equipment for crowd control.

This is a briskly told polemical biography, in which virtually everything about the decay of democracy is attributable to the Republican Party, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan and his party’s decades-long efforts at voter suppression. If any other political party or public organization or corporate entity that is not allied to or in support of Republicans is responsible for Mr. Hartmann’s fear that democracy in this country is on the verge of extinction, he does not say.

In other words, this is a tendentious biography that, you might well say, ought not to be given attention — not because it makes no valid points but because it is so narrowly conceived. Mr. Hartmann does not seem to have done much research. He has read Mary Trump’s takedown of her uncle and similar sources, portraying Mr. Trump not as an actor in his own right but essentially a creation of his fascistic father and of Roy Cohn, prosecutor of the Rosenbergs, who were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, and later a fixer for various establishment figures. 

The Trump administration’s foreign policy fares no better as Mr. Hartmann harps on Mr. Trump’s humiliating meetings with Vladimir Putin, which have their origins in a slavish worship of the powerful and the dictatorial traceable to, of course, father Fred Trump’s authoritarian attitudes. I say “harps” because, again, it is not as if the criticism does not have merit; it is simply repetitious and without nuance.

This much space is given to Mr. Hartmann’s biography so as to point out that a very different kind of biography is required, one that would devise a more catholic conception of the circumstances in which Mr. Trump has triumphed — no matter his setbacks — and of the world in which he has had to function. After all, he did not spend his entire life as a Republican Party stalwart.

Mr. Hartmann would have done well to slow down, to employ the passive voice — perhaps a counterintuitive suggestion to anyone educated by Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style.” What the passive voice offers, however, is a measured assessment of the world in which a biographical subject perforce has to operate, as in Samuel Johnson’s biography of Richard Savage, commonly considered a scoundrel, and Murry Kempton’s “The Briar Path,” an 18th-century-like prose depiction of a Black Panther trial, in which the prosecution is in the dock with the defendants.

In Johnson’s baroque prose Savage becomes emblematic of a larger truth, a vision of a wretched humanity: “The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely death. To those mournful narratives I am about to add the life of Richard Savage.” Johnson’s message: You simply can’t rush a biography, no matter what you think of the subject.

Murry Kempton had deep qualms about the American justice system, but he decided not to publish a denunciation in the customary style of a journalist delivering the bad news. Like Johnson, he took the long way around his subject: “The institutions that had kept Lumumba Shakur and the others in prison more than two years had watched these defendants acquitted in two hours and could, without reflection, cherish this judgment upon their vices as an ultimate proof of their virtues.” That you might have to read Kempton’s sentence more than once to be sure who is on trial would not, I suspect, have troubled him. 

At this fraught moment, a biography of Donald Trump might attempt something like the Johnson/Kempton approach, giving due respect not only to the person of interest but to the trying conditions from whence that person became known.

Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming book is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”