Make sense of President Donald Trump’s second term—with the best books on his first term

In the decade since he descended his golden escalator to announce his first presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump has been the subject of hundreds (if not thousands) of books. With the benefit of some hindsight, we can see that the many books written about the 45th president of the United States during his time in office fell into a few categories. There were books that took us inside the Trump White House, sparked by Michael Wolff’s fly-on-the-wall tell-all Fire & Fury.

There were testimonies from the personal and professional inner circles of President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. And there were the big picture analyses of what it all means—and might end up meaning. Then in the months and years following the events of January 6, 2021 many books set out to assess Trump’s political and cultural influence through the 2020 election and the single term of his successor Joseph R. Biden.

Originally published in 1991, shortly after the release of Donald J. Trump’s own ghostwritten book Trump: The Art of the Deal, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s study of the real estate mogul focuses on how he made Trump Tower happen, which was at the time Trump’s crowning achievement. Barrett shows Trump operating in a domain he knows well—Manhattan real estate—and doing whatever it took to get the deal done. Barrett digs into Trump’s biography to paint a portrait of the mogul at the peak of his powers, just before his run of bankruptcies in the 1990s—and more than a decade before his comeback via The Apprentice TV series.

Long regarded as the definitive account of Trump’s real estate dealings in Manhattan, the book was updated and re-released in 2016, following Trump’s entry into the presidential race. Wayne Barrett died at age 71 on January 19, 2017, the day before Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States of America.