What is read at the White House

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It is difficult to understand what captured Donald Trump ’s imagination as he read the pages of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” with its tragic description of life in the trenches of the First World War. The book by German Eric Maria Remarque was a huge success in the post-war years, only to become banned reading under the Nazi and Fascist regimes. Entire generations read it in the decades that followed, after another world war had devastated the world. But it is surprising to find it on the bedside table of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh presidents of the United States .

Yet Remarque's is practically the only novel that Trump has read. During his first campaign for the White House, The Donald told a journalist from The Hollywood Reporter that he was rereading it because he considered it "one of the greatest books of all time." It is one of the very rare literary reviews that the president has given himself in recent years regarding a book that does not talk about him or that does not speak badly of one of his opponents . But in general, books have never been a privileged topic of discussion for Trump and do not find much space in his posts on Truth or in his interviews. "I love books, but I don't have time to read," is the answer with which he closes the subject when someone asks him a question about his reading preferences.

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Analyzing leaders' reading lists is usually very useful to try to understand their approach to challenges, but also their tastes and passions. However, trying to understand how the current White House sees the world through the literary preferences of its protagonists is not an easy task. Because at least the tenant of the Oval Office does not seem to spend much time leafing through bound pages and has always admitted to having little patience even for the loose pages enclosed in the dossiers that his collaborators submit to him. He prefers a summary, possibly by word of mouth and without too many turns of phrase .

In this as in many other things it is a world light years away, for example, from the White House of Barack Obama , a bibliophile president who still shares entire lists of the books he is reading on social media and rankings of the ones he liked the most. In addition to browsing through them, Obama also loves writing books and using them for political activity: at 34 he had already written an autobiography, “Dreams from my Father” and thirty years later he still spends a lot of time completing the writing of the second part of his monumental presidential biography. Obama certainly shares Trump's passion for talking about himself, but unlike the current president he does not like to use ghostwriters and writes a lot in the first person .

His predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush , was not considered a bookworm, but in reality he spent a lot of time immersed in it. When reporters occasionally asked what books Bush was reading at that particular time, the White House press office would provide lists of important titles, biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and invariably the Bible . In reality, the president of the first decade of the century was a fan of Tom Wolfe, the author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and there was a moment when his reluctance to reveal that he was reading “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the sex-and-beer novel that the writer dedicated to the American university world in 2004 became a case . It was a sensitive topic for Bush’s aides, given the president’s turbulent past as a student who loved to party and drink. In the Bush household, however, the passion for reading was so widespread that daughter Jenna is now a television celebrity specializing in books: her Book Club on NBC is one of the most sought-after by publishing houses, along with her Instagram profile “Read with Jenna”, where her 300 thousand followers can decree the triumph of a book in an instant .

The current president has spoken about his reading almost exclusively in the memoirs and books he had written in the 1980s and 1990s, dedicated to the rules for achieving success. The most famous is “The Art of the Deal” from 1987, signed by Trump and written by journalist Tony Schwartz, which significantly contributed to making the name of the real estate entrepreneur familiar to a large number of Americans even outside New York, where he had mainly operated until that moment. It is in these books that the future president of the United States has cited here and there some classics that he appreciates, including “The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli and “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. Trump's ideal library also includes texts by Albert Einstein and Carl Gustav Jung, essays on America by Ralph Waldo Emerson, historical analyses such as “Team of Rivals” , the famous portrait that Doris Kearns Goodwin dedicated to Abraham Lincoln's White House and biographies of presidents, in particular George Washington and Richard Nixon.

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Among the great leaders, however, the current occupant of the Oval Office has a particular passion for one who is not American: Winston Churchill , whom Trump often quotes and whose story William Manchester told in his biography “The Last Lion,” he says he appreciated. The British prime minister during World War II seems to be the true inspiration that Trump has chosen as a leadership model, at least from an image perspective. The thumbs-up that the president shows in every photo is Trump’s version of Churchill’s two-fingered “V for victory.” And the grim look that Trump has made an icon, from his mug shot to the presidential portrait with which he began his second term, is, according to what he confided to some collaborators, an attempt to give himself a “Churchill” look .

In the Oval Office there is a small bookcase with some volumes, between the entrance door and the presidential desk, but they are certainly not Trump's reading material. They are mostly the same books that Joe Biden also kept in the office and have probably been there for decades. They are ten volumes of works by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, including "The Scarlet Letter", bound in old scarlet covers, and a collection of books from Yale University Press dedicated to the institutions of the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, brought something new to the Oval Office from a cultural and spiritual point of view. The president has been claiming for months that the failed attack on him last July was foiled thanks to a providential intervention and describes himself as a miracle worker. It is an event that he says has changed his life and his perspective on things and has rekindled his interest in a book that all American presidents love to quote and keep in evidence: the Bible. In the official photos of these first weeks of his presidency, no copies of the sacred book have been seen, but photos of moments of prayer in the Oval Office have gone around the world, with Trump at his desk surrounded by preachers of various denominations. And here other reading interests of the president emerge, because he quotes and praises the books of some of those preachers on social media and in public speeches. First of all Paula White, who has been a listened to spiritual advisor to Trump for a decade and who introduced him to “prosperity theology” . A rereading of the Gospel that has its roots in the thought of pastor Esek William Kenyon, who in the first half of the last century theorized how faith brings wealth, health and well-being, while poverty and disease would be punishments for the lack of faith. A doctrine that rewards the rich could not fail to please Trump, who a few days ago entrusted White with the leadership of the newly formed Faith Office of the White House.

If Trump reads little and has no intellectual ambitions, the atmosphere is completely different on the opposite side of the West Wing, where his vice president JD Vance's office is located. The vice president is known for his cultural depth, his brilliant academic history at Yale, his omnivorous reading, his conversion to Catholicism through reading St. Augustine, his favorite author. And obviously Vance is an almost unique case of a best-selling author who ends up in the White House: his “Hillbilly Elegy” was a literary phenomenon and a subsequent cinematic success well before the author's political adventure began, a former anti-Trump who later converted on the road to Mar-a-Lago.

Still little explored, however, is the line of thought - and the related reference books - that with Vance and Elon Musk arrived at the White House from the undergrowth of Silicon Valley. Here, to understand the readings that fuel the worldview of the most powerful men who support Trump, we must go back to the literary and cultural passions of their mentor: the techno-billionaire Peter Thiel. Because if there is a spiritual father for the new leaders of the White House who are one step below the president, that is him, the founder of PayPal and Palantir, the man who financed Vance's career, who was Musk's partner and boss of David Sacks, another of the so-called "PayPal Mafia", whom Trump called to the White House as "czar" of cryptocurrencies and AI.

Steve Bannon, the ideologue of the Maga movement who hates them all and would like to distance them from Trump, claims that the thing Thiel, Musk and Sacks have in common is that they were all born or raised in South Africa and have a not-so-secret passion for apartheid . But the true cultural roots of the circle of powerful people inspired by Thiel have been identified and analyzed by Father Paolo Benanti , the Franciscan expert in technology ethics who is today one of the world's leading experts on the scenarios of the digital age, in his new book "Il caduta di Babele" (San Paolo).

There are two lines of thought to keep an eye on, according to Benanti. One leads to the French anthropologist and philosopher René Girard, whom Thiel had as a professor at Stanford and who became the reference author first for him, and then for his disciples like JD Vance. From Girard, the group learned and put into practice in Silicon Valley the theory of “mimetic desire,” which sees human desire fundamentally as a continuous imitation: we desire what others desire because they desire it. This creates rivalry and potentially conflict and violence. Also from Girard’s thought, Thiel and his companions have thoroughly explored the concept of the scapegoat, the violence towards single individuals or communities who are blamed for collective ills. Peter Thiel has developed his own entrepreneurial theories based on concepts inspired by Girard and has built PayPal and other companies on these intellectual foundations . And now the ideas of the French professor who emigrated to Stanford (where he died in 2015) have entered the White House and found a home in Vance's office.

The other cultural phenomenon originating from Silicon Valley to keep an eye on, according to Benanti, is the set of “post-humanist” ideas that seem to fascinate Musk above all and that always originate in Thiel’s circle. A mix of movements that have in common the idea that humanity is in crisis and therefore needs to be “enhanced” (with artificial intelligence, for example) or transferred elsewhere, perhaps to Mars with SpaceX spaceships . It is a colorful archipelago that is brought together under the acronym TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Long-Termism.

Trump reads little, but around him there is a new ruling class that reads, writes and elaborates theories outside the mainstream schemes, translating them into ideas that often surprise and sometimes worry. For now they result in economic projects, such as the partial replacement of the dollar with cryptocurrencies . But the cultural trend of those who believe that man must be "improved" with the help of technology, starting with artificial intelligence , will reserve surprises in the next four years of the Trump administration.

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