Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country by Steve Almond, 257 pages.

Essays on Trump, the 2016 election, and the odd turn our country has taken. Almond, a former journalist and the author of Candyfreak and Against Football, has written some compelling and some not-so-compelling essays on recent political events. The title of the book, Almond explains, indicates his belief that we tell each other bad stories, stories that are "fraudulent by design or negligence," or frivolous or "too frightening to confront." The essays in the book detail the different bad stories that we told each other that resulted in the Trump presidency. While his arguments make sense for the most part, I think that we ended up here, politically because, on the whole, we're not that bright.
Many interesting stories are told here. The second essay "The United States is a Representative Democracy," is a good read and a sobering reminder of the slave-holding genesis of our politial system. But Almond's assignment of blame to the New York Times for covering Comey's announcement that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation, while the paper failed to cover the emerging (but still not officially announced) Russia-Trump story seems a bit of a stretch. His assertion that John Stewart and the subsequent generation of political humorists are guilty of bringing this political Armageddon about because they didn't use more of their power to register voters and keep Trump from office also seems to overshoot the mark.
His assertion that this is a potentially end-of the-world scenario is, hopefully, overblown.
Almond frequently references Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and it does seem worth hunting that down and reading it.
Almond has given us an engaging series of essays that, while I don't completely agree with, are well worth the read.