No other nation has an election success record like ours. We have held 58 consecutive presidential elections since 1789 and we’ve never postponed one. Moreover, we’ve witnessed the peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another 22 times.

Now we’ve begun our 59th presidential election, and most people understand it will primarily be a referendum on incumbent President Donald Trump. His has been an unusual presidency, and the country is, to understate it, divided about him and his America First policies and COVID-19 pandemic leadership.

Dozens of authors have weighed in on Trump or the state of the nation. We share here brief reviews of several of their books, ranging from very pro-Trump to decidedly anti-Trump. At least four of these authors are Republicans or conservatives.

• David Horowitz, Blitz: “Trump Will Smash The Left and Win” (Humanix Books, 2020). Horowitz, a staunch conservative, is a prolific best-selling author. Donald Trump, Jr, the president’s son, says “if you are interested in debating the deranged liberals with facts, you won’t want to miss this book.”

And if you are a regular FOX TV-viewer, this book will reinforce their narratives: the Mueller investigation was a partisan scam; Trump has been a patriotic defender of our borders and our 2nd Amendment rights; he’s been our most pro-Israel president; and he’s our best defense against the “Green New Deal,” which the author says should be called “Green Communism”.

Horowitz lambastes U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as “the most radical, power-grabbing government takeover of the economy ever proposed outside of the Communist Party.”

Horowitz celebrates the Kanye West-Donald Trump 2018 meeting as a historic event, one “creating a bridge between a Republican White House and America’s forgotten black communities.” As many readers may have noticed, West is now running for president against Trump — but with the GOP’s and Trump’s suspicious blessing. This sounds a lot like the old political ploy used in Mississippi and South Carolina. (This is described in Stuart Stevens’ “It Was All A Lie” — see below).

Horowitz’s book is a pugnacious literary effort to rally Trump supporters who see their candidate’s low public-approval ratings. Moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats will not enjoy what they read here, yet may develop an understanding of the Trump-believers and why most will be sticking by their man. Biden-Harris supporters are already nervous about the election; Horowitz’s “Blitz” will make them more nervous.

• John Yoo, “Defender-In-Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power” (All Points Books, 2020). John Yoo is also a conservative. A respected constitutional law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he was a legal adviser at the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration, where he was noted for his approval of broad presidential discretionary authority.

Yoo says he has never met Trump, doesn’t approve of Trump’s immigration policies, and does not find the president personally appealing. Yet, Yoo is a Hamiltonian federalist with originalist judicial beliefs. He believes Trump has correctly defended presidential authority and, in most instances, defended presidential prerogative.

Thus he writes that Trump was correct during the impeachment hearings, when he fought back against State Department and National Security Council staffers who believed he acted unconstitutionally in his dealings with Ukraine. Regardless of his motives, Trump was correctly defending the original Constitution when he differed with these intelligence and FBI officials.

Yoo also defends Trump’s dealings with Iran, Syria and Afghanistan. While Trump’s decisions are sometimes impulsive, and he seems intoxicated with executive orders, he is acting as the founders intended, Yoo says, pursuing the constitutional right of future presidents to take the means necessary to protect the nation’s security.

Yoo makes a compelling case for Hamiltonian presidential prerogative. Along the way he gives Donald Trump the benefit of almost every doubt. Yoo isn’t anti-Congress, yet he believes presidents are at least equal partners in the decision about war and peace. And Yoo is skeptical, like Trump, of the “deep state” bureaucracies that have grown in power over recent decades.

“Defender-In-Chief” is primarily a defense of broad presidential discretion. Thus, Yoo concludes that “Trump properly fought impeachment as hard as he did in order to prevent Congress from undermining presidential independence and sapping it of executive energy.” Along the way, Yoo appears to be giving Trump an A- on his political agenda and activist America First policies. It should be noted that there is no coverage of Trump’s COVID-19 policies, or Trump’s attitudes about Black Lives Matter or racial injustice.

Still, this is an important legal and scholarly argument —even if it is a contrarian contribution in today’s political climate.

• John Bolton, “The Room Where It Happened” (Simon and Schuster, 2020).

John Bolton, a noted Republican hawk, had served for many years in Republican State Departments, and briefly, under George W. Bush, as an acting U.N. Ambassador.

He campaigned aggressively to be appointed secretary of state or national security adviser for Donald Trump. He was twice passed over for both jobs.

He wanted to be back in the rooms where major decisions were made. He succeeded in becoming Trump’s third national security White House adviser, but it ended with his resigning a few days before he was likely to be fired. Trump told Sean Hannity that he knew Bolton was “a washed-up guy,” but “I gave him a second chance.” Trump later claimed he never liked Bolton, and that Bolton “only wanted to go to war.” Trump has an ungracious way of dismissing people who once worked as his key advisers. Bolton, he said, was “a wacko,” “a dope,” “incompetent,” and “a disgruntled boring fool.” One wonders why President Trump hired and kept him on in that strategic post for a year and a half?

Bolton’s is a well-written if very self-serving memoir. He relishes sharing his firsthand narrative of West Wing policy fights. Bolton is full of his own personal put-downs. He is negative about former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and a number of others. He writes of Mnuchin, for example, that he “apparently never saw a negotiation where he couldn’t make enough concessions.”

Bolton goes relatively easy on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. But once Bolton’s book came out, Pompeo blasted Bolton as a “traitor,” adding that “it is both sad and dangerous that John Bolton’s final public role is that of a traitor who damaged America by violating his secret trust with its people.”

Bolton is toughest on Trump. He alleges Trump was no match for Vladimir Putin, and was delusional in his dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He says Trump asked China’s President Xi Jinping to help his re-election prospects by buying more U.S. farm products. Trump also told Xi, so Bolton claims, that some of his (Trump’s) supporters wanted to change the 22nd Amendment for him. (The 22nd Amendment provides for a two-term limit for the American presidency.) 

Bolton accuses Trump of putting politics ahead of the nation’s interest and sound long-range policies. He faults Trump’s dealings with Turkey and Ukraine, and deems Trump unfit to serve as president.

Two last thoughts on the Bolton memoir. He obviously delighted being in the White House and being a “player” in the place where things happened. He talks of all his meetings in “the Oval” and in “the Sit Room” or in the DoD “tank,” and his many flights from “Andrews.” Bolton persuaded his publisher to showcase 20 photos of him meeting with world leaders and cabinet officials, portraying and celebrating him as a contemporary Henry Kissinger. Yet Bolton was definitely not in the same league as James Baker, Henry Kissinger, or Brent Scowcroft.

Still, the Bolton book is important reading because it offers a dozen or more national security case studies of U.S. policy negotiations with China, Russia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Venezuela and NATO. It is also an invaluable insider’s account of West Wing and Cabinet-level bureaucratic politics. Warning: there are no heroes in this book. Your faith in government will be at risk the more you digest this memoir.

• Stuart Stevens, “It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Trump” (Knopf, 2020).

Stuart Stevens has been a leading, and usually successful Republican campaign strategist for five decades. His book traces the history of the Republican Party from the Barry Goldwater years to the present. He lays out how the GOP became the “white grievance party” that it is today.

Trump, Stevens writes, didn’t hijack the GOP — the party had already become Trump. Trump, or his like, was just inevitable.

This is an angry rambling account of how Stevens believes his party lost its moral compass. He apologizes for having played a part in this wayward journey, noting that he usually — although not always — worked for principled Republicans like George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Bill Weld, Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan. 

Yet he was there in the room — “in the tribe” — as the party embraced Goldwater’s attack on the Civil Rights Act, embraced the “southern strategy” of George Wallace, and adopted a “race-baiting politics of resentment.”

Stevens says the Trump White House welcomes and empowers those on the right who peddle conspiracy theories and religious and racial bigotry on the Internet. Donald Trump, he writes, did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self.

This is a deeply personal expose. Stevens was dedicated to the Republican Party until he recently joined the “Lincoln Project,” a group of Republicans who have split from Trump, and are now actively seeking to defeat him. Stevens’ sense of failure is palpable: “For me, much of this is personal. I helped elect so many who now support Donald Trump, and I know because I know these men and women well, that they find Trump repulsive and a degradation of their life’s work and espoused values. And yet they support him, knowing on some level that it is damaging civic value they have previously held.

Readers beware again: You will not find heroes in the Stevens book.

• Eric A. Posner, “The Demagogue’s Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump” (All Points Books, 2020). Posner is a respected professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

He writes, as does professor John Yoo, that Trump may have clashed with Congress, the courts and the media, yet he has rarely violated the laws or the Constitution. Meanwhile, he notes, Trump’s executive actions, especially with regulatory agencies, have mostly been blocked or reversed by the federal courts.

Posner’s splendid book surveys the demagogic personalities that have arisen in our republic. His rogue’s gallery profiles Andrew Jackson, Georgia’s Tom Watson, Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Senator Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace. While not calling these men “dictators,” he shows how they borrowed strategies from “the demagogues’ playbook.”

American demagogues were frequently nativists, and harbored anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Asian and anti-Catholic sentiments. Georgia Congressman Tom Watson is an illustration. Watson started out as a populist, expressing hope that poor whites and blacks could unite in making economic progress. But he became a white supremacist; his newspaper attacked Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. He attacked political institutions and incited mob bigotry.

In the 1930s the right wing-population was typified by the Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, who blamed America’s problems on Jews and foreigners.

A left-wing populist was personified by Governor and Senator Huey Long, who avoided appeals to bigotry, but regularly violated constitutional norms as he built a grassroots rural-poor constituency, one pitted against the corporate and political elites of his day. He was in the process of challenging President Franklin D. Roosevelt from the left when he was assassinated at the Louisiana state capitol in 1935.

Later George Wallace and Richard Nixon attacked the media, elites and intellectuals. Posner says it would be wrong to describe Nixon as a simple demagogue, yet Nixon did manipulate and abuse the bureaucracy at times. “He directed the FBI to spy on his political opponents and at the same time tried to block the FBI and the Justice Department from investigating the criminal activities of his subordinates.” And Posner quotes Barry Goldwater who called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life.”

Then there is Trump. “The demogoguery that brought Donald Trump to power has deep roots in the democratic culture of the United States, above all the populist and anti-elite strain that goes back to the beginning of the Republic.” Trump’s strategies include vicious personal attacks, divisive appeals, especially against immigrants, contempt for the truth, attacks on elites and attacks on traditional political institutions.

Posner says it would be wrong to call Trump a dictator — but, “if a demagogue is a politician who verbally attacks institutions and tries to shake confidence in them, then Trump is a demagogue.” Posner, who has impressive mainstream (not liberal) legal credentials, minces no words in his verdict about Trump and Trumpism. “We need to see him as a political monstrosity who should be repudiated by the body politic, so that politicians who eye the presidency in the future will be deterred from using Trump’s ascendance as a model.”

• Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “How Democracies Die” (Crown, 2019).

These two Harvard University scholars have extensively studied how democracies in Europe, Africa and Latin America failed. They recognize that demagogues emerge from time to time in every society.

Their book concentrates on the guardrails constitutional republics try to put in place to prevent military coups or the drift into authoritarianism.

The obvious guardrails are a written constitution, freedom of the press, safeguards for opposition parties, fair and regular elections, and independent legislative and judicial branches of government.

But Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize that constitutions are always incomplete, and institutions alone are not enough to ensure the health and survival of a democracy. “Democracies work best,” they write, “when constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.” Two crucial norms are: mutual tolerance — the understanding that competing parties should accept one another as legitimate rivals — and “forbearance” — the understanding that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. These may be the soft guardrails of American democracy, but it was their absence that destroyed democracies in Europe in the 1930s and in South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

The authors argue convincingly the constitutional democracy is fragile even in the best of times. Civic civility has to be almost as important a priority as sound policies that promote economic growth and economic opportunities for everyone.

Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, praises “How Democracies Die” for its brilliant historical synthesis, and adds that it should be”a clarion call to restore the shared beliefs and practices that constitute the essential guardrails for preserving democracy.”

We agree.

Read all of the above as the Trump-Pence vs. Biden-Harris race unfolds and you will receive maximum extra credit.