Want to better understand Donald Trump’s presidency? Read Tom Wolfe

Niall Ferguson says the novels of Tom Wolfe clearly explain the climate that created the US president, while the author also understood Trump’s underappreciated political genius

Reading Time:4 minutes

Author Tom Wolfe poses with then-president George W. Bush, and first lady Laura Bush during the National Endowment for the Arts National Medal Awards ceremony at Constitution Hall in Washington in 2002, where Wolfe was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Photo: AP

Published: 5:00pm, 21 May 2018Updated: 7:14pm, 21 May 2018

The death of Tom Wolfe sent me back to The Bonfire of the Vanities. No other book, it is generally agreed, better captured the atmosphere of mid-1980s New York. What no one foresaw at its publication was that, 30 years later, a character from Wolfe's New York would take over the entire United States.

As Maggie Haberman of The New York Times put it recently: “Tom Wolfe envisioned a Donald Trump before the actual one came into tabloid being”. But Trump had already come into being: The Art of the Deal was published the same year – 1987 – as The Bonfire of the Vanities. We catch glimpses of Trump-like figures not only in Bonfire but also in the equally engrossing, although less lauded, A Man in Full.

From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to Radical Chic and The “Me” Decade, Wolfe the journalist had a knack for capturing and puncturing the zeitgeist, combining the verbal pyrotechnics of a James Joyce or a Jack Kerouac with a Southern sensibility that subtly conveyed contempt for 1960s and 1970s self-indulgence.

But the novels are Wolfe's masterpieces, exploring mercilessly the country's three great obsessions: money, sex and race. They can now be reread – and relished – as trailers for Trump's presidency, which is simultaneously, fascinatingly, horribly about all three.