This is the story of two reckonings—Donald Trump’s and my own.
Trump’s reckoning came on May 30, 2024, when he was convicted of multiple felonies in one of the most significant criminal trials in American history.
My own reckoning—with my image of America and its commitment to democracy—is still underway. I have lost my claim to be, as John F. Kennedy described himself, “an idealist without illusions.” I’m still idealistic but it turns out I had more illusions about this country than I thought I did.
Watching Trump desecrate the presidency and other democratic institutions over the last several years has been an ordeal—a trial—for me and for millions of others. Now American voters face their own reckoning as they render a verdict at the polls.
Historians who overwhelmingly rate Trump as the worst president since the founding of the republic will have a hard time explaining how a convicted felon, serial liar, and malignant narcissist mounted a political comeback. I’m not going to try here, and details of Trump’s unAmerican election denialism and contempt for the rule of law are beyond the scope of this book. So is the full story of the 2024 campaign, though I do provide some fresh reporting on the fateful political events of July, especially Nancy Pelosi’s historic efforts to convince her reluctant friend Joe Biden to withdraw from the race. Overnight, Kamala Harris’s thrilling candidacy eased the dread of Democrats and put Trump’s criminal conviction front-and-center in the most pivotal election since the Civil War. Harris’s signature line is “I know Donald Trump’s type.” Beyond articulating a “We are not going back!” vision of the future, she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are prosecuting much of the broader case against Trump that I lay out in this book.
My aim here is to show how a tawdry trial about hush money payments to a porn star became an inspiring if provisional locus of democratic accountability—a place where, for the first time since his father died twenty-five years ago, Donald Trump was forced to sit down, shut up, and face the consequences of his actions.
Amid my contextualizing of presidents and my journal of the trial, I try to tap into the anxiety that so many Americans feel about Trump and his enablers—the fear of what they are doing to our sense of ourselves.
My focus here is partly personal. Trump’s disrespect for the Constitution and for the presidency is an assault on many of the assumptions that have underpinned my life. In the nation that I thought I knew, an obvious con man would not have been elected president; in that nation—receding into the past—the Republican leaders who support Trump despite knowing better would not have failed the character test of their generation.
All of this has caused me to question my faith—not in God or democracy, but in the common sense and good judgment of roughly half of the American people.
The portentous question at hand is whether the two “Black Swan” events of 2024—the criminal conviction of an American president and the last-minute replacement of the Democratic nominee for president—would together put America, and the world, on a better path.
If Trump wins the election, this book will be in the tradition of William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which chronicles what it felt like to watch Adolf Hitler consolidate his power after he overcame a criminal conviction to become the dictator of Germany.
If Kamala Harris wins, my story will be more in the spirit of Jimmy Breslin’s post-Watergate book How the Good Guys Finally Won, with the felonies I write about looming large in Trump’s defeat at the hands of a former prosecutor.
Whatever happens, the criminal trial—the first ever of an American president—will remain a subject of compelling historical interest.
The case was highly publicized, but little understood. Without television or even audio, the millions of people who said they were closely following news from the courthouse had to settle for brief reports that often felt like messages in a bottle from a distant shore.
As one of a handful of journalists with a pass that let me in the courtroom every day, I had essentially a front-row seat for this twenty-three-day drama. I kept a journal that recorded everything I saw, from the judge threatening Trump with jail time, to jurors stifling giggles, to the defendant’s bald scalp.
I’ve been a reporter and historian of sorts since I was a little boy. I’ve interviewed nine of the last ten American presidents (all except Ronald Reagan)—either before, during, or after their presidencies—and written books about three. And I’ve covered politics over the last forty years for the old Newsweek and other publications.
While I have always approached candidates and presidents with a critical eye, I revere the office the founders created and mourn the way Trump’s Supreme Court has now endowed it with monarchical powers. In assaulting the Constitution and the rule of law, Trump has inadvertently given me greater appreciation for the other men, flawed but decent, who have assumed “the glorious burden” of the presidency.
I don’t like to admit it, but I’m a figure from another age—a straight, white, sixty-six-year-old legacy journalism holdover. The late Texas Governor Ann Richards famously said that George W. Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. (In Trump’s case, it’s a homer.) By contrast, I want to be upfront about my life of privilege and the additional obligations that incurs. Like soldiers or jurors, I feel a tugging duty to serve—to be the eyes and ears of anyone who appreciates journalism and history and still loves this infuriating country.
I start with the premise that democracy is a muscle that needs exercise and that our democratic institutions must be protected from criminals, whatever the political fallout may be. The stories I tell—and the accountability I witness—flow from there.
My tale of Trump’s encounter with the criminal justice system moves from frustration to satisfaction and at least some measure of hope.
The frustration came when it looked as if Trump’s strategy of delay, delay, delay would let him skate until after the election.
The satisfaction and hope came when he finally faced the music—an Irish-born jury foreperson chanting “Guilty” thirty-four times.
That was one of the most dramatic public moments of the twenty-first century and the genesis of this book and cri de coeur, which I deliver as a series of discrete epistles to myself and to you.
Part One is a mini-memoir of growing up in a political family in Chicago, where, as a child, meeting Martin Luther King Jr. and experiencing the turmoil at the 1968 Democratic National Convention helped set me on my path. I tell a few stories about my encounters with flawed but decent presidents and would-be presidents to illuminate how much of a departure and shock to my system—and our system—Trump has turned out to be. And I explain how my enduring civic faith helped power my desire to see him held accountable.
Part Two is my barbed journal of the winter and spring of 2024. In it, I undertake a frenzied mission to capture the dispiriting run-up to this Trumpiest of Trump trials; review how the judge, the lawyers, and the witnesses performed; and (with a hat tip to the late Dominick Dunne’s coverage of celebrity trials) collect color aboard the dizzying Tilt-a-Wheel ride inside the Manhattan Criminal Court Building—from Stormy Daniels’ stiletto heels clacking on the grimy floor, to the legal arguments proffered in the line to the bathroom, to the chaotic scene when a furious Judge Merchan cleared his courtroom.
As the trial moved forward, I found myself alternating between confidence in a conviction and concern that the prosecutors had blown it. Everyone knows how the story ends, but not the strange ups and downs en route.
Part Three chronicles the aftermath of the trial and the astonishing Black Swan Summer that followed, an historic period when the political world turned on its axis in just a few short weeks. I try to synthesize some of what I’ve learned about presidents into an assessment of the broader meaning of this national moment, then end on a hopeful note.
American Reckoning is my chance to give readers of today and the future a tactile sense of what it felt like to be a troubled but hopeful American looking for justice in a dangerous and dispiriting time.
Jonathan Alter
Montclair, New Jersey
August 2024