Reading has long marked the public perception of U.S. presidents. Presidential libraries, for instance, focus primarily on archival efforts, yet in the popular imagination they still index readerliness: what presidents read, how, and why. More informally, the phenomenon of the presidential book list yokes the individualist dimension of reading to national culture.
In this paper, I argue that bad reading has emerged as an unlikely, yet appropriate figure for the Trump presidency. To the extent that reading has come to define the U.S. presidency — often functioning as a celebratory trope — it has inflected Trump’s presidency in unusual because almost antithetical terms. I begin by suggesting that the now-familiar category of “fake news,” generated by Trump’s open hostility towards the media, all but demands the belief that only certain news is worth reading. This hyper-politcization has in turn seen the rise of a parallel discourse about Trump’s own status as a reader, a fact, I argue, that testifies to the increasingly uncertain relation between reading and information in contemporary U.S. culture. From mock-horrific speculations about his impending library, reports on what books Trump has endorsed and how Trump appears to approach the act of reading, to accounts of the president’s functional illiteracy and theories that he in fact cannot read: these, driven by the assumption that reading mirrors the person, go on to measure (and dismiss) Trump’s presidency through reading. That many of these claims are speculative and unverifiable matters less than their force, which adamantly yokes reading to the feasibility of resistance.