In a bid to offset the flurry of books critical of his presidency, Donald Trump has started something of a conservative book club, endorsing new releases that offer a rosier picture of his campaign and young presidency. One of those is The Great Revolt, by Salena Zito and Brad Todd:

“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2018

It’s vintage Trump. The self-aggrandizement, the populist tone, the erroneous capitalizations—they are familiar tics, which appeal to his base and no one else. The question of Trump’s appeal ostensibly forms the backbone of Zito and Todd’s book. Zito, a reporter who writes for The New York Post and The Washington Examiner, and Todd, a Republican strategist, argue that Trump is an authentically populist figure: a chaotic but remarkable leader who transcended ideology to permanently alter American politics.* This version of Trump’s story—one where racism barely merits a mention—is glaringly incomplete, but it is useful in showing what Trump’s supporters tell themselves and how the left can respond.

The flaws of The Great Revolt are almost immediately obvious. “Trump’s nationalist argument was economically pragmatic from the start, devoid of the ideological language of the trench warfare that had stalemated presidential politics for the last 35 years,” Zito and Todd write early in the book. In truth, Trump’s nationalism was overtly driven by a certain ideology, best exemplified by his proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico that would keep out “rapists” and “thieves.” The authors refer, later, to Trump’s “ideological apostasy,” his rejection of politics, and his anti-establishment appeal. When they do cover Trump’s racist remarks, they couch his rhetoric in euphemisms: His language is simply “nonpolitical, often coarse.”

The idea that Trump possessed no politics, that his campaign promoted no ideology, is a useful bit of propaganda that places his appeal outside anything so crass as pure bigotry. This is an unfortunate failure for numerous reasons, chief among them the fact that Zito and Todd had the resources to write a different book. The authors boast that they travelled “27,000 miles of backroads” to visit counties in the Great Lakes region, which is an expensive feat. Their so-called Great Revolt survey, which purportedly adds empirical backing to the book’s political conclusions, probably wasn’t cheap to administer either.

THE GREAT REVOLT: INSIDE THE POPULIST COALITION RESHAPING AMERICAN POLITICS by Salena Zito and Brad Todd Crown Forum, 320 pp.. $28.00

They had opportunity, too: Readers could benefit from a granular examination of Obama-Trump counties, those in which voters switched their vote from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016. The authors say Rust Belt counties are places “where most of America’s decision makers and opinion leaders have never been.” In this they have a point, if by “opinion leaders” they are referring to the press. A veritable genre emerged in the wake of Trump’s victory—the Trump Country Safari—in which journalists parachuted into the Rust Belt and Appalachia to try to explain Trump voters to the rest of America. But by focusing so heavily on bitter diner patrons, the press whitewashed what are in fact diverse areas of the country, while reinforcing the notion that economically anxious whites drove the Trump train to victory.