The titles of recent books about President Donald Trump suggest to the reader that there must be a person of substance behind the weird hair and the too-long ties—that there is a profound truth amidst the tweets and the hoopla and the bombast. The Washington Post published Trump Revealed, a collection of investigative journalism; Michael D’Antonio dropped The Truth About Trump; and David Cay Johnston wrote The Making of Donald Trump, which argued that to understand Trump you have to understand his past.

Six months into Trump’s first term, however, there is no evidence that there is any depth to the man. The real Trump is the one right in front of us, tweeting about the blood coming from Mika Brzezinski’s face. He has almost no grasp of policy, and takes no interest in it. He has no ideological convictions, even if he has a raw, emotional understanding of the politics of white grievance. He acts like the extremely wealthy and privileged man he is, without fear of consequence.

Yet the book industry continues to bank on a widespread appetite for a unified theory of Trump. And while many books have emerged to explain Trump from the left, liberals by no means have a monopoly on the business of Trump-splaining. We are awash in books by conservatives attempting to elucidate both Trump and Trumpism, including The Fourth Way: The Conservative Playbook For a Lasting GOP Majority by radio host and new kid on the MSNBC block Hugh Hewitt; Understanding Trump by former House Speaker and America ruiner Newt Gingrich; and The Swamp: Washington’s Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It by Fox News libertarian Eric Bolling.

These books reveal the remarkably shallow intellectual foundations of the Republican Party in the Trump era.

All these books seek to explain Trump—and to coopt his movement. In the process, they reveal the remarkably shallow intellectual foundations of the Republican Party in the Trump era.

Hewitt’s The Fourth Way is, like its author, comically pretentious. It features not one, not two, but three epigraphs: from the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. It also features four appendixes, one of which is The Homestead Act of 1862. The book’s 176 pages are padded out with the meaningless dreck that defines talk radio—the Founding Fathers “knew liberty,” he repeats again and again in a section about the judiciary; Trump “needs some wins, and early. Big Wins. Lasting wins. Wins you can point to for decades to come.”