Opinion | If You Know How to Read It, Washington Is an Open Book

President Barack Obama is one politician who might have made his living as a writer, and now kind of does. I’ve read “Dreams From My Father,” “The Audacity of Hope” and his first White House memoir, “A Promised Land.” There is plenty to learn in all three, even if “Dreams” remains the best of the lot. (It’s a law of presidential memoirs: The more distant a book from the author’s time in the White House, the better it is.) But when I think about Obama’s story, I often come back to a detail that appears not in one of his own books, but in “Power Forward: My Presidential Education,” the memoir by Reggie Love, his former personal aide.

In the book, Love recalls in passing the time he forgot Obama’s briefcase before a flight, when they were headed to a Democratic debate in 2007. He worried he might be fired, but Obama gave him another chance. Love mentions one reason Obama was annoyed about the missing bag. It turns out, the senator liked to be seen carrying something when he got off a plane. As Obama told Love, “J.F.K. carried his own bags.”

That one line is what I remember most from this memoir, indeed, from many Obama-era volumes. It reveals how carefully Obama cultivated his public persona, and how he drew inspiration from one of our most mythologized past presidents to shape the image of a future one. “Power Forward” was one of the first books I reviewed when I became The Post’s nonfiction critic in 2015. If I’d started that job a few weeks later, I might have missed it — and I’m so glad I didn’t.

It was impossible to miss Donald Trump, or his books, later that year. If you had read a sampling of them at the beginning of his campaign, as I did, you would not have been surprised by the presidency that followed. Shocked, perhaps, but not surprised. The bragging and insecurity, the insults and vindictiveness, the ease with deceit and contradiction — it was all right there, a reminder that even ghostwritten works provide plenty of truth. In the case of “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” the ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, did not go through the typical process of conducting in-depth interviews with his subject because, as he told The New Yorker years later, Trump couldn’t sit still or focus long enough to share his life story. Instead, Schwartz fashioned Trump’s story by following him around the office and listening in on his phone calls, an approach that most likely captures Trump as well as any.

Trump loves to bring up that first memoir — “we need a leader who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he declared in the 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy — but it’s a different Trump book that, to me, captures him especially well. In “How to Get Rich,” published in 2004, Trump provides a lengthy passage about his hair, but it doubles as a damning admission about his life. “The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don’t have to deal with the elements very often,” Trump says. “I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I’m either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter or my private club in Palm Beach, Fla. … If I happen to be outside, I’m probably on one of my golf courses, where I protect my hair from overexposure by wearing a golf hat.”