Worth a Look: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

Worth A Look
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Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOPโ€”and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, andย technologicalย disruptionย during that periodโ€”can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of Americaโ€™s current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?

Politico Magazineโ€™s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insiderโ€™s look at the making of the modern Republican Partyโ€”how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains inย American Carnage, to understand Trumpโ€™s victory is to view himย not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.

American Carnageย is the story of a presidentโ€™s rise based on a countryโ€™s evolution and a partyโ€™s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the partyโ€™s base. Yet Obamaโ€™s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nationโ€™s rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the partyโ€™s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emergedโ€”one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnellโ€”engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOPโ€™s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Loaded with explosiveย original reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviewsโ€”including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many othersโ€”American Carnageย takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as weโ€™ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

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