American Carnage

I used to refer to these books as self-flagellation, but turns out the official term is The Chaos Chronicles. This is sort of the prequel/lead-in to the main story. Nice lead-up and a walk through the last 10 years of American politics.

The first two-thirds of the book, which was originally conceived to be about the "Republican Civil War," and is built around the author's access to the key GOP congressional players in that drama, serves very well as a narrative of how the party came to bend the knee to Trump. All of the stuff after his inauguration (final third of the book) I knew well enough already.

If you’re looking for an inside view of the Republican schism between populist and Never Trump wings, this is a pretty solid book, with occasionally pithy writing. If, like me, you want to explore the “paranoid style” from the John Birch Society onwards, you’re going to be underwhelmed. Basically it’s a view of the rise of the Tea Party through the first few years of Trump’s presidency from a Never Trump perspective, valuable in its own way but hardly the social or political commentary I was hoping for.