American Carnage
On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump
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発行者による作品情報
New York Times Bestseller
“Not a conventional Trump-era book. It is less about the daily mayhem in the White House than about the unprecedented capitulation of a political party. This book will endure for helping us understand not what is happening but why it happened…. [An] indispensable work.”—Washington Post
Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—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.
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 party’s base. Yet Obama’s progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural identity, lit a fire under the right. Republicans regained power in Congress but spent that time fighting among themselves. With these struggles weakening the party’s defenses, and with more and more Americans losing faith in the political class, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to launch his campaign in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil.
Loaded with explosive original reporting and based on hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of a political era.
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Republican congressional factions battle each other and Donald Trump for the party's soul in this sweeping study of modern American politics. Politico magazine correspondent Alberta surveys a decade of GOP upheaval; he begins with the rise of the ultraconservative Tea Party and its feud with establishment Republicans during Barack Obama's presidency, moves on to party leaders' failed efforts to quash Trump's 2016 campaign, and recounts their struggle to corral votes in a Republican Congress after Trump's victory and to deal with the president's volatile style and erratic leadership. Drawing on extensive interviews with politicians and pundits, Alberta's engrossing narrative is full of sharp intrigues and vivid personalities and focuses on attempts by House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan to craft legislative compromises against furious resistance and speakership challenges from the party's uncompromising right wing. Alongside the horse-trading, Alberta explores two tectonic shifts in the American electorate: the Republican base's turn away from small-government, fiscally austere, free market, free trade Tea Party doctrine to a Trumpian populism of anti-immigrant xenophobia, protectionism, and free-spending industrial policy, as well as an overall demographic shift toward a less white, better educated, more urban population. Incorporating trenchant analysis and a wealth of detail in stylish prose, Alberta highlights the broad currents beneath the chaos of recent politics.
