American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump Audiobook (Free)

Politico Magazine’s main political correspondent offers a rollicking insider’s go through the making of the present day Republican Party-how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from your unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta clarifies in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is usually to see him much less the creator of this about American Carnage: On leading Lines from the Republican Civil Battle as well as the Rise of President Trump period of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most express consequence.

American Carnage could be the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush remaining workplace with record-low acceptance ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans confronted an instant of reckoning: They had no eyesight, no era of new market leaders, no energy in the party’s foundation. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural and demographic panorama, lit a open fire under the right, coming back Republicans to power and appealing a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged-one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell-engaged in some devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling an evergrowing resentment toward the politics class and its own organizations, the stage was arranged for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his work in the summertime of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Only simply by viewing Trump as the culmination of the decade-long civil war in the Republican Party-and from the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption throughout that period-can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How do a party enthusiastic about the national personal debt vote for trillion-dollar deficits and record-setting spending boosts? How did the party of compassionate conservatism end up being the party of Muslim bans and wall space? How did the party of family beliefs elect a thrice-divorced philanderer? And, most important, how lengthy can such a celebration survive?

Loaded with exclusive reporting and based off a huge selection of interviews-including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, and several others-American Carnage takes us in back of the scenes of the tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the top chronicler of this political era.