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

I've mentioned before that I prefer retrospective rather than current political analysis, and usually from historians rather than reporters. Reporters give the what; historians give the why and how and often paths to the future. Although he's a reporter, Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump is a long view of the years from 2008 through 2018, understandably focusing on the time from the 2016 Presidential campaign onward. Looking back, I once again wondered whether Trump could have been stopped or whether he was inevitable. 

Alberta starts with the election President Obama and then moves to the election of the ungovernable and uninterested in governing Tea Party faction of the Republican party. Those chapters highlight the infighting among party factions and told the origin stories of current power players (as well as reminding us of once prominent rabble rousers who have faded into the background). Alberta picks immigration as a theme for this section of the book, showing how politicians on both sides of the aisle considered it an important issue even if they differed on the mechanics.

Once Donald Trump came on the scene, that went by the wayside. His anti-immigrant populism made any neutral let alone positive commentary on immigrants anathema. But when he came down the escalator in 2015, could anyone have imagined him not only becoming President but remaking an entire party in his bellicose and bigoted image? I'd like to say I had a hint (when he declared I was on a project with three guys who all thought he'd be a good president and wondering why anyone would be liberal...ignoring the fact that they were siting with a single, professional, graduate-educate, 40-something woman who chose to live inside a city), but I never thought it was likely. And that may have been the problem with his primary challengers. None of them thought he could possibly win and, combined with his unusual strategy, failed to cut him off. Alberta also mentions miscalculations by Hillary Clinton and her campaign, but doesn't mention misogyny as a potential contributory factor.

Once Trump was in the White House, the rest of the Republican party saw the hold he had on a pivotal segment of the population and (for the most part) cravenly became Trump supporters. We can say it started with white Evangelicals flocking to his campaign (attracted by power rather than theology as outlined in Kristen Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne), but as Alberta points out in his epilogue, even politicians like Paul Ryan, who retired rather than continue working with Trump and who think of themselves as different, are forever branded as Trump Republicans.

Alberta's book ends in January 2019 and came out later that year so we don't see the impeachment trials, the electoral defeat, or the insurrection. Or the how Trump is inexplicably the front-runner in the 2024 primaries. And this is why, although I found Alberta's book interesting and thought-provoking, I still prefer a historian's view. He added the why and how to the what, but no hints as to how to fix the problem.