Unlike other recent White House chroniclers, Alberta offers something more ambitious than a tale of palace intrigue; his book is also a six-hundred-plus-page history of the Republican Party over the past decade, which seeks to explain how the G.O.P. steadily moved right and eventually gave way to full-on Trumpism ... Although Alberta is clearly not an admirer of the President, he is not unsympathetic to the voters who have embraced him and their feelings of resentment toward what they see as an increasingly liberal culture.

... isn’t just another drop in the deluge of Trump books; in fact, it isn’t really a Trump book at all. Instead it’s a fascinating look at a Republican Party that initially scoffed at the incursion of a philandering reality-TV star with zero political experience and now readily accommodates him ... generally strikes a tone of measured fairness throughout.

... lengthy, indispensable ... Alberta marries insight on Republican politics with room-where-it-happens reporting to show how easily a major party surrenders ideology to the temptations of power and revenge ... Alberta deftly peels away the veneers ... Alberta offers dishy details on how the two lawmakers survived multiple attempts to oust them and how they made their peace with Trump’s rise ... Alberta seems torn over how to explain [Trump]. He writes early on that Trump’s underlying values and motives don’t matter, but warns later against misunderstanding the president’s 'bedrock beliefs' on immigration and trade ... 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.

The struggle that American Carnage covers in fact may well be over, won by Trump and his loyalists—who are now drawn from both the establishment and the hard right—and leaving supposed moderates like Romney on the fringe. Alberta’s guarded optimism about the party’s future, projected upon the once-and-future Romney, reflects a major limitation in his densely reported book: its paucity of historical background ... starting an account of the GOP’s civil war in 2008 is a bit like starting a history of the American Civil War after Gettysburg. By the time Alberta’s account gets underway, most of the political dynamics behind the events he describes were long established and extremely powerful ... While American Carnage describes the outcome of the party’s radicalization, it completely misses—indeed, fundamentally misunderstands—a major impetus behind Trump’s ascendancy: the destructive presidency of George W. Bush ... Alberta...is a demon researcher. He has also mastered the knack of culling juicy quotations and narrating colorful vignettes that seem to jump off the page, part scoop and part gossip. They confirm that Alberta has amassed a fortune in the debased coin of the realm of modern journalism, which is access; but they also display his genuine gift for fly-on-the-wall storytelling from certain Republican walls ... Alberta...has an irritating habit of reviving hackneyed Republican platitudes and talking points, and of blaming Democrats for Republicans’ partisan excesses ... Alberta is more convincing and even entertaining when he sticks to narrating his book’s three main storylines: the battles between the GOP’s congressional leadership and its caucus’s strident right wing; Trump’s emergence in 2015 and triumph a year later; and the tumults that rattled the first two years of his presidency. Alberta has a sharp eye for folly, and it serves him well in covering some of the escapades of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus troublemakers ... Alberta is unsparing about the Republicans’ desertion of the party’s professed principles—including its devotion to free trade, small government, and fiscal responsibility—in succumbing to Trump. Yet he flounders when it comes to explaining their willingness to support a man they held in contempt ... Any number of historians, political scientists, and journalists have chronicled the long history of the Republican Party’s decay, but you won’t find it in Alberta. He would prefer that Trumpism be something other than Republicanism, not its culmination.

Starting with the final months of the Obama presidency, Mr. Alberta’s wordy history works its way through the crowded 2016 Republican field ... Mr. Alberta...offers a detailed review of everything that happened from President Obama’s last term up through the pivotal 2018 midterms. Mr. Alberta’s detailed timeline would play nicely as a history text if you took the expletives out of the quotes. And there are plenty ... Mr. Alberta adds some insider anecdotes from (and about) John Boehner, Mr. Priebus and Mr. Cruz. Some of the Boehner stories are laugh-out-loud funny, particularly his respectful interactions with President Obama, but also his unlikely reactions to some of his colleagues. Mr. Alberta’s access to these weighty GOP figures and peripheral players makes for some juicy reading ... This book doesn’t go easy on Mr. Trump in any way, pointing out many of his well-documented lies, missteps, gaffs and embarrassments. He goes no easier on Democrats or liberals ... Old school Republicans will have to decide what he is, where they stand and how they’ll vote in 2020. Maybe this 'textbook' of recent GOP history will be of some assistance.