Politico Magazine's chief political correspondent examines 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.
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.
