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

— Book review by Jens Kruse —

Journalism has been called “the first rough draft of history” and Tim Alberta’s book gives us the history of the ten years from February of 2008 to December of 2018, the history of, as the subtitle of his book states, the “Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.” He explains that “[t]he narrative I am setting forth in these pages” – all 612 of them – “is not meant to be comprehensive. What I have attempted to construct is an account guided by my own coverage of what, until the spring of 2016, was commonly known as the Republican civil war, as told through the eyes of the combatants on the front lines (ix).”

And Tim Alberta knows the combatants well and has reported on the issues at the center of their skirmishes and their battles for many years. He is currently the chief political correspondent for Politico Magazine, but prior to that he reported for the National Review and the Wall Street Journal, among others. In other words, he has covered the events and the actors of this decade of the history of the Republican Party, and, consequently, of the history of our body politic, not so much as a distant observer but as someone who has for many years been at the center of the storm.

His account may not be “comprehensive,” but it is hard to imagine a more broadly and deeply sourced and reported – and hence detailed and rich — account of these ten years. Alberta says that his “book is fashioned not as a traditional work of journalism, but as a storytelling narrative (ix).”

And what a storyteller Tim Alberta is! If a reader opening this book might be concerned that 600+ pages of narrative might not just be exhaustive, but also exhausting, s/he will soon be pleasantly surprised that Alberta tells the story briskly and muscularly, carrying the reader forward expertly. My interest in his account never flagged, and 600 pages never seemed long.

At the end of his “Author’s Note” Alberta writes:

It is my hope that by reading this account of the political and cultural turbulence that rattled the nation during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, you will gain a more textured understanding of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency – and of its implications for America. (x)

The “Prologue” of American Carnage paints the scene of Alberta sitting in front of the Resolute Desk with Trump behind it; in the “Epilogue,” after reviewing what Trump has done to the Republican Party and to Democratic presidential candidates, Alberta returns to that scene, asking the President whether he is “transitional or transformational.” After a brief pretense of coyness Trump answers: “Honestly, can there even be a question” (612)?

In between, Alberta takes us from the beginning of the 2008 presidential election season to the Democrat’s retaking of the House in 2018 and the subsequent Trump shutdown of the federal government.

If you have forgotten the myriad events that stressed and strained our politics and our society during that decade American Carnage will remind you of them: comprehensively, in vivid detail, and with relentless and compelling narrative analysis that does, perhaps more than any other book I have read recently, answer granularly the question with which Alberta opens his book: “How did Donald Trump become president of the United States” (vii)?

There, at the beginning, Alberta gives the answer that he will then exfoliate in all that follows:

Since the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, game attempts to solve this riddle have been subject to the same disorienting forces that came to define his political ascent: ideological bias and tribal loyalty, social alienation and demographic transition, institutional breakdown and political polarization.

There is a temptation not only to associate these things with Trump but, but to blame him for the havoc they hath [sic] wrought on America and the world. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his first two years in office, Trump defied every law of gravity while shattering societal conventions that will prove difficult to repair. In so doing, he nurtured narratives of his own centrality to a bruising reconfiguration of American life.

Trailblazing as he might be, Trump is not the creator of this era of national disruption. Rather, he is its most manifest consequence. (vi)

American Carnage. On the Frontlines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper, 2019) can be checked out from the Orcas Library. It is available through Darvill’s Bookstore.