Connect with us

Привет, что-то ищете?

The Times On Ru
  1. The Times On RU
  2. /
  3. Новости США
  4. /
  5. American Carnage: a masterful must-read on Trump’s Republican takeover

Новости США

American Carnage: a masterful must-read on Trump’s Republican takeover

Like the deity on the sixth day of creation, Donald Trump has recast the Republican party in his own image. Aggrieved and belligerent is the new normal. The soul of the party has migrated from the sun belt to the Bible belt, from the suburbs to rural America, from a message suffused with upward arc to one brimming with resentment.

Trump calls Ocasio-Cortez ‘Evita’ in new book American Carnage

Read more

The 45th president has won the hearts and minds of the faithful while turning off the rest of America. According to a recent poll, Trump has garnered the approval of seven in eight Republicans even as he trails Megan Rapinoe, the star of the champion US women’s soccer team, 42%-41%. All this despite an economy that moves forward.

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, has written a masterful must-read. Across 600-plus pages, he chronicles more than a decade of transformation and turmoil within what was once but is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the past half-century, the GOP has dramatically changed. New England and New York’s tony bedroom communities are now Democratic. The old Confederacy is a contiguous sea of Republican red. In the 2018 midterms, the GOP captured 9% of the black vote. In 1972, they got twice that.

The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing

Paul Ryan

Subtitled On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, American Carnage delivers a lively tick-tock on how the party moved from George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the jagged contours of Maga. Trump emerges as the vehicle and voice of white evangelicals and white Americans without a four-year degree, the operative word being “white”.

Alberta is mindful that the winds of proto-Trumpism were present before Bush had left office. In his telling, Sarah Palin – who once bragged of her husband and herself: “He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack” – was a harbinger of a post-Bush world.

American Carnage records Karl Rove, Bush’s political brain, branding Palin “vacuous” and evidencing a Republican tropism toward “wanting people who would throw bombs and blow things up”. While Trump was the “ultimate expression” of that impulse, Rove says, Palin was an “early warning bell”.

As framed by Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and 2012 vice-presidential candidate: “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.” Against the backdrop of failure in Iraq, the Great Recession, displacement and globalization, Trump delivered “hope” to voters Hillary Clinton discounted as deplorable.

Alberta’s storytelling is bolstered by his access to powers that be and were. Trump, Ryan and John Boehner, another ex-speaker, all go on the record. American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness.

For example, Alberta lets us know the fix was in at Fox News for Trump during the Republican primaries, in a manner akin to the Democratic National Committee putting its thumb on the scales for Clinton. Ted Cruz, Texas’ grating junior senator, never had a real chance with the network built by the late Roger Ailes.

One Fox staffer told Cruz: “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on the air.” Or, as Cruz put it after Ailes’ death in 2017: “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.” Alberta lets us know that Ailes believed Barack Obama “really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States”.

American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness

American Carnage also crystalizes Trump’s own penchant for eavesdropping. In early 2012, as the primaries were heating up, Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, met with Michael Cohen, Trump’s then consigliere who is now a resident of a federal correctional facility. They discussed the prospect of Trump meeting Romney. Alberta lays out what happened next: “Cohen was suddenly interrupted by a voice crackling over a speakerphone on the table. It was Trump. He had been listening the entire time …”

In describing the 2012 race, Alberta conveys the mistaken belief held by Romney’s team that that he would win based upon pre-election polling. American Carnage, however, makes no mention of a poll circulated on the Saturday night before the election by Alex Gage, which showed Obama with at least 300 electoral votes. Gage was a veteran of the Bush 2004 re-election effort and Romney’s 2008 campaign. His then wife, Katie Packer, was Romney’s deputy campaign manager.

Alberta sheds light on Trump’s thinly reported May 2016 meeting with Rove. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s then campaign manager, called the get-together “good” without saying more. American Carnage brings color and detail.

Trump appears both ignorant of the realities of the electoral map and appreciative of the tutorial. The two men review Trump’s path to an electoral college majority, Rove correcting his eager but pride-filled pupil. Trump poses the possibility of winning California, New York and Oregon, only to be shot down. The last time any of those states went Republican was more than 30 years ago.

Ted Cruz exploded over Fox News’s pro-Trump bias in 2016, new book claims

Read more

Rove explains that Iowa, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are winnable if the campaign husbands its time and energy. Trump turns to Steve Wynn, a casino magnate subsequently felled by allegations of sexual misconduct, and exclaims: “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”

Alberta makes clear that Trump was the only candidate capable of harnessing populist fury into something more than a collection of raw emotions. Clinton’s worship at the altars of identity politics and political correctness helped cost her the election, just as Trump’s lack of a filter endeared him to his base.

Although Clinton finished with nearly 3 million more votes, Trump sits in the Oval Office. As Alberta observes, authenticity remains in high demand, more so than reality.

Trump is embattled but far from despairing. “I fucking love this job,” he “howls” to no one in particular, backstage at a rally in Columbia, Missouri, in November 2018.

He knows he is transformative.

“Honestly,” Trump tells Alberta. “Can there even be a question?”

Оставить комментарий

Leave a Reply

Ваш адрес email не будет опубликован. Обязательные поля помечены *

Стоит Посмотреть

Новости По Дате

Январь 2021
Пн Вт Ср Чт Пт Сб Вс
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Вам может быть интересно:

Спорт

Zen Чемпионка Европы по фигурному катанию Алена Косторная заявила изданию Sport, что пропустит сразу два соревновательных сезона «для решения личных проблем». Что скрывается за...

Общество

ZenДОНЕЦК, 3 ноября. Число раненых в результате атаки украинского беспилотника на станцию ​​Никитовка в Горловке в ДНР возросло до двух человек, сообщил мэр города...

Бизнес

В третьем квартале 2024 года более 70% особо критических киберинцидентов были связаны с компрометацией учетных записей сотрудников. По данным центра противодействия кибератакам Solar JSOC...

Спорт

Дзен Ровно 95 лет назад родился советский вратарь Лев Яшин. В 1963 году он стал обладателем главной индивидуальной награды в мировом футболе — «Золотого...