I had rheumatic fever as a child. I read all I could find on my illness when I was 14. I didn’t like what I read. I might have had a different life if I didn’t read what I did. I’ve done a lot of things in my life I’m not proud of, but I would only change one. My guidance counselor in high school said I should think about becoming a school teacher. I didn’t even consider it. Later in life, I thought it would have been nice to have summers off. I would never have thought I would ever write a book. I went to welding school, so I believe I’m more qualified to write a book than Beck or Hannity. I’ve got to have a higher IQ. More important, I care about America.

I had rheumatic fever as a child. I read all I could find on my illness when I was 14. I didnt like what I read. I might have had a different life if I didnt read what I did. Ive done a lot of things in my life Im not proud of, but I would only change one. My guidance counselor in high school said I should think about becoming a school teacher. I didnt even consider it. Later in life, I thought it would have been nice to have summers off. I would never have thought I would ever write a book. I went to welding school, so I believe Im more qualified to write a book than Beck or Hannity. Ive got to have a higher IQ. More important, I care about America.

A leading pollster and adviser to America’s most important political figures explains why the Republicans will crash in 2020. For decades the GOP has seen itself in an uncompromising struggle against a New America that is increasingly secular, racially diverse, and fueled by immigration. It has fought non-traditional family structures, ripped huge holes in the social safety net, tried to stop women from being independent, and pitted aging rural Evangelicals against the younger, more dynamic cities. Since the 2010 election put the Tea Party in control of the GOP, the party has condemned America to years of fury, polarization and broken government. The election of Donald Trump enabled the Republicans to make things even worse. All seemed lost. But the Republicans have set themselves up for a shattering defeat. In RIP GOP, Stanley Greenberg argues that the 2016 election hurried the party’s imminent demise. Using amazing insights from his focus groups with real people and surprising revelations from his own polls, Greenberg shows why the GOP is losing its defining battle. He explores why the 2018 election, when the New America fought back, was no fluke. And he predicts that in 2020 the party of Lincoln will be left to the survivors, opening America up to a new era of renewal and progress.

A takedown of the GOP’s deceitful propaganda machine from the blogger of Salon’s Unclaimed Territory and the author of the New York Times bestsellers How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy. Ever since the cowboy image of Ronald Reagan was sold to Americans, the Republican Party has used the same John Wayne imagery to support its candidates and take elections. We all know how they govern, but the right-wing propaganda machine is very adept at hijacking debate and marketing their candidates as effectively as the Marlboro Man. For example: Myth: The Republican nominee is an upstanding, regular guy who shares the values of the common man. Reality: He divorced his first wife in order to marry a young multimillionaire heiress whose family then funded his political career. Myth: Republicans are strong on defense and will keep us safe. Reality: They prey on fears, and their endless wars make America far less secure. Myth: Republicans are the party of fiscal restraint and small, limited government. Reality: Soaring deficits, unchecked presidential power, and an increasingly invasive surveillance state are par for their course. The first book to dissect the Republican Cult of Personality and leave it openly exposed in its unabashed, shameful depravity, Great American Hypocrites is a deeply necessary call-out to Democrats to attack the GOP with their competitor’s very own weapons. Praise for Great American Hypocrites “Intelligent, insightful.” —Daily Kos “Glenn Greenwald has done it again.” —Alan Colmes “Glenn Greenwald is a treasure.” —BuzzFlash

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." —The New York Times Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

New York Times' Top Books of 2019 Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at 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. The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural and demographic landscape, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the Republican Party—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party obsessed with the national debt vote for trillion-dollar deficits and record-setting spending increases? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and walls? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-divorced philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive? Loaded with exclusive reporting and based off hundreds of interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, and many others—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.