PARTY CRASHER In the chaotic world of American politics, about the only predictable event these days may be the regular release of a new book about the Trump administration — a phenomenon that describes nearly two dozen titles to date and that may soon include a memoir by the president’s eldest son as well as, eventually, one by the president himself. This week, the latest installment in the genre, “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump,” by Tim Alberta, enters the nonfiction list at No. 2. Most others of its ilk have also appeared there, proving, perhaps, that the one other reliable variable in national politics may be the reading public’s apparently insatiable appetite for Trumpiana.
Alberta’s book arrives with a Hollywood-ready title (a phrase liftedfrom Trump’s Inaugural Address) and trailing a flurry of news articles touting some of its more sensational tidbits (that example: Trump claims to have “spotted” the political talent of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez long before most Americans knew her name; that Roger Ailes, the longtime C.E.O. of Fox News who died in 2017, believed that Barack Obama “really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States”). But Alberta, the chief political correspondent for Politico, has loftier ambitions. Nearly 700 pages long and stocked with granular reporting, his book aspires to explain the Republican transformation, over the course of a decade marked by often bitter infighting, from the party of compassionate conservatism under George W. Bush and Mitt Romney to the overtly nativist party of Trump. (In a review, The Times called the book “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.”)
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