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The fifth began with Ronald Reagan and will end with someone whose name we don’t know yet, but he or she will likely be elected president in 2028.
George Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
By 2015 it was Donald Trump who had once again melded the combative Rothbardian style to Buchananite ideology. Trump did not simply defeat Jeb Bush; he humiliated him and his family on a personal level. Ditto Ted “Your father shot JFK” Cruz, and Marco “Google ‘gay rumors’” Rubio. Many in the thinking class assume Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing,
... See moreMichael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
Georgia’s decades-long governmental disorganization had reached a level of chaos that seemed to defy solution, with no fewer than 102 departments, boards, bureaus and commissions, each capable of mobilizing a constituency to resist change, with duplicating functions and salaries, and no semblance of central budgetary controls or of control over
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
Lester Hunt, who later became the inspiration for one of the main characters in Allen Drury’s classic political novel Advise and Consent.
Susan Glasser • The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
Donald Trump had taken full page ads in several newspapers urging the death penalty, which helped whip up public opinion.
Sara Davidson • The Didion Files
More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15–$30 million to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the US Senate races. On a separate front, he explained to me, as the plane descended into Washington, DC, he was exploring the legality of paying Donald Trump himself not to run for president. His team had somehow created a back channel into
... See moreMichael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history.