The immersive, captivating untold story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, entrenching the political power of a radical right-wing fringe dedicated to dismantling democracy itself.
Inspired by Donald Trump’s election lies, a growing movement of grassroots activists mobilized around the country to pick up where the insurrection left off, laying the groundwork to succeed next time where Trump had failed to keep himself in power. But their own success in taking over and purging the Republican Party became their undoing as it drove away moderates and supplied the Democrats with a winning message in the 2022 midterms. Still, the MAGA Republicans proved uninterested in learning from that defeat, only becoming more extreme, divisive, and dead set on returning Trump to power.
Washington Post national political reporter Isaac Arnsdorf has spent years at the forefront of reporting on this growing movement. Drawing on extensive, exclusive on-the-ground reporting around the country, and deepened by historical context, Arnsdorf has produced the defining journalistic account of the origins, evolution and future of the MAGA movement. Combining critical and rigorous reporting with the intimacy and complexity of a novel, this book is unlike any other in the decade since Donald Trump convulsed and transformed American politics.
Finish What We Started tells the story of the ordinary Americans driving this change, who they are and where they came from, what motivates them, and what their movement means for the survival of American democracy.
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Many have been surprised at the radicalization of the Republican Party by fringe extremists but Isaac Arnsdorf, a talented young political reporter has been ahead of this story from the start. Now, in vivid and chilling detail he takes readers inside the grassroots of the MAGA movement as its foot soldiers fight to take over not just the Republican Party, but the entire country. Anyone trying to understand how America has come to the brink of embracing authoritarianism in 2024 should read this engagingly told yet terrifying book.
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Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right