F*ck Silence

Republican presidential candidate and former congressman Joe Walsh argues that Americans must treat Donald Trump like a threat unlike this country has seen: a self-obsessed strongman who resembles a leader of China or Russia more than the United States, and an existential danger to conservativism, the presidency, and national unity.

Republican presidential candidate and former congressman Joe Walsh is as rock-ribbed a conservative as they come. But he believes that no right-wing policy victory is worth the loss of our very democracy.

In this cleareyed and unsparing book, Walsh makes the case that Trump has more in common with the foreign dictators he praises publicly than a predecessor like Ronald Reagan. Trump has violated the Constitution in plain sight, assaulted democratic institutions, overwhelmed the country with disinformation, erected around him a cult of personality, and governed according to his narcissism more than any discernable political philosophy.

This is the behavior of a strongman—the type of person the Founders tried to prevent from ever becoming president.

Though Walsh agrees with Trump that the Washington elite has hung working-class America out to dry, traveling down the road to despotism is no response. For the first time in our history, a person who places himself above the rule of law and accountability sits in the Oval Office—all that’s missing is a big, beautiful throne behind the Resolute Desk. Joe Walsh challenges his countrymen, especially his fellow conservatives, to acknowledge and oppose this unpatriotic and unAmerican behavior before we give away what made America great in the first place: our democracy.