Introduction: Face to Face with ‘The Donald’
1 Remarks by the president, 26 June 2015. White House Press Secretary.
2 Politico, 31 July 2016.
3 With neither candidate reaching the necessary 270 Electoral College votes to win – they would have been tied on 269 – the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives, where the Republicans hold the majority of state delegations. Trump, therefore, would have won.
Chapter 1: It’s Morning Again in America
1 Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 161.
2 The New York Times, 9 January 1983.
3 Steve Kornacki, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (HarperCollins, 2018), p. 20.
4 Ibid., p. 58.
5 Newsweek Election Extra, November/December 1984.
6 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin, 2004), p. 43.
7 Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2004.
8 H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (Anchor, 2016), p. 146.
9 Lou Cannon, The Role of a Lifetime (Public Affairs, 2000), p. 26.
10 Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, 1946–2004 (Knopf, 2009), p. 276.
11 Brands, p. 168.
12 Joe Klein, Politics Lost (Crown, 2007), p. 19.
13 Brands, p. 194.
14 Klein, Politics Lost, p. 62.
15 Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (Crown, 2003); Klein, Politics Lost, p. 96.
16 E. J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (Simon & Schuster, 2016), p. 234.
17 Cannon, p. 5.
18 Ibid., p. 32.
19 Donald Ritchie, ‘Who Moved the Inauguration? Dispelling an Urban Legend’, Oxford University Press blog, 22 January 2009.
20 Cannon, p. 120.
21 Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins, 2007), p. 258.
22 The New York Times, 29 July 1984.
23 Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House, 2017), pp. 255–6.
24 UPI, 5 July 1985.
25 Cannon, p. 40.
26 Hendrik Hertzberg, Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966–2004 (Penguin, 2004), p. 71.
27 Cannon, p. 98.
28 Hollywood Reporter, 6 January 2017.
29 Norman Mailer, Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays (Random House, 2014), p. 450.
30 Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford (Henry Holt, 2017), p. 122.
31 Cannon, pp. 81–2.
32 Ibid., p. 37.
33 Brands, p. 219.
34 The New York Times, 21 January 1981.
35 Cannon, pp. 76–7.
36 Ibid., p. 40.
37 Andersen, Fantasyland, p. 255.
38 Salon, 7 February 2015.
39 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (Mariner, 2009), p. 294.
40 Cannon, pp. 8–9.
41 Troy, p. 123.
42 Cannon, p. 8.
43 Yahoo, 22 September 2017.
44 Politico, ‘What I Learned Watching Back to the Future with Ronald Reagan’, 27 February 2018.
45 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 704.
46 Ed Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline (Abacus, 2012), p. 49.
47 The New York Times, 4 April 1984.
48 New York magazine, 29 January 2016.
49 Fortune, 1 December 1986.
50 Time, 16 January 1989.
51 The Daily Beast, 21 October 2015.
52 The New York Times, 21 November 1986.
53 The New York Times, 7 August 1983.
54 The New York Times, 25 September 1988.
55 The New York Times, 4 April 1984.
56 Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987), p. 176.
57 The New York Times, 4 April 1984.
58 Cooke, p. 339.
59 The Washington Post, 2 September 1987.
60 The New York Times, 7 September 1987.
61 The New York Times, 5 October 1987.
62 Politico, 25 October 2015.
63 The New York Times, 8 September 2015.
64 Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2016), p. 326.
65 Trump, p. 58.
66 Troy, p. 16.
67 The Atlantic, February 2010.
68 Forbes, 15 September 2015.
69 The Atlantic, February 2010.
70 Dionne, p. 32.
71 Ibid.
72 Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2004.
73 Brands, p. 539.
74 Troy, p. 321.
75 The Washington Post, 4 February 2011.
76 Schlesinger, p. 294.
77 The New York Times, 10 June 2004.
78 Ibid.
79 Politico, 16 January 2008.
80 Time, 27 January 2011.
81 Cannon, p. 9.
82 The New York Times, 5 March 1992.
83 The Atlantic, 30 June 2019.
Chapter 2: Goodbye to the Greatest Generation
1 Meacham, p. 495.
2 Ibid., p. 462.
3 The New York Times, 2 March 1991.
4 Meacham, pp. 471–2.
5 Ibid., p. 466; The New York Times, 2 March 1991.
6 The New York Times, 2 March 1991.
7 Meacham, p. 468.
8 Ibid., p. 469.
9 Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), p. 13.
10 Troy, p. 301.
11 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, p. 33.
12 Ibid.
13 Meacham, p. 117.
14 Ibid., p. 124.
15 Ibid., p. 325.
16 Newsweek, 19 October 1987.
17 Klein, Politics Lost, p. 101.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 103.
20 Ibid., p. 98.
21 Kornacki, p. 81.
22 Meacham, p. 357.
23 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, p. 8.
24 Meacham, p. xxxiii.
25 John Lawrence, ‘How the “Watergate Babies” Broke American Politics’, Politico, 26 May 2018.
26 David Osborne, ‘The Swinging Days of Newt Gingrich’, Mother Jones, 1 November 1984.
27 The Washington Post, 23 March 1989.
28 Los Angeles Times, 1 June 1989.
29 The Washington Post, 2 December 2018.
30 Kornacki, p. 111.
31 John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (Random House, 2006), p. xxii.
32 Kornacki, p. 85.
33 Meacham, p. 472.
34 Kornacki, p. 91.
35 The New York Times, 5 February 1992.
36 Kornacki, p. 153.
37 Ibid., p. 154.
38 Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1992.
39 The Washington Post, 29 February 1992.
40 Kornacki, p. 157.
41 The American Conservative, 30 May 2018.
42 Dionne, p. 107.
43 Kornacki, p. 167.
44 Ibid., p. 162.
45 Ibid., p. 191.
46 Ibid., p. 173.
47 Dionne, p. 108.
48 Kornacki, p. 209.
49 The Washington Post, 2 December 2018.
50 Associated Press, 5 December 2018.
51 Politico, 5 December 2018.
52 Meacham, p. 498.
53 Ibid., p. 511.
54 Ibid., p. 522.
Chapter 3: Bill and Newt
1 Harris, p. 9.
2 Kornacki, p. 216.
3 The New York Times, 2 February 1993.
4 Harris, p. 5.
5 Ibid., p. 329.
6 Klein, The Natural, p. 52.
7 Kornacki, p. 272.
8 Ibid., p. 266.
9 The Atlantic, November 2018.
10 Harris, p. 143.
11 Ibid., p. 82.
12 Kornacki, p. 261.
13 Ibid., p. 262.
14 Baltimore Sun, 27 July 1995.
15 ‘Did Bill Clinton Hold up LAX Air Traffic for a Haircut?’, Snopes, 27 July 2016.
16 Ken Jennings, Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture (Simon & Schuster, 2018).
17 Pew Research Center, 4 February 2016.
18 UPI, 2 April 1993.
19 Cooke, p. 354.
20 Harris, p. 147.
21 George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (Knopf, 2019), p. 312.
22 The Washington Post, 25 August 2016.
23 Harris, p. 115.
24 The New York Times, 3 October 1993.
25 The Washington Post, 25 August 2016.
26 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, p. 68.
27 Time, 7 June 1993.
28 Dionne, p. 118.
29 Kornacki, p. 248.
30 Klein, The Natural, p. 103.
31 The Atlantic, November 2018.
32 Kornacki, p. 291.
33 Ibid., p. 287.
34 The New York Times, 11 May 1995.
35 The New York Times, 7 November 1996.
36 Klein, The Natural, p. 8.
37 Packer, p. 311.
38 James Macgregor Burns and Georgia J. Sorensen, Dead Center: Clinton–Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation (Scribner, 1999), p. 219.
39 Dionne, p. 134.
40 Kornacki, p. 340.
41 Author interview with Toni Morrison.
42 The Atlantic, November 2018.
43 Klein, The Natural, p. 16.
44 Ibid.
45 Harris, p. 342.
46 Ibid., p. 347.
47 Lepore, p. 711.
48 The New Yorker, 11 March 2019.
49 Lepore, p. 707.
50 Klein, Politics Lost, p. 16.
51 Lepore, p. 714.
52 Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 36, 222.
53 Kurt Andersen, ‘The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously’, The New York Times, 6 February 2015.
54 Joseph Stiglitz, ‘The Roaring Nineties’, The Atlantic, October 2002.
55 Klein, The Natural, p. 13.
56 USA Today, 30 June 2014.
57 The New York Times, 28 April 1994.
58 Michael Burleigh, The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: A History of Now (Pan Macmillan, 2018), p. 257.
59 Salon, 11 September 2016.
60 ThoughtCo, 28 February 2019.
61 The New York Times, 20 October 2002.
62 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter, 2002.
63 Justice Department News, 29 January 1998.
64 ‘One Nation, Interconnected’, Wired, May 2000.
65 The New York Times, 4 September 2018.
66 Andersen, pp. 357–60.
67 Foreign Affairs, 1 October 2018.
68 USA Today, 21 August 2016.
69 The Atlantic, 22 August 2016.
70 Luce, p. 266.
71 Harris, p. 283.
72 Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998.
73 The Guardian, 19 June 2019.
74 Harris, p. 206.
75 Esquire, 17 June 2015.
76 Fortune, 22 July 1996.
77 Reuters, 17 July 2016.
78 Fortune, 22 July 1996.
79 Kornacki, p. 411.
80 Ibid., p. 412.
81 Ibid., p. 413.
82 Ibid., p. 412.
83 Politico, 25 October 2015.
84 The New York Times, 14 February 2000.
85 Ibid.
86 Dionne, p. 158.
Chapter 4: The Three Convulsions
1 Jean Edward Smith, Bush (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. xx.
2 Meacham, p. 553.
3 Dionne, p. 171.
4 The Atlantic, 27 August 2018.
5 Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution, 1 January 2001.
6 Vanity Fair, 19 March 2014.
7 Nation, 28 July 2015.
8 Smith, p. xxi.
9 Kornacki, p. 419.
10 Ibid., p. 422.
11 Ron Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (Penguin, 2008), p. 265.
12 The Washington Post, 11 September 2017.
13 The New York Times, 10 April 2005.
14 Lepore, p. 745.
15 The New York Times, 15 November 2001.
16 The Atlantic, 4 September 2013.
17 Klein, Politics Lost, p. 226.
18 The Washington Post, 11 September 2017.
19 The New York Times, 26 September 2006.
20 Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide (W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 5.
21 Smith, p. xv.
22 NPR, 5 April 2019; Forbes, 27 June 2014.
23 Burleigh, p. 11.
24 The New York Times, 1 July 2019.
25 Smith, p. 384.
26 Weekly Standard, 7 November 2001.
27 Friedman and Mandelbaum, p. 156.
28 The New York Times, 4 March 2001.
29 Lepore, p. 740.
30 Vanity Fair, 22 January 2016.
31 Ibid., March 2005.
32 Smith, p. 392.
33 Ibid., p. 415.
34 Washington Examiner, 3 September 2005.
35 Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart (Mariner, 2009), p. 6.
36 Ibid., p. 12.
37 Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (Penguin 2018), p. 166.
38 Bishop, p. 38.
39 The New Yorker, 27 December 2018; Fortune, 8 September 2016.
40 Smith, p. 441.
41 Ibid., p. 432.
42 The New York Times, 28 October 2016.
43 Luce, p. 272.
44 Friedman and Mandelbaum, p. 72.
45 The New York Times, 26 October 2011.
46 Governing.com, 29 January 2020.
47 Smith, pp. 636–7.
48 Dionne, p. 233.
49 Pew Research Center, 23 July 2009.
50 Dionne, p. 223.
51 David Autor and others, ‘Importing Political Polarisation: The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure’, December 2017.
Chapter 5: No You Can’t
1 Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (Basic Books, 2006).
2 Dionne, p. 287.
3 Ibid., p. 292.
4 CNN, 19 January 2008.
5 Robert Draper, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives (Free Press, 2012), p. xviii.
6 The New York Times, 14 January 2017.
7 Politico, 4 December 2016.
8 National Journal, 23 October 2010.
9 Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 129.
10 Politico, 4 December 2016.
11 Luce, p. 180.
12 CBS News, 2 November 2009.
13 Alter, p. 408.
14 New York Daily News, 5 February 2010.
15 Salon, 29 December 2019.
16 CNN, 28 January 2010.
17 Laura Flanders, At the Tea Party: The Wing Nuts, Whack Jobs and Whitey-Whiteness of the New Republican Right – and Why We Should Take It Seriously (OR Books, 2010), p. 239.
18 New York Review of Books, 19 December 2019.
19 ABC News, 15 February 2010.
20 The New York Times, 25 February 2014.
21 The Guardian, 29 May 2012; Politico, 31 July 2009.
22 Gallup, 19 June 2014.
23 Politico, 24 September 2013.
24 The Washington Post, 17 April 2013.
25 Reuters, 30 July 2013.
26 BBC News, 22 May 2016.
27 New York Review of Books, 23 May 2019.
28 Stiglitz, p. 30.
29 Vanity Fair, 31 May 2012.
30 Ibid., May 2011.
31 Forbes, 24 July 2018.
32 New York Magazine, 27 January 2015.
33 Burleigh, p. 261.
34 National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, December 2012.
35 Interview between Barack Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 30 August 2013.
36 Politico, 9 February 2017.
37 Vox, 10 January 2017.
38 Burleigh, p. 285.
39 The New York Times, 17 October 2004.
40 Wall Street Journal, 10 September 2013.
41 Barack Obama, ‘The Way Ahead’, The Economist, 8 October 2016.
42 New York Review of Books, 19 December 2019.
43 Statement by Barack Obama, 9 November 2016.
44 Michael Dimock, ‘How America Changed During Barack Obama’s Presidency’, Pew Research Center, 10 January 2017.
45 Ibid.
46 Slate, 11 June 2012.
47 Molly Reynolds, ‘President Obama’s Legislative Legacy and What It Means for the Next Generation’, Brookings Institution, 30 December 2016.
48 Alter, p. 224.
49 Dimock.
50 ‘Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data’, Council on Foreign Relations, 20 January 2017.
51 Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (Other Press, 2017), p. 82.
52 The New York Times, 17 January 2017.
53 The Atlantic, 10 August 2014.
54 Rachman, p. 164.
55 Dimock.
56 Alter, p. 279.
57 The New Yorker, 18 November 2016.
Chapter 6: The Donald Trump Show
1 Politico, 30 July 2009.
2 Lepore, p. 777.
3 Burleigh, p. 285.
4 CNN, 30 June 2016.
5 Salena Zito, ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’, The Atlantic, 23 September 2016.
6 Fortune, 8 November 2016.
7 Pew Research, ‘Greatest Dangers in the World’, 16 October 2014.
8 Nick Bryant, The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way (Random House, 2014).
9 Gallup, 8 November 2016.
10 The New York Times, 29 February 2016.
11 Ibid., 15 March 2016.
12 CNN, 6 May 2016.
13 BuzzFeed, 16 November 2016.
14 The New York Times, 19 October 2016.
15 Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 125.
16 Vox, 15 November 2019.
17 Columbia Journalism Review, 5 December 2017.
18 CNN, 8 November 2016.
19 The Atlantic, 15 September 2020.
20 CNN, 8 November 2016.
21 The New Yorker, 11 March 2019.
Chapter 7: American Carnage
1 The New York Times, 9 December 2017.
2 The New Yorker, 17 September 2108.
3 CNN, 23 December 2019.
4 The New Yorker, 27 July 2017.
5 Politico, 5 January 2018.
6 Salon, 29 February 2020.
7 Newsweek, 9 October 2019.
8 Bloomberg, 31 July 2019.
9 CNN, 27 November 2017.
10 The Daily Beast, 7 July 2017.
11 Pew Research Center, 8 January 2020.
Chapter 8: The Descent into January 6TH
1 Business Insider, 3 August 2020.
Conclusion: Present at the Destruction
1 The Week, 13 October 2019.
2 The New York Times, 27 November 2019.
3 New York Review of Books, 23 July 2020.
4 ‘Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-Pacific’, US Studies Centre, 19 August 2019.
5 Lepore, p. 726.
6 The Washington Post, 16 January 2019.
7 Business Insider, 9 July 2015.
8 Public Religion Research Institute, 21 February 2019.