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"The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new generation of Republicans-led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn-far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes, bringing American democracy to the very edge of reason The violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 was a terrible day for American democracy, but at least, many people dared hope that, after it was over, the fever would then be broken, Trump's absurd and relentless set of lies about the stealing of the 2020 election made unspeakable. That is not what happened. Instead, shockingly, "the big steal" has increasingly become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disturbing. That is the story Robert Draper tells here. Through his extraordinarily intrepid reporting on the ground across the country, Draper chronicles the road from January 6th to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the US Congress, as Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk have come to shape their party's terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago. He brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories-not just about "the big steal", but about COVID and vaccines, Antifa and BLM and George Soros and the Rothschilds and President Obama and on and on and on-the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. The leadership of the anti-Trump resistance among Republicans in Congress has cooperated extensively with the author; the book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call Conspiracyland. Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over 25 years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. It's difficult to imagine a book that could underscore the stakes of the 2022 midterm elections more powerfully"--

Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of important new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised, by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. Draper's fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. No one is cheap-shotted here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth - evidence to drive a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.

Intro -- Dedication -- Epigraph -- Cast of Characters -- Prologue: Evening, January 20, 2009 -- Part One: Reinforcements -- Chapter One: Tea Party Freshman -- Chapter Two: The Dean -- Chapter Three: Bayonets -- Part Two: Shut 'Er Down -- Chapter Four: Citizens in the Devil's City -- Chapter Five: Gabby -- Chapter Six: The Institutionalist -- Chapter Seven: State of the Weiner -- Chapter Eight: Madam Minority Leader -- Chapter Nine: Continuing Resolution -- Chapter Ten: Moment of Silence -- Chapter Eleven: Black Republican Out of Floridaxs -- Chapter Twelve: Radicalization -- Chapter Thirteen: Woman of a Certain Rage -- Chapter Fourteen: "You Hard Head" -- Part Three: "You Don't know Where I'm Coming From!" -- Chapter Fifteen: Draft Horse -- Chapter Sixteen: The Winning Message -- Chapter Seventeen: Side Pockets on a Cow -- Chapter Eighteen: "Here Is Your Shield" -- Chapter Nineteen: "Dropping Out of Things Is What I Do" -- Chapter Twenty: "You Are Wrong!" -- Part Four: Rascality -- Chapter Twenty-One: Coffee with Your Congressman -- Chapter Twenty-Two: The Hostage -- Chapter Twenty-Three: Lower, Ever Lower -- Epilogue: Evening, January 24, 2012 -- Afterword: January 2013 -- Acknowledgments -- About Robert Draper -- Notes -- Index -- Copyright.

In this press-wary administration, journalist Draper has accomplished a small miracle: He has knocked on all the right doors, and thus become the first author to tell a personality-driven history of the Bush years. With access to all the key figures of this administration and perhaps 200 other players, Draper delivers an intimate portrait of a tumultuous decade and a beleaguered administration, with a special emphasis on how the very personality of this strong-willed president has affected the outcome of events. Though the headlines may be familiar, the details, the utterly inside account of how events transpired will come as fresh reportage to even the most devoted followers of mainstream media coverage. Draper allows us to witness in complete granularity the personal force of a president determined to achieve big things, who confronted the history of his time with what can surely be described as dead certainty.--From publisher description

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- All About My Mother -- Candy -- The Education of Laura Bush -- The Witness -- Can you take a hint? -- What does Kay want? -- The price of being molly -- Lady Bird Looks Back -- O Janis -- The making of Barbara Jordan -- The Warrior's Bride -- The Queen Is Dead -- Lip Shtick -- Hallie and Farewell