I can’t imagine a funnier, more heartbreaking, insightful, and frightening book to read at this point in our country’s history than this book. I recommend it highly. I don’t have a nit to pick; I was glued to it from the minute I picked it up and finished it.

This is one of the most timely books you can read as the congressional and legal investigations into Trump’s treason and corruption continue. I read very few political books, but I’m glad I didn’t skip this one.

For several years, I’ve been dumbfounded, unable to understand how the  Republican Party’s most powerful leaders- people like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marcio Rubio,  Mitch McConnel, to mention just a few – all filled with scorn and contempt for Donald Trump’s candidacy – almost instantly became his greatest fans, ass kissers, excuses, and enablers after he won.

This is the greatest story of moral cowardice in American history that I know of. Benedict Arnold was a piker.

Lebovich knows all these “leaders” and asked them face-to-face about what was looking more and more like treason, a vicious President gone mad,  the Capitol riots, the lies about the election, and the answers he got were as chilling as the politician’s cowardice.

I can’t believe they talked to him so openly; I imagine they will regret it.

Lindsey Graham just wanted to be “relevant.” He has fun playing golf with the president.  Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker of the House; nobody knows what Mitch McConnell wants beyond stuffing the Supreme Court with political extremists; Marco Rubio just wanted to be important. Ted Cruz just wanted to be a snake with ambition, as everyone around him already knows he is.

Most of the others were just cowards terrified of drawing Trump’s wrath, an almost certain death sentence in today’s Republican Party, where vengeance against dissent or independent thinking is ruthless and quick.

This matters. This, says Lebovich,  is why Vladimir Putin and the Chinese no longer fear us and feel free to ignore us.

Since Trump was elected, our enemies, write Lebovich,  see us as a weaker and weaker country with no moral compass or strong leaders, divided and more vulnerable. I know now that they are right.

This book, combined with the January 6 super-sharp hearings on Capitol Hill, helped me understand the hearings much better and the role the Republican Party played in the tragedy and horror of January 6. Lebovich knows all the players and they almost all spoke with him or met with him or had lunch with him.

I may not want to hear what he says, but I know I need to. And he really seems to know what he is talking about.

I am surprised to say I must have laughed 100 times reading this book, sometimes so hard I had to read the passage to Maria. Lebovich has mastered the art of satire and absurdity while offering powerful and disturbing insights. He rarely forgets to keep us laughing.

I covered politics for a long time as a journalist, and politicians are famous for equivocating and ducking trouble. I have never heard of or met or read about any politician as dangerous and without any kind of ethical ground or restraint or morality than the Donald Trump in this book.  His taking over of a major political scandal is a tragedy for our country, as this book makes clear.

People who support him still will have to look in their own mirrors and answer to their own Gods. They are threatening something precious, and all that really stands between them and our democracy at the moment is a weak 80 old man with a good heart and a political party crammed with cowards.

Lebovich doesn’t write as one might expect a New York Times National Political Correspondent to write. He writes just like we all talk, making the book accessible and easy to read. I found myself laughing and gnashing my teeth at the same time. You have to take your medicine; my grandmother would tell me when I was sick.

When I stopped laughing – Lebovich is witty and clever – I started brooding. It’s not only not over yet; it could quickly get much worse if this sick and amoral man ever gets near the White House again.

Lebovich found that Republicans refer knowingly – and silently to “the Joke.” The Joke is that Donald Trump is a dangerous and mentally disturbed fool. They all admit it in private and to one another, he says, but no one left in the party except for a handful of doomed representatives and Mitt Romney – will say it out loud.

One of the great twists for me in this story is Lynn Cheney, a politician I’m not sure I ever agreed with about anything, who has become a hero to me, a shining star of courage, honesty, and patriotism.

She will almost certainly lose her seat in Congress (her party in Wyoming has convicted her for criticizing Trump.)

But she is one of those storied and genuine American heroes, willing to sacrifice herself to do the right thing. She may be the last one in Washington.

Those people stand in the way of evil because it is the right thing to do; damn the consequences. She shames the lackies and cowards in her party whenever she opens her mouth. She says this committee work is the most important thing she has ever done.

Lebovich reports that Cheney is admired by the same Republicans who accuse her of betraying her party and are running her out of politics. The hypocrisy and cowardice detailed in this story are stomach-churning. How did we fall this far?

It’s clear that Trump is a strong personality, but I couldn’t grasp how weak many influential people in his party are.

Lebovich has written an honest book – no, he-said-she-said stuff in Washington speak – and I would say an unflinching account of what he calls the moral rout of the Republican Party. I now know what happened and how it happened; I don’t have to wonder anymore, which is why the book is so important.

We never imagined the horror of Donald Trump could occur; we never imagined how he would survive two impeachments, so much bumbling, so many lies, so much corruption, and too much cruelty and too many crises, insults even to count – and now, in 2022, be planning to run for President again and be an almost certain nominee of his party.

You would think he would be too embarrassed to go out onto a golf course, let alone run for president. But there is no shame in the man, which is, it seems, what makes him so dangerous and effective. He is the leader of a whole political party that is the same way. No shame, not for him, not for them.

So many things that we could not imagine have become real, and I admit I was one of those squishy-headed writers who kept trying to explain Trumpism rather than just condemn it. I wanted to be better than him.

I love this book because Lebovich (who now works at the Atlantic Magazine) speaks in plain English and pulls none of the usual academic or journalistic punches.

He isn’t trying to explain or forgive Trump and his followers; as someone who traveled the country for a decade and followed Trump’s campaign closely, he tells us what he thinks, in straight, unsparing English,  and the book sure got me to sit up.

Trumpism is all about laziness, arrogance, and bigotry. It’s really. He says, as simple as that, something many people suspected but could not bring themselves to believe. Liberals and progressives are always wishy-washy this way. They never see it coming.

Trump is not. I’m convinced. He and his followers and slobbering acolytes are just as bad as I thought, except much worse.

Lebovich persuasively, thoroughly, and convincingly tracks the transformation of Rubio, Graham,  Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and the 123 House Republicans who voted to overturn the election.

As a highly respected National Political Correspondent for the New York Times, Mark Leibovich had a great view of Washington and politics in the Trump years, from his shocking victory in 2016 to his disastrous presidency to his lies and cruelty and incompetence, and finally, to the moral collapse of the Republican Party that enabled and led directly and excused the horrific attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It was one of the worst and most shameful days in American history. It woke us all up to the damage Donald Trump has done to our democracy and is determined to do again, with the hypocritical and cowardly collaboration of the most influential people in the Republican Party.

I decided to read this book because I am watching each of the hearings the April 6 Congressional committee has been producing on the attack and Donald Trump’s role in it. I needed to understand it.

This book is the very definition of a book I could not put down.

I read it in 24-hour hours (blessedly, it’s only 309 pages). It’s a credit to Leibovich’s skills as a humorist and a gifted journalist that I laughed a score of times while reading the book – he is stomach-achingly funny – until I wanted to cry. And suddenly, I wasn’t laughing at all.

The story of the cowardly and immoral collapse of the Republican Party – which had several opportunities to stop Trump – is at the heart of the book.

Leibovich focused much of the book on the Trump Hotel, the President and his family’s money laundering, and insurrectionists’ plotting center. The butt-kissers, dictators, lobbyists, and oddballs attracted to our President used it as their headquarters, from Rudy Guiliani to the Proud Boys and various Ukrainian crooks.

It was also one of the focal points for the bootlickers of the Republican Party to be seen and noticed by Trump and for him to preen away from all those elitists and RINOs who hated him. One of the world’s most hateful men, he was desperate to be loved.

According to Lebovich, Trump had a steak dinner at the hotel nearly 40 times during his presidency (he also charged the Proud Boys $1,600 a night to stay and plot to kill Vice President Pence, who wasn’t going along with Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election. There is no record of him eating anywhere else in Washington or Mar-a-Largo in those four years.

Leibovich has a genius for humor (his bestseller This Town, about Washington in the Obama era, was hilarious and telling).

But one warning: he doesn’t leave us with much to feel good about.

“A former Republican congressman told me recently that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved darkly divine intervention. “We’re just waiting for him to die,” he said. That was it; that was the plan. He was 100 percent serious. But soon enough, 2004 won’t be a long way off. Trump will likely be alive. He’s running again will no longer be hypothetical. The crowds will return to the arenas and to the next Trump Hotel or wherever the lights go on next. So will the original owner, primed for a return engagement as the Republican standard-bearer-because what could go wrong?

And who would stop him?”

I am somewhat more optimistic than he is, Liz Cheney has put some big holes in the Trump fever, and she’s not finished yet. Her sacrifice will not, I think, be for nothing, even if that takes a while. She won’t have to wait for history to praise her, she is admired right now all over the world.

This is a very special book that will not leave you happy but will make you a lot wiser. If you are like me, you just first need to understand how this could have happened. The future is not knowable, our country’s recent past needs to be understood.