Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy

by Isaac Arnsdorf

Overview

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Pick

"Entertaining, enlightening and disturbing." - Ira Glass

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 movement 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.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316497510
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	100,696
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Isaac Arnsdorf is a national political reporter for The Washington Post who covers former president Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” political movement, and the elected officials, activists, donors and media figures on the right who are powering the Republican Party. He was previously an investigative reporter covering national politics at ProPublica and a money-in-politics reporter at Politico. His reporting on President Trump's agenda for veterans won the Sidney Hillman Foundation's Sidney Award and the National Press Club's Sandy Hume Award. Finish What We Started is his first book. 

Editorial Reviews

02/19/2024

Washington Post journalist Arnsdorf debuts with a raucous recap of the evolution of Trumpism since the 2020 election via the “Precinct Strategy,” a movement encouraging adherents to join the Republican Party’s lowest ranks as precinct committeemen, from which vantage point they can oust moderate Republican leaders and promote MAGA primary candidates. Arnsdorf profiles leading characters in this political drama, including Arizona Republican Dan Schultz, who started the movement; MAGA generalissimo Steve Bannon, who boosted it on his War Room podcast; and Georgia mom Salleigh Grubbs, whose viral video of election workers allegedly shredding ballots set her on a path to becoming chairwoman of her local precinct committee, where she oversees campaigning and election monitoring. Arnsdorf spotlights MAGA extremism (“To talk to Susan... was to hear about how the person in the White House was a body double or a clone wearing a Joe Biden mask”) and paints a fascinating picture of politics at its grubbiest in tedious party meetings where factions wrestle over Robert’s Rules of Order. His colorful reportage teases out from the tangle of conspiracy theorizing the deeper yearning of MAGA zealots to have their voices heard in a world that seems immovably complex and atomized. It’s an entertaining and insightful look at the Republican Party in extremis. Agent: Isabel Mendia, Cheney Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Isaac has a great eye for a story, and hangs out with people we all need to know.  I was thrilled to run some of the early reporting from this book on our radio show, and I’m sobered to see how it all played out in the months after. An entertaining, enlightening and disturbing book."—Ira Glass, host of This American Life

“Finish What We Started is a bracing, deeply reported dispatch from the front lines of the MAGA movement — a movement that, as Isaac Arnsdorf convincingly shows here, is more radical and determined than ever as it gathers force for Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House.”—Joshua Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Devil’s Bargain

“Isaac Arnsdorf is a political journalist par excellence, whose work is shaped by deep, immersive reporting, perceptive analysis and a keen understanding of history. Finish What We Started is a sophisticated yet unnerving portrait of the MAGA movement and a stark preview of what a second Trump term might portend. This is urgent and essential reading for anyone who cares about the state of America’s democracy.”—Philip Rucker, co-author of the New York Times bestselling A Very Stable Genius

“Isaac Arnsdorf ventures beyond the punditry of Washington, D.C and delivers a revealing, distinctive look at how our nation's democracy might be forever changed. Peppered with scoops and fresh insight, Finish What We Started manages to be both spritely and ominous, a closely-reported depiction of the reorientation of modern politics.” —Robert Samuels, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

"This book is extraordinary. By turning the lens away from the palace intrigues that crowd far too many Trump books, patiently earning the trust of his most devoted grassroots followers to document without adornment what they actually say and think instead, Isaac Arnsdorf has provided an invaluable service for future historians. But you can read it now. And you must. Your jaw will drop. Even mine did."—Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland

“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.”—Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

"An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party."—Kirkus

"Washington Post journalist Arnsdorf debuts with a raucous recap of the evolution of Trumpism since the 2020 election via the 'Precinct Strategy,' a movement encouraging adherents to join the Republican Party’s lowest ranks as precinct committeemen, from which vantage point they can oust moderate Republican leaders and promote MAGA primary candidates...It’s an entertaining and insightful look at the Republican Party in extremis."—Publishers Weekly

“In Finish What We Started, Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter at The Washington Post, offers the first extended examination of Trump’s remarkable rise from the depths of his humiliation after the failed January 6 coup to his resurgence as the Republican front-runner… Filled with telling anecdotes and vivid prose, his book provides an essential guide to understanding Trump’s political resilience. He suggests that the 2022 midterm elections were the closest America has come to being seized by a far right fringe that is redoubling its efforts to orchestrate an authoritarian seizure of power in 2024.”—Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Monthly

“There have been several books about the Trumpification of the Republican Party focused on the politicians and operatives who allowed such a transformation to happen. “Finish What We Started” focuses instead on the ordinary foot soldiers in the MAGA grass roots — the “faces in the crowd” who, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, continued to insist that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and are determined to never let such an outrage happen again….Arnsdorf’s book arrives at a moment when Democrats are warning that Trump and the MAGA movement are seeking to end democracy as we know it”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

From the Publisher

02/15/2024

Washington Post national political reporter Arnsdorf delves into the origins and evolution of the Trump-inspired Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. He interviewed hundreds of people over the course of three years to examine what motivates and stirs the MAGA supporters into action. A big factor is their strong dissatisfaction and desire to dismantle traditional political parties. He discusses the perceived leadership traits of Donald Trump but stresses that the MAGA movement is more than devotion to one man. For example, Steve Bannon is a provocative presence throughout the book, along with other prominent far-right figures. The lesser-known Dan Schultz emerges as a key figure as well. The heart of the book is a blow-by-blow account of how MAGA candidates took over the Republican Party in Maricopa County, AZ, using a precinct strategy devised by Schultz. He also writes at length about Salleigh Grubbs, a Republican Party worker in Georgia. She worked tirelessly to try to invalidate Biden's victory there in 2020. VERDICT This eye-opening, often terrifying (for democracy advocates) debut work is rich with political history and recent case studies. Highly recommended for readers wanting to understand how millions of Americans have been swept up in the MAGA universe.—Thomas Karel

Library Journal

2024-02-14
MAGA is coming for democracy, but first it’s coming for the GOP.

“Our audience does not hate these people,” said Steve Bannon of Democrats. “But they hate the RINOs.” In his first book, Washington Post politics reporter Arnsdorf notes that, since the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, when Trump-approved candidates lost nationwide, it was Republican boards, commissioners, and judges who fended off challenges. There were Republican governors and operatives in places such as Pennsylvania and Arizona who counted the votes that lost Trump the presidency in 2020. “Even Trump’s own vice president refused to help him block the official certification in Congress,” writes the author. Consequently, one of MAGA’s chief goals is to take over all those downstream positions so that loyalists can force out moderates and never-Trumpers and fill the ranks with true believers. Never mind that true believers are very much in the minority and that the fringe is broadly unpopular. Never mind, Arnsdorf writes, that they “disconnected from the rest of the country.” In their campaign to capture the GOP, they have been successful, helped along by election deniers and Capitol stormers for whom loyalty to Trump is the only litmus test. Ironically, as one longtime Arizona GOP operative told Arnsdorf, most of the recruits into the far-right movement, as well as candidates for local posts such as precinct commissioner, rarely or never voted before 2020, while local MAGA darling Kari Lake was an Obama supporter before seeing greener pastures in Trumpland. Given MAGA’s remake of the GOP, with no small help from QAnon initiates, it’s small wonder that most of the candidates being fielded at every level are MAGA approved and that the Republican Party is what Bannon calls “a revolutionary vanguard” for the extreme right.

An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party.

Kirkus Reviews