Why we did it : a travelogue from the Republican road to Hell

Summary: Former Republican political operative Tim Miller admits what no one else on the right ever will: they all encouraged the madness that has overtaken the party. The Trumpification of the American right was the inevitable result of a series of decisions made by people like Tim Miller over the past decade. In a book that is part memoir, part anatomy of the Republican enablers, Tim Miller delivers the most honest insider assessment of the mindset of those who contributed to Trump's rise that has been delivered to date. Featuring astonishingly raw and candid interviews with former colleagues and friends who jumped on the Trump Train, he finally answers the question of why so many who knew better went along with the madness. When mainstream Republicans teamed up with Steve Bannon and Breitbart or implied Hillary committed murder or asked questions about Obama's birth certificate, they told themselves they were just playing "the game" but deep down they knew they were feeding the very mob that has now tried to upend our democracy. Churchill's famous statement about international diplomacy is applicable to the modern GOP as well: "Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured." Politicians and pundits know they get their power from whipping their base into a frenzy, assuming someone else would bear the brunt of their anger. But the Republican establishment were the ones who ended up getting eaten. In this hard-hitting critique, Miller wryly recounts the key moments that he and others-colleagues like Reince Priebus and Lindsay Graham-decided it was fine to encourage the Obama-birth-certificate and Clinton "Kill List" crowd as long as it was good for the team. The MSNBC contributor, Rolling Stone writer, and one of the strategists behind the famous 2012 RNC "autopsy" conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see. Miller warns that Republicans will continue to make the same choices and political calculations, with disastrous consequences for the nation, until his former friends are shaken from their self-deception and stop playing the dangerous games with our democracy that brought us to the brink.

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