Nearly one third of Black men had entered the criminal justice system between 19.Like all reporters, Osnos is drawn to statistics, and the book is rich with numbers that shock: Osnos peers in between the cracks of America’s disparities – the rich and the poor, the white and the black, those who had lost hope and those who never had it – and sees running hot beneath them, like magma below a steaming lava field, the destructive flames that are consuming the American ideal. society – the Golden Triangle of Greenwich, Conn., five square miles “that represented the highest concentration wealth in America ” Clarksburg, West Virginia, gateway to coal country, where its once Democratic voters, devasted by lack of work and plagued by opiate addiction, fell sway to the empty promises of Trump and Chicago – Mud City – where the poorest black neighborhoods were stuck in a punishing bog of violence and poverty. In other words, the short answer to Why Trump? was this: Race, fear, resentment, greed, media, and raw politics.Įvan Osnos, a writer for The New Yorker, adds flesh to this skeletal response in Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury, and produces an explanatory body of highly-readable recent history that creates context for America’s current divisive tumble through the backwash of Trump and Covid.Īs a mechanism, Osnos reports on the rise, the fall, and the stagnation of three segments of U.S. and the cowardly moderate GOP pols who once they sniffed the direction of their base’s wind abandoned what few principles they had in favor of self-preservation.

the greed of wealthier Republicans who saw Trump for what he was but bet (correctly) on his willingness to enrich them further.the mendacity of conservative media (led by Murdoch and Fox), the death spiral of local news reporting, and the viral compression of the public attention span by social media.flaccid economies in former factory towns the created American’s first modern generation that wasn’t going to live better than its parents.working-class white backlash to Obama and the related fear in White America to the browning of the nation.I never developed a succinct answer from the many factors that put Trump in the White House: Immediately after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, friends from other countries like Mexico, Venezuela, or Spain asked me: How did this happen? How could Americans vote for such a thuggish clown?

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