Fools on the Hill

By Dana Milbank

Page I bailed on: 38

Verdict:  Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank’s previous book The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party did a decent job giving an account of the historical process that culminated in the triumph of the Trump MAGA movement. This book is more like a reporter’s notebook though, and is mainly just a collection of pieces on the clown show that Congress turned into in the 2020s.

But if you follow politics you probably already know more than enough already about figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and all the other “hooligans, saboteurs, conspiracy theorists, and dunces” who attracted so much media attention. And it didn’t take long before I got tired of the litany of outrageous pronouncements made by these whackos on social media, and the scandalous behaviour of this lunatic fringe. One question still in need of answering is how much of this is just performance and how much is the expression of sincerely held beliefs (read: psychosis). Though I suspect that at this point the performance may have created its own alternative reality, making the question moot.

So this is another DNF that isn’t a bad book but that I just didn’t feel any need to stick with for 350 pages, especially as I skimmed ahead and didn’t see where Milbank was coming to any new or profound conclusions about what was going on. “This is no way to run a country and certainly no way for a democracy to function,” he says at one point when talking about the outsized influence the crazies have. “But this is our current reality.”

Except the book came out at the beginning of 2024 and the “current reality” was about to get a lot worse.

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