The owner of the pizzeria, James Alefantis, had been mentioned in the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, which ignited a frenzy of speculation about the pizza joint’s putative role in a pedophile ring led by Clinton. One arrived on December 4, 2016, when a heavily armed 28-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove from North Carolina to attack a pizzeria in Northwest Washington, D.C., called Comet Ping Pong. In recounting the saga of the GOP after January 6, he explains how and why it continues to prostrate itself to Trump.ĭraper sets the stage for January 6 by highlighting a number of instances of right-wing violence that presaged it. What distinguishes his account from a number of new books about the GOP-including Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists, which traces the rot in the party to the ascension of Newt Gingrich in 1992, and David Corn’s American Psychosis, which emphasizes the long-standing tradition of conspiracy-mongering in the Republican Party-is his firsthand reporting. He has traveled widely across America to interview both them and their followers. Draper, who is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, focuses on far-right House Republican firebrands such as Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. Now Draper illuminates the enduring grip of the paranoid style in the party-and Trump’s ability to gull his followers-by focusing on the aftermath of January 6.

Such an upbringing has only augmented Draper’s current consternation at the GOP’s conversion from a party into a Trumpian cult. At most, he intimates in his introduction that in writing about the Republican Party over the past two decades, he may have been overly influenced by the example of his late father-a former Marine, capitalist, family man, and lifelong Republican-to view the party with a degree of respect it has not merited. In his excellent new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion, Robert Draper does not delve into the GOP’s past predilection for extremism. Even the events of January 6, 2021, proved no more than a speed bump for the Trumpian project, whose adherents are exploiting it as a kind of Beer Hall Putsch moment to double down on purging the GOP and ensuring fresh fealty to the former guy. In the present day, the GOP’s delusions have become so pervasive that even former party stalwarts such as Liz Cheney have ended up as lonely dissidents, reduced to hoping that some sliver of sanity can be retrieved from the wreckage to rebuild the party. Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind

Robert draper new book