(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

In this groundbreaking battery of dispatches from the heartland of America, Matt Taibbi tells the full story of the Trump phenomenon, from its tragi-comic beginnings to the apocalyptic election. Full of sharp, on-the-ground reporting and gallows humour, his incisive analysis goes beyond the bizarre and disturbing election to tell a wider story of the apparent collapse of American democracy. Taibbi saw the essential themes right from the start: the power of spectacle over truth; the end of a shared reality on the left and right; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism.
From the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the aimless Hillary Clinton campaign, across the flailing media coverage and the trampled legacy of Obama, this is the story of ordinary voters forced to bear witness to the whole charade. At the centre of it all, "a bumbling train wreck of a candidate who belched and preened his way past a historically weak field" who, improbably, has taken control of the world's most powerful nation.
This is essential and hilarious reading that explores how the new America understands itself, and about the future of the world just beyond the horizon.

What a brilliant book! I was kinda expecting a Donald Trump beat-up for 350 pages, what I got was one of the most interesting political books I have ever read.

Sure, this starts out as a "Who the hell does Trump think he is?" story, it quickly comes to show the US political system in all its ugliness. It details how Trump bypassed the "tried and true" Republican system for selecting candidates by not bowing down to financial interests and running his own race - whether the Republican hierarchy liked it or not. It talks about the failings of the Democrats for not taking him more seriously and for ignoring the warning that the Bernie Sanders support told them about the future of the party.

This book was taken from articles the author did for Rolling Stone during the election campaign. They are hilarious, thought-provoking and, most importantly, spot on. Yes, Donald Trump is a lunatic in a businessman's body - but he worked out a way around the big-business interests in politics. He cut a swathe through the rich and powerful, dragging along those who were fed up with the rich, career politicians from both sides. He was, in effect, the star of another reality TV show: Election 2016.

A highly recommended book, regardless of what side of the fence you sit on politically.


Paul
ARH

Let me start by saying that I'm not American, nor do I live in USA. I was looking at the US presidential election as a complete outsider. I'm always more or less aware of what is happening in the US, who's the president, whats the latest scandal, latest mass shooting or foreign country invasion. Because of the power and meaning of the US to the world, important thing from US are being reported throughout the world. However, I work in American company (whose name is scattered in this very book in an unflattering way, which made me question my life choices), and my team consists of mostly of Americans. So one day it inevitably came to a call on which I learned who one of my teammates is supporting in this election. I was profoundly confused and shocked that he was a strong Trump supporter. At that time I didn't know much about Trump, but I just knew that he's a ridiculous person that could never be president. But I didn't have any strong arguments at that time, that could help me with a discussion. Now I know that any discussion will be fruitless and pointless. But this moment urged me to learn more about US presidential election. Eh... and I learned a lot about why Trump should not be a president, and that he's ridiculous is just a top of an iceberg.

My interest in American politics brought me to this book, Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus. I didn't know the author before, but I've seen him on The Daily Show. He seemed like a reasonable guy, and the title of the book is just perfect so I decided to give this book a try. It's a collection of essays that were published in Rolling Stone since 2015 when the whole madness started. It's fascinating to read those essays now, when we know what happened at the end. To read about the moments when Taibbi was predicting that Trump's campaign is going nowhere, that they made a horrible mistake that he won't be able to recover from. Eh...

This book gave me a unique look at American politics, how the campaign works, how the media works with the politics. And let use one of Trump's favorite words to describe it all: SAD. Taibbi delivers an analysis of what went wrong in American political system, how it took years to build a ground for a 'outsider' like Trump to came and grab the Oval Office for himself. Highly recommended read for everyone who's trying to understand how the hell it all happened.

The wonderfully titled Insane Clown President reprints Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone articles from this past election, starting in August 2015 to the aftermath of that apocalyptic Election Night. The book has its moments but Taibbi isn’t the most original of commentators, more often than not going with the overall media narrative, so, if you followed the election closely like me, this reads more like a summary of the whole thing than a unique insight from the campaign trail.

Annoyingly, it takes a while to get going. His intro and reprinted intro from his 2008 book The Great Derangement(!), basically say the same thing: America’s getting dumber and shallower and that doesn’t bode well for the future. He’s essentially taking credit for predicting Trump which, no, sorry, and besides it’s a weak, repetitive beginning. To be fair though, later on in an early 2016 piece he writes a fair assessment of Trump, highlighting his good and bad points, and is savvy enough then to predict a Trump presidency.

Then (12% in! I read this on Kindle) we’re into the book proper with the 17 Republican candidates (labelled the “clown car”) blathering it out among themselves for the nomination. Taibbi laughs off Trump as unserious, how his very presence there shows the end of the Republican Party, and that he’ll never be the nominee, let alone win against Hillary. There was also a lot of talk about Republicans needing to completely revamp their party in a 21st century style to appeal to minorities and that Trump seemingly losing the Latino vote with his offensive comments would cost him the election. I’ll admit to thinking these same things, as many people did, and how wrong we all were!

It was funny to be reminded of the bizarre mudslinging that went on during the nominations, particularly what went Ted Cruz’s way. Cruz was literally accused of being the Zodiac Killer whose dad was in league with Lee Harvey Oswald in the JFK assassination, and a neurologist actually wrote an article on why his face is so punchable. I laughed so much at those insane accusations - it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving candidate! The drinking game articles on the Republican Nominee debates though were lame, as was the one on casting the movie of the election.

Taibbi reviews the culture that allowed Trump to rise to the top and finds its roots in Dubya. Almost as a reaction to having an intellectual like Obama as a two-term President, a trend of anti-intellectualism was on the rise which Trump was able to exploit. But of course there’s more to it than that. Trump and Bernie Sanders were the two candidates people were most pumped about as Trump made it a point that he was funding his own campaign while Bernie wouldn’t take corporate money. The message was clear: neither would be beholden to corporations in office unlike Hillary who couldn’t stop taking their “donations”. It shows the mood of the country, that people in general are sick of insider corruption and feel betrayed by their politicians hence why a significant number of voters respond to candidates who appear to be separate from it.

He also takes a look at the left, criticising the Democratic National Committee who didn’t learn from Bernie’s popularity and just how close Hillary came to losing the nomination, as well as noting the startlingly crazy stuff that emerged from Trump’s victory with some commentators – sadly one of my favourite political writers, Andrew Sullivan, was among them – talking about changing the system to stop dumb people from voting!

The post-election article where he’s trying to make sense of what’s happened was definitely my favourite. To his credit Taibbi is aware of the media’s shortcomings in this election cycle – including his own – in overestimating their influence (earlier in the book he talks almost proudly of the media’s ability to destroy candidates like Howard Dean after a gaffe – but somehow they couldn’t bring down Trump, signalling their decline in power) and talking too much amongst themselves instead of listening to what ordinary voters were saying.

More importantly he highlights the shocking failings of the Clinton campaign and why Hillary lost. Bill and Hillary were once optimistic and idealistic, pursuing policies to benefit the American people but, after decades of being ground down in the realities of politics, they’ve become cynical and made a conscious decision, shortly after Bill’s presidency, to pursue money instead, becoming multi-millionaires in the process.

Obama indirectly criticised Hillary by noting in a post-election speech that when he ran for President he campaigned tirelessly in the smallest communities, even the ones where he was told he didn’t stand a chance, meeting as many people as possible – a tactic that Trump also used in this election. Hillary meanwhile did far less grassroots campaigning, allegedly doing over 400 corporate fundraisers instead and relied on public opinion from a computer program called Ada!

Hillary was an unlikeable, unappealing candidate who ran a garbage campaign, blocking out dissent and living in an echo chamber, so divorced from reality that there was a story that in her campaign headquarters her staffers were popping champagne on the morning of the election! As weird and important as Trump’s ascension was, it feels like there’s a more fascinating book to be written on Hillary’s enormously corrupt campaign.

If you followed the election closely, there’s not going to be a whole lot new to you here, though if you didn’t, Taibbi is an informative, sometimes witty, and largely non-partisan writer who does a decent job of summarising the madness, particularly as the pieces were written as the events were happening, reflecting the perceptions of the time. That’s also its flaw as Taibbi tends to often defer to the mainstream political narrative than question it and try to be more objective. That said, it was such a strange and eventful election that reliving parts of it remain entertaining and he is occasionally insightful on certain aspects to make reading it worth my while. It’s not the definitive book on the 2016 Election but it’s not a bad one on the subject.