Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi (PDF)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy’s uncertain future, by the country’s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone—plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; 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 that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright” alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War” to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.” For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight.“Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle

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Editorial Reviews: Review “Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Incisive and often incredibly funny . . . Matt Taibbi is the spiritual heir of legendary presidential campaign scribes Hunter S. Thompson and Tim Crouse. . . . Insane Clown President is a valuable work about one of the most bizarre electoral outcomes in American history.”—Santa Barbara Independent “A lively set of dispatches [that] unfolds as a comedy [but] slowly turns into a horror movie.”—Kirkus Reviews “Taibbi, a writer of striking intelligence and bold ideas, is as hilarious as he is scathing.”—Publishers Weekly About the Author Matt Taibbi, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement, is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1The Great Derangement ReduxTen years before Donald Trump, I wrote a book about Middle America’s growing mistrust of government, the media and other mainstream forces. The thesis of the book was that we were moving toward a future in which facts would be increasingly irrelevant and people would gravitate more and more toward conspiratorial politics. This situation was fueled by the repeated failures of once-trusted institutions to respond to the frustrations of ordinary people.I didn’t exactly see Donald Trump coming. But there were a lot of signs that the conditions were set long ago for the rise of a truly postfactual candidate.From the introduction to The Great Derangement:We were living through the last stage of the American empire. Historians consistently describe similar phenomena in past centuries. Great societies often collapse in the same way.When the Bolsheviks finally broke through the gates of the Winter Palace, they discovered tsarists inside obsessed with tarot cards. When the barbarians finally stormed Rome in its last days, they found the upper class paralyzed by lethargy and inaction and addicted to the ramblings of fortune-tellers.This, too, seemed to be the fate of America, viciously attacked by a serious enemy on 9/11 but unable to grasp the significance of this attack. Most of the country instead fled for consolation to the various corners of our vast media landscape, in particular seeking solace in the Internet, an escapist paradise for the informationally overwhelmed.Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities. We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation. We hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all.And directly feeding into this madness was the actual, real failure of our own governmental system, reflected in a chilling new electoral trend. After two consecutive bitterly negative presidential elections and many years of what was turning into a highly deflating military adventure in Iraq, the American public had reached new levels of disgust with the very concept of elections.People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by. They voted against candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country), was striking.Politicians, with their automated speeches and canned blather about “hope” and “change” and “taking the country back,” were now not only not believed by most ordinary people, but actively despised.A parallel phenomenon was a growing lack of faith in the mainstream media on both sides of the spectrum. Conservatives and liberals alike accepted unquestioningly the proposition that the stories put out by network news broadcasts and major daily newspapers amounted to little more than a stream of untrammeled, insidious deceptions.In the 2006 senatorial primary contest between the would-be Jimmy Stewart–esque do-gooder millionaire Ned Lamont and the archetypal Washington whore Joe Lieberman, the fault lines were outlined with crystal clarity.The “People” boosted Lamont with blogs and YouTube broadcasts, while the entrenched political mainstream circled the wagons around Lieberman. The major news mags and dailies blasted the blogger phenomenon, and the likes of sanctimonious New York Times columnist David Brooks ascribed the antimedia bias to “moral manias” and a “Liberal Inquisition.”On the right, similar fault lines were appearing. Whereas before conservative anger toward the “liberal media” had been usefully directed against the Democratic Party by Republican strategists, the failure of the Iraq war and also growing disillusionment on the part of Christians who had supported George W. Bush led more and more of those voters to seek out their own enthusiasms.For the first time I started to see and hear people at Republican events who sounded very much like the dissidents on the fringes of American liberalism. The Ron Paul supporters who began to collect around the rallies of assembly-line establishment-blowhard candidates like Mitt Romney were almost indistinguishable from the followers of liberal candidates like Dennis Kucinich.They were similarly against the war, similarly against the conspiracy of business interests that dominated Washington, similarly fed up with standard-issue campaign stumpery.At these events I heard some of the same theories about “peak oil” and the nefarious influence of institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission that dominated 9/11 Truth rallies.But they weren’t liberals. They were ex-Dittoheads and dropouts from the Republican revolution. The Ron Paul candidacy was an extreme example of outsider politics on the left and right merging.I spent time down in Texas with a group of churchgoers who were loyal to an apocalyptic theory of world events, one in which 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were part of an ongoing march toward a final battle between the forces of Satan and an army of God.At the same time, I found myself involved, at times involuntarily, with the 9/11 Truth Movement.The similarities between both of these groups is striking and should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side.The Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore–style environmentalism. The Truthers easily believed that reporters for the Washington Post, the president, and the front-line operators of NORAD were equally capable of murdering masses of ordinary New York financial-sector employees.Abandoned by the political center, both groups ascribed unblinkingly to a militant, us-against-them worldview, where only their own could be trusted.What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely idiotic, fanciful, and imaginary.At a time when the country desperately needed its citizens to man up and seize control of their common destiny, they instead crawled into alleys and feverishly jacked themselves off in frenzies of panicked narcissism.Time and again during the research for this book, I encountered people who acted not like engaged citizens looking for solutions to real problems, but like frightened adolescents, unaccustomed to the burdens of political power. People saw in the vacuum of governmental competence an opportunity not to take control of their lives, but to step in and replace the buffoons above with buffoon acts of their own.They made elaborate speeches to no one in particular, as though cameras were on them, they dressed in Washington and Jefferson costumes, they primped and preened like they were revolutionaries, modern-day Patrick Henrys and Thomas Paines. And they got nothing done.I was struck particularly by a meeting of 9/11 Truthers in Austin, Texas, in which a “discussion” of what to do about the conspiracy in Washington devolved into a speech-making session. A group of twenty-five to thirty Truthers filed into a little church on the outskirts of town and, led by a breezy, EST-counselorish moderator who enforced tolerance for the viewpoints of all, each participant got up and offered his or her own individual angry theory about the nature of The Conspiracy.Some blamed the royals, others the bankers, others the Trilateral Commission, all blamed decades of Bush family iniquity, and one woman even talked about a conspiracy to hide the discovery of alien technologies at Area 51.Everyone made his or her speech, and then the meeting was over with nothing accomplished except a decision to have another meeting.Having seen all this, what I ended up trying to do in this book was describe the whole outline of the problem. Much of the book focuses on the insider game in Washington, from the corrupt response to Hurricane Katrina to both parties’ absurdly transparent attempts to deflect popular opposition to the Iraq war. At the same time I tried to describe the response to this nonfunctioning government across the country, on both the right and the left.What I hope comes through is that the corruption of the system certainly has had consequences in the population, inspiring popular disgust and rage, with voters keenly understanding on some level anyway the depth of their betrayal.But the form of the public response turns out to be a grotesquerie. It turns out that we’ve been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn’t really possible.We don’t respond to problems as communities, but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it.That it’s the same media landscape these new dissidents often reject as a false and misleading tableau dominated by corrupt interests turns out not to be problematic for many.In some cases, like that of those Christians I spent time with in San Antonio, the trusted new figure, a preacher named John Hagee, turns out to be every bit the establishment Washington insider these would-be religious revolutionaries think they’re fleeing from.In other cases, like that of the 9/11 Truthers, the radical canonical revolutionary tracts end up including thoroughly commercial mainstream entertainments like V for Vendetta and The Matrix (at different times I would hear both radical conservatives and liberals describe their political awakenings using the phrase “taking the red pill”).In short, what sounds on the surface like radical politics turns out to be just another fracturing of the media picture, one that ultimately will result in new groups of captive audiences that, if experience is any guide, will ultimately be assimilated and electorally coddled by a political mainstream in reality bent on ignoring both sides.For now, however, the situation going into the 2008 election looks grim. We have a population more disgusted than ever with our political system, one inclined to distrust the result no matter who wins the White House—and should the national election end up being a contest between a pair of full-of-shit establishment conservatives like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, it will only confirm the worst fears of both sides and result in an even further bonkerization of the population.Gone will be the good old days of neat blue-state/red-state hatred—a nicely symmetrical storyline that has always appealed to the Crossfire/American Gladiators sports-coverage mentality of the commercial media.In its place, at least temporarily, will be a chaos of lunatic enthusiasms and dead-end political movements, with calls for invasions of Babylon and, on the other side, congressional investigations into nonexistent conspiracies . . . ​When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes. Real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology, and has instead turned into a problem of information.Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It’s a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.From Chapter One:Out There, in states both blue and red, the People were boarding the mothership, preparing to leave this planet for good.The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions.But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer.The religious right increasingly saw satanic influences and signs of the upcoming apocalypse. Meanwhile, on the left, a different sort of fantasy was gaining traction, as an increasing number—up to a third of the country according to some polls—saw the “Bush crime family” in league with Al-Qaeda, masterminding 9/11.Media outlets largely ignored poll results that they felt could not possibly be true. For instance, there was a CBS News survey that showed that only 16 percent believed that the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11, with 53 percent believing the government was “hiding something,” and another 28 percent believing that it was “mostly lying.”Then there was a stunning Zogby poll taken just in advance of the 2004 Republican convention that showed that nearly half of New York City residents—49.3 percent—believed that the government knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were coming and purposely failed to act.Voters didn’t just distrust the government’s words and actions. By 2007 they also had very serious doubts about their government’s legitimacy.Successive election cycles foundering on voting-machine scandals had left both sides deeply suspicious of election results. A poll in Florida taken in 2004 suggested that some 25 percent of voters worried that their votes were not being counted—a 20 percent jump from the pre-2000 numbers.Even more damning was a Zogby poll conducted in 2006 that showed only 45 percent of Americans were “very confident” that George Bush won the 2004 election “fair and square.”The most surprising thing about that last poll was the degree to which the distrust was spread wide across the demographic spectrum. That 71 percent of African Americans distrusted the 2004 results was perhaps not a surprise, given that black voters in America have been victims of organized disenfranchisement throughout this country’s history.But 28 percent of NASCAR fans? Twenty-five percent of born-again Christians? Thirty-two percent of currently serving members of the armed forces?These are astonishing numbers for a country that even in its lowest times—after Watergate, say, or during Reconstruction—never doubted the legitimacy of their leaders to such a degree.And if distrust of the government was at an all-time high, that was still nothing compared to what the public thought of the national media. Both the left and the right had developed parallel theories about the co-opting of the corporate press, imagining it to be controlled by powerful unseen enemies, and increasingly turned to grassroots Internet sources for news and information.In the BBC/Reuters/Media Center’s annual Trust in the Media survey in 2006, the United States was one of just two countries surveyed—Britain being the other—where respondents trusted their government (67 percent) more than they trusted national news reporters (59 percent). A Harris poll that same year showed that some 68 percent of Americans now felt that the news media were “too powerful.”The country, in other words, was losing it. Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts. There was no common narrative, except in the imagination of a daft political and media elite that had long ago lost touch with the general public. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Twenty-five of the 26 chapters of INSANE CLOWN PRESIDENT first appeared in Rolling Stone, where the hilarious Matt Taibbi first published his dispatches about the 2016 presidential election. RS, as we all know, is a biweekly magazine, which means its contributing editors, such Taibbi, can’t simply report on the latest news, which is the job of reporters at the big dailies, such as the Times, Post, and Journal. Instead, Taibbi has to spot and vivify trends that are otherwise underreported or vaporized in the news cycle. At this task, Taibbi is truly gifted and his insights from 2016 have not yet dated, even though we are months into the reign of Trump. Now, this lazy reviewer turns the podium over to Matt, who writes in ICP:4%: Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign was massively fueled by racism and xenophobia. But racism and hatred and fear of foreigners were not irreconcilable with hatred of the arrogant establishment that controlled major-party politics. Many voters out there hated both, and some hated those latter folks with the heat of a thousand suns. Trump was tuned into this. Better than any candidate we’d ever seen…7% He converted the press’s indignation toward him into street cred with ordinary people, cred that otherwise might have been out of reach for a coddled billionaire like himself… nothing about Trump’s initial success came as a surprise to me, because I saw he was giving people a means to express their disgust at a campaign process that had long ago stopped working for voters.21%: Politics used to be a simple predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies…21%: Rove and his acolytes mined a lot of the same resentments to get Republicans elected over the years, but the difference is that Trump’s political style encourages people to do more to express their anger…23% America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage and Trump is urging it on.25%: Republicans won Middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn’t know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch.41%: Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That’s his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn’t realize it’s a distorted picture… Trump isn’t just selling easy answers. He’s also buying them. Trump is a TV believer.52%: What… places like the National Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.58%: Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do…for ordinary people? Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the world’s biggest jerks? I doubt even Hillary could answer that question. She has been playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it… My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have been saying, “The Republicans are worse!” for so long that they’ve begun to believe it excuses everything… Young people don’t see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest-politician, and one who is so profoundly part of the problem that she can’t even see it anymore.64%: As any journalist who has ever covered a miners’ strike or a foreclosure court will report, things get physically tense when people are forced to fight for their economic lives. Yet Trump’s campaign has been the first to unleash that menacing feel during a modern presidential race. Some, or maybe a lot of it, is racial resentment. But much of it has to be long-delayed anger over the way things have been divvied up over the years. …Trump’s solutions are preposterous… but he’s giving people a promise more concrete than “”Tax cuts will stimulate growth that will eventually bring jobs back.”77%: This is the Trump they fell in love with. It’s the same uber-confident, self-congratulating gas bag who bulldozed to the Republican nomination on the strength of long unscripted rants that were glorious tributes to every teenager everywhere who has ever taken a test without studying… The man who once famously pronounced “I know words, I have the best words” scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla (“China—money—bad!”).95%: Trump seemed more like a consumer of alt-right ideas than a progenitor of them. He came off like a guy who read some stuff on the Internet that got him so worked up, he ran for president. This helped him connect with ordinary voters, because they read the same material. Trump was just like them!96%: But with Bannon’s help, Trump’s rhetoric unleashed a monstrous energy in these crowds. It turned out it took just a little push to move the traditional doddering Republican voter from tepid free-market internationalism to furious “tribal preservation.” Trump…unleashed something dark and violent in the American psyche. He gave voters permission to disbelieve in a common future with the rest of America and offered the option of confrontation instead.Highly recommended.

⭐Matt Taibbi’s writing deserves a prize. Indeed, it has won some. He sparks out of the page at you. He also has the virtue, too rare among modern USA journalists, of not being afraid to have an opinion or tell you what it is. (I mean to say, ALL journalists have opinions, but mostly they are sneaky about revealing them.)Obviously, YOU, the reader of this review, also have opinions, and those opinions will affect what you think of this book, Insane Clown President. The title refers to Donald Trump. In case there is any doubt, Taibbi is not a fan. If you are, you may find it impossible to appreciate Taibbi’s writing. But perhaps not. Invective, well-done, can be a delight, even if you don’t agree with it.

⭐Mr. Taibbi is channeling his Rolling Stone magazine predecessor the late Hunter S. Thompson. If you are familiar with Mr. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,’ then you might recognize ‘Insane Clown President’ as having the same cynical eye. The book is a collection of his columns written for Rolling Stone magazine during the 2016 presidential election. It includes a few additional pieces updating and analyzing the aftermath of Trump winning. The first column is dated August 12, 2015 and concludes with one dated November 18, 2016. If the reader followed the election, there is very little that is new in here. However, I picked up a copy because I find Mr. Taibbi’s sarcastic writing and point of view to be both informative and frequently funny.While President Foghorn Leghorn is at the center of the book, there are also pieces which take to task many of the sixteen other Republican candidates who were running against Trump. Some of the columns also address… actually, more like lambaste such targets as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinksi, President George W. Bush, commercial television news programs, the electorate, the culture of Washington D.C., the press, and Wall Street. Mr. Taibbi takes special delight in skewering Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. Beyond near endless examples of Trump’s idiocy and racist crass demagoguery, the reader is treated to Trump’s media blaming, countless insults about others who don’t support him, the GOP’s kitschy convention, and the Access Hollywood tape. I’m surprised Mr. Taibbi only mentions in passing the Clinton/Trump debates. Those three debates were rich with material to crap on. It’s a credit to the author that the columns have not been revised to delete his predictions that Trump was going to lose big time in the general election. Mr. Taibbi’s cockiness about Trump going down especially stands out. He does write a mea culpa piece about his wrong prediction. His last column is a fair short assessment of President Obama and the epilogue for Mr. Taibbi’s book addresses the evolution of the Clintons from when they first entered Washington D.C. up until Hillary Clinton falling short in attaining the White House.While I found the author’s previous works ‘The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap’ and ‘Griftopia’ to be informative and entertaining, ‘Insane Clown President’ was more a sarcastic recap of a truly weird election cycle. I’d guess that each page in the book has about six snide remarks by the author. Conservatives, liberals… heck, NOBODY truly escapes Mr. Taibbi’s barbs. Trump is the main focus simply because of the orange tumor’s many faults and how he usurped the Republican establishment’s playbook. Read the collection of columns for the laughs, not any new insights. It was an amusing, yet painful, trip down memory lane.

⭐This book is enticing, revealing and upsetting at the same time. I could not put it down. Read it within a 2-day period. A must read for those who are still in disbelief over the Trump election and are trying to answer the questions: Why? How come? What now and What’s next? An excellent review of the 2016 election circus from a well-versed and brilliant writer. A must read for those who want an honest day-by-day look at how a democratic event got outrageously perverted.

⭐Matt Taibbi provides an interesting and disturbing insight into being a part of Donald Trump’s campaign as press. He speaks of being among those used by Trump as props and focus of his disdain. He also speaks of Trump’s history and personality. This is a great read for anyone interested in politics, recent American politics, and the person of Donald Trump.

⭐Matt Taibbi traces the 2016 US Presidential campaign and with remarkable honesty, reveals his own shock at a result that seemingly only time will tell how irreversible the change in the American (but not only American) politic a Trump Presidency represents. There are a few hints at the influence that we are only now coming to understand of the impact of malign fake news. But Taibbi’s cautions for would-be leaders will hopefully always be more important than real or imagined conspiracies: without the compassion and a message that connects to a broad base of electors, this really is the end of democracy.

⭐Matt Taibbi is one of the smartest journalists around today. He’s not only a very readable, talented (and side-splittingly hilarious) writer, but his analysis is original, deep, a spot-on. He can distill modern American politics and economic issues down to their core, in a witty, engaging way.

⭐An interesting account of the 2016 presidential race that is let down by the authors personal feelings about Donald Trump. Too much hype, not enough serious discourse, the author spends whole chapters on who he would cast to play the various electoral candidates in a movie, and a drinking game he played at one point… It really feels like he had to fill a page count, but if you skip over the filler its still a worthwhile read

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