American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News


James O'Keefe - 2018
    To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O’Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work–equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky—has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.In American Pravda, the reader is invited to go undercover with these intrepid journalists as they infiltrate political campaigns, unmask dishonest officials and expose voter fraud. A rollicking adventure story on one level, the book also serves as a treatise on modern media, arguing that establishment journalists have a vested interest in keeping the powerful comfortable and the people misinformed.The book not only contests the false narratives frequently put forth by corporate media, it documents the consequences of telling the truth in a world that does not necessarily want to hear it. O’Keefe’s enemies attack with lawsuits, smear campaigns, political prosecutions, and false charges in an effort to shut down Project Veritas. For O’Keefe, every one of these attacks is a sign of success.American Pravda puts the myths and misconceptions surrounding O’Keefe’s activities to rest and will make you rethink every word you hear and read in the so-called mainstream press.Edit

Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People”


KT McFarland - 2020
    Now former government official and political commentator KT McFarland returns with tenacity, resolve, and the truth about the Trump Administration and those seeking to destroy it. For decades, KT McFarland has been one of the country’s most prominent conservative foreign policy experts. She was part of the Trump Revolution from the beginning. As Trump’s first Deputy National Security Advisor, she had a seat at the table for everything: Trump’s unconventional campaign and upset victory; his throw-out-the-rule-book Trump Tower Transition; the chaotic first months in the West Wing; the unusual events surrounding General Flynn’s firing; and the sprawling Mueller investigation. In Revolution, she walks the reader through the Washington Establishment’s relentless efforts to destroy Trump, populism, and nationalism in order to keep their own hands on the levers of power. The Trump Revolution, like the Reagan Revolution and all the anti-Establishment political revolutions before it, will ultimately prevail. It is this ability to reinvent ourselves, not just as individuals but as a society, that lies at the heart of American Exceptionalism. When McFarland left the Trump Administration and Washington, she disappeared from public view and refused to discuss her experiences. Now, for the first time, McFarland tells a story that reads more like a political thriller than a tour through this unique moment in history. Written with unusual candor, with insights into Trump and his inner circle, Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un, McFarland’s book is destined to become a classic. If you only read one book about the Age of Trump, make it Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People.”

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation


Joseph J. Ellis - 2000
    Ellis focuses on six discrete moments that exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new nation: Burr and Hamilton's deadly duel, and what may have really happened; Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's secret dinner, during which the seat of the permanent capital was determined in exchange for passage of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to end the "peculiar institution" of slavery--his last public act--and Madison's efforts to quash it; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his retirement from public office and offering his country some final advice; Adams's difficult term as Washington's successor and his alleged scheme to pass the presidency on to his son; and finally, Adams and Jefferson's renewed correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their different views of the Revolution and its legacy.In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men, and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was his wife, Abigail; Burr, crafty, smooth, and one of the most despised public figures of his time; Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep economic savvy masked his humble origins; Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence, but so reclusive and taciturn that he rarely spoke more than a few sentences in public; Madison, small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy, yet one of the most effective debaters of his generation; and the stiffly formal Washington, the ultimate realist, larger-than-life, and America's only truly indispensable figure.Ellis argues that the checks and balances that permitted the infant American republic to endure were not primarily legal, constitutional, or institutional, but intensely personal, rooted in the dynamic interaction of leaders with quite different visions and values. Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics--then and now--and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that shape history.

Democracy in America


Alexis de Tocqueville - 1835
    Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, came to the young nation to investigate the functioning of American democracy & the social, political & economic life of its citizens, publishing his observations in 1835 & 1840. Brilliantly written, vividly illustrated with vignettes & portraits, Democracy in America is far more than a trenchant analysis of one society at a particular point in time. What will most intrigue modern readers is how many of the observations still hold true: on the mixed advantages of a free press, the strained relations among the races & the threats posed to democracies by consumerism & corruption. So uncanny is Tocqueville’s insight & so accurate are his predictions, that it seems as tho he were not merely describing the American identity but actually helping to create it.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House


Michael Wolff - 2018
    Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

Madam Secretary: A Memoir


Madeleine K. Albright - 2001
    A national bestseller on its first publication in 2003, Madam Secretary combines warm humor with profound insights and personal testament with fascinating additions to the historical record.

Rogue Spooks: The Intelligence War on Donald Trump


Dick Morris - 2017
    This groundbreaking exposé will leave listeners questioning the motives of U.S. Intelligence agencies, leftover partisans within our government, and members of the mainstream press.Donald Trump's first 100 days in office were roiled by allegations of treasonous contacts between his campaign team and the Kremlin to rig the election. These outrageous charges first surfaced in the notorious “Trump Dossier,” an unverified document of suspect provenance, full of wild and salacious accusations.This dossier―filled with little more than gossip, rumor, and innuendo––was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative who teamed up with the FBI and anti-Trump partisans. Hillary Clinton supporters paid for Steele’s work.When no news media would publish the unverified dossier, the ex-spook enlisted the help of a former UK ambassador to Russia, who arranged in turn for a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State to get the document to Senator John McCain, in the hope that he would then bring it to FBI Director James Comey’s attention. McCain did just that.Comey himself played a critical role in the dossier ultimately going public, giving a confidential summary to President Obama and Congressional leaders. It was immediately leaked by rogue spooks in order to demean, destabilize, and destroy Donald Trump’s nascent presidency.The dossier and this mythical intelligence are the basis for the phony claims about a Russia/Trump collusion to steal the election. No proof was found. No substantiation uncovered. Even Comey told Trump he was not under investigation for the Russian meddling charges.But that didn’t end the leaks or the allegations. Working in concert with liberal news outlets, these rogue spooks have formed a new intel/media complex that threatens our democracy. Rogue Spooks will reveal how it works.Listeners will be shocked to learn the truth about the false accusations against President Trump in the flawed dossier. They’ll be interested to know how leaks to the media fueled the phony scandal, and how intelligence agencies will try to use the newly appointed special prosecutor to oust President Trump.They will also learn what we can do―specifically―to stop them.

The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny


William Strauss - 1996
    With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America's past will predict its future.Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four eras--or turnings--that last about twenty years and that always arrive in the same order. In The Fourth Turning, the authors illustrate these cycles using a brilliant analysis of the post-World War II period.First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis--the Fourth Turning--when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth.The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for America's next rendezvous with destiny.

The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency


John Dickerson - 2020
    In campaigns, the presidency is a magical place where the will of its occupant can move the nation. In reality, the presidency is stretched, burdened, and unmatched for the complexity of the modern world. With both an historical and contemporary view of the presidency, Dickerson explores how and why the office has expanded and how America's obsession with the presidency is at odds with its creation and leads to disappointment. Dickerson also charts Donald Trump's departures from and innovations to the office, developing a picture of where the presidency stands on the eve of the 2020 election and beyond. Armed with an understanding of the office, Dickerson suggests new ways to test candidates, elect presidents thoughtfully, and fix the job so that it more closely can match our expectations.

Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics


Lawrence O'Donnell - 2017
    Long before Lawrence O'Donnell was the anchor of his own political talk show, he was the Harvard Law-trained political aide to Senator Patrick Moynihan, one of postwar America's wisest political minds. The 1968 election was O'Donnell's own political coming of age, and Playing With Fire represents his master class in American electioneering, as well as an extraordinary human drama that captures a system, and a country, coming apart at the seams in real time. Nothing went to script. LBJ was confident he'd dispatch with Nixon, the GOP frontrunner; Johnson's greatest fear and real nemesis was RFK. But Kennedy and his team, despite their loathing of the president, weren't prepared to challenge their own party's incumbent. Then, out of nowhere, Eugene McCarthy shocked everyone with his disloyalty and threw his hat in the ring. A revolution seemed to be taking place, and LBJ, humiliated and bitter, began to look mortal. Then RFK leapt in, and all hell broke loose. Two assassinations and a week of bloody riots in Chicago around the Democratic Convention later, and the old Democratic Party was a smoldering ruin, and, in the last triumph of old machine politics, Hubert Humphrey stood alone in the wreckage. Suddenly Nixon was the frontrunner, having masterfully maintained a smooth facade behind which he feverishly held his party's right and left wings in the fold through a succession of ruthless maneuvers to see off George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and the great outside threat to his new Southern Strategy, the arch-segregationist George Wallace. But then, amazingly, Humphrey began to close, and so, in late October, Nixon pulled off one of the greatest dirty tricks in American political history, an act that may well meet the statutory definition of treason. The tone was set for Watergate and all else that was to follow, all the way through to today.

The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution


Roger Stone - 2017
    Trump to concede, shocking a nation that had, only hours before, given little credence to his chances. Donald Trump pulled the greatest upset in American political history despite a torrent of invective and dismissal of the mainstream media. Here is the first definitive explanation about how the “silent majority” shifted the election to Donald Trump in reliable Democratic Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, thus handing him the presidency.Stone, a long time Trump retainer and confidant, gives us the inside story of how Donald Trump almost single-handedly harnessed discontent among “Forgotten Americans” despite running a guerrilla-style grass roots campaign to compete with the smooth running and free-spending Clinton political machine.From the start, Trump’s campaign was unlike any seen on the national stage—combative, maverick, and fearless. Trump’s nomination was the hostile takeover of the Republican party and a resounding repudiation of the failed leadership of both parties whose policies have brought America to the brink of financial collapse as well as endangering our national security.Here Stone outlines how Donald Trump skillfully ran as the anti-Open Borders candidate as well as a supporter of American sovereignty, and how he used the Globalist trade deals like NAFTA to win over three of ten Bernie Sanders supporters. The veteran adviser to Nixon, Reagan, and Trump charts the rise of the alt-conservative media and the end of the mainstream media monopoly on voter impacting information dissemination. This is an insider’s view that includes studying opposition research into Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton’s crimes, and the struggle by the Republican establishment to stop Trump and how they underestimated him. Stone chronicles Trump’s triumph in three debates where he skillfully lowered expectation levels but skewered Mrs. Clinton for the corruption of the Clinton Foundation, her mishandling of government email, and her incompetence as Secretary of State.Stone gives us the inside word on Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, Carlos Danger, Doug Band, Jeffery Epstein, and the efforts to hide the former first lady’s infirmities and health problems. Stone dissects the phony narrative that Trump was in cahoots with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin or that the e-mails released by Wikileaks came from the Russians.The grizzled political veteran of ten Republican presidential campaigns from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump explains how Trump’s election has averted near certain war with Russia over Syria and the rejection of the neocon policies of the Obama/Clinton Administration.The Making of the President 2016 reveals how Trump brilliantly picked at Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses, particularly her reputation as a crooked insider, and ignited the passions of out-of-work white men and women from the rust belt and beyond, at a time when millions of Americans desperately wanted change. Stone also reveals how and why the mainstream media got it wrong, including how the polls were loaded and completely misunderstood who would vote.Stone's analysis is akin to Theodore H. White’s seminal book The Making of the President 1960. It is both a sweeping analysis of the trends that elected Trump as well as the war stories of a hard-bitten political survivor who Donald Trump called “one tough cookie."Other books by Roger Stone: The Man Who Killed Kennedy , a New York Times bestseller in which Roger Stone makes a compelling case that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the mastermind behind the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Stone maps out LBJ’s motives for orchestrating the murder and uses fingerprint evidence and testimony to prove JFK was shot by a long-time LBJ hit man—not Lee Harvey Oswald. Nixon’s Secrets gives the inside scoop on Nixon’s rise and fall in Watergate. Stone charts Nixon’s rise from election to Congress in 1946 to the White House in 1968 after his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in 1960, his disastrous campaign for Governor of California in 1962 and the greatest comeback in American Presidential history. Jeb and the Bush Crime Family , in which Stone collaborates with Saint John Hunt to make this a “no-holds-barred” history of the Bush family. After detailing the vast litany of Jeb’s misdeeds, Stone travels back to Samuel, Prescott, George H. W., and George W. Bush to weave an epic story of privilege, greed, corruption, drug profiteering, assassination, and lies. This exposition will have you asking, “Why aren't these people in prison?” The Clintons’ War on Women , where Roger Stone and historian Robert Morrow uncover the explosive and ugly truths about Bill and Hillary’s crimes and cover-ups. They reveal the details about their actions in Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s scandalous time in the White House, who really ordered the deadly attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Hillary’s federally-investigated tenure as secretary of state, their time at the corrupt Clinton Foundation, and Hillary’s failed campaign for president.

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office


Susan Hennessey - 2020
    . . Other books on the Trump White House expertly detail the mayhem inside; this book builds on those works to detail its consequences. --Carlos Lozada (one of twelve books to read to understand what's going on)Perhaps the most penetrating book to have been written about Trump in office. --Lawrence Douglas, The Times Literary SupplementThe definitive account of how Donald Trump has wielded the powers of the American presidency The extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies.From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the "invaluable" (The New York Times) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors' misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own?By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.

A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror


Larry Schweikart - 2004
    These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.” As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin.A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin


H.W. Brands - 2000
    Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the pivotal figure in colonial and revolutionary America, comes vividly to life in this masterly biography.Wit, diplomat, scientist, philosopher, businessman, inventor, and bon vivant, Benjamin Franklin was in every respect America’s first Renaissance man. From penniless runaway to highly successful printer, from ardently loyal subject of Britain to architect of an alliance with France that ensured America’s independence, Franklin went from obscurity to become one of the world’s most admired figures, whose circle included the likes of Voltaire, Hume, Burke, and Kant. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and a host of other sources, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands has written a thoroughly engaging biography of the eighteenth-century genius. A much needed reminder of Franklin’s greatness and humanity, The First American is a work of meticulous scholarship that provides a magnificent tour of a legendary historical figure, a vital era in American life, and the countless arenas in which the protean Franklin left his legacy.

BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win


David Horowitz - 2020
    In Blitz, Horowitz tackles the high-stakes upcoming presidential election. This book provides a blueprint for how Trump will once again stun his competitors - winning over key and surprising new supporters and finally vanquish the left wing of the Democratic party, keeping America free and prosperous.