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Liar's Circus

A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"A brilliant, riveting, funny, terrifying journey into the beating heart of Trumpland." —Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls

In this daring work of immersive journalism, based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman journeys deep inside Donald Trump’s rallies, seeking to understand the strange and powerful tribe that forms the president’s base. 

Hoffman, who has written about the most dangerous and remote corners of the world, pierced this alternate society, welcomed in and initiated into its rites and upside-down beliefs, and finally ushered to its inner sanctum. Equally freewheeling and profound, Liar’s Circus tracks the MAGA faithful across five thousand miles of the American heartland during a crucial arc of the Trump presidency stretching from the impeachment saga to the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic that ended the rallies as we know it.

Trump’s rallies are a singular and defining force in American history—a kind of Rosetta stone to understanding the Age of Trump. Yet while much remarked upon, they are, in fact, little examined, with the focus almost always on Trump’s latest outrageous statement. But who are the tens of thousands of people who fill these arenas? What do they see in Trump? And what curious alchemy—between president and adoring crowd—happens there that might explain Trump’s rise and powerful hold over both his base and the GOP?

To those on the left, the rallies are a Black Mass of American politics at which Trump plays high priest, recklessly summoning the darkest forces within the nation. To the MAGA faithful, the rallies are a form of pilgrimage, a joyous ceremony that like all rituals binds people together and makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Both sides would acknowledge that this traveling roadshow is the pressurized, combustible core of Trump’s political power, a meeting of the faithful where Trump is unshackled and his rhetoric reaches its most extreme, with downstream consequences for the rest of the nation.

To date, no reporter has sought to understand the rallies as a sociological phenomenon examined from the bottom up. Hoffman has done just this. He has stood in line for more than 170 hours with Trump's most ardent superfans and joined them at the very front row; he has traveled from Minnesota to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Hampshire immersing himself in their culture. 

Liar’s Circus is a revelatory portrait of Trump’s America, from one of our most intrepid journalists. 

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    • Kirkus

      July 1, 2020
      Travels among Trumpian true believers. Hoffman, the author of outstanding books that blend travel, history, and anthropology such as Savage Harvest (2014), turns his eye on Donald Trump's MAGA rallies. The author racked up thousands of road miles over many months going into Trumpian strongholds, meeting people such as "a fifty-nine-year-old self-employed house painter and dog breeder, a former Marine, big boned and goateed, who walked with a rolling gait and traveled with a bottle of whiskey, a battery-operated bullhorn, several large flags, and banners exalting Donald Trump." That fellow vies to be first seated in the front row at any Trump rally, but he's skunked by a young cancer survivor who has turned to both the Bible and the Donald. Early on, Hoffman validates Godwin's law: namely, that these days, in any conversation involving politics, someone will soon compare one of the players or subjects with Hitler. Sure enough he does, citing Hitler's observation nearly a century ago that "great movements are...volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments." That's abundantly evident, and the quote is apposite. Hoffman often shakes his head in wonderment but rarely condescends, and he approaches his subject with scholarly vigor, sometimes quoting from heady philosophical and sociological sources while retaining a sense of fraught adventure: "If Trumpism was a place, then it was a place I could travel to just as surely as a village in the swamps of New Guinea or the huts of nomads in the rain forests of Borneo." What he discovered speaks volumes about economic uncertainty, racism ("almost no one admitted to being a racist...but none of them wanted blacks living next door to them or to share any power with them"), xenophobia, fundamentalism, and other populist dog whistles that "lay at the heart of Trump's message and his power." A valuable portrait of authoritarianism in action and its more-than-willing adherents.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 17, 2020
      Journalist Hoffman (The Last Wild Men of Borneo) recounts his experiences at eight Trump rallies held between October 2019 and January 2020 in this vivid yet somewhat shallow sociological study. Hoffman has a keen sense for such ironies as the blaring of Village People songs “in an arena of fundamentalist Christians who thought homosexuality a sin,” and enriches his descriptions of the rallies with incisive sketches of rural American towns hollowed out by the decline of family farms and lucrative blue-collar jobs and “surrounded by lines and lines of chain stores.” Yet interviews with attendees, including a former strip club owner who’s been to nearly 60 rallies, a mortgage broker who thinks Trump is “heaven-sent,” and multiple people who subscribe to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, reveal little of substance. Hoffman also delves into the psychology of crowds, makes comparisons to Nazi Germany, rebukes the Republican establishment for its submissiveness, and holds out hope that “the end of American exceptionalism” brought about by Trump’s rise to power will provide “an opportunity for wisdom.” The result is both an intriguing portrait of a political phenomenon and a missed opportunity to go beyond the stereotypes of Trump loyalists.

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