It would be difficult to think of any modern president who has been more exhaustively written about than Donald Trump. There have been books about his foreign policy, about his business empire, about his relationship with his generals, about his ceaseless legal battles, and about his family—not to mention a fusillade of memoirs by former employees and colleagues alternately venting their disdain for and alarm about him. Is there anything left to add to this mountain of works about a man who didn’t write his own memoir and disdains reading anything longer than a notecard?
In Finish What We Started, Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter at The Washington Post, offers the first extended examination of Trump’s remarkable rise from the depths of his humiliation after the failed January 6 coup to his resurgence as the Republican front-runner. Arnsdorf traveled across the country to interview numerous Trump followers. Filled with telling anecdotes and vivid prose, his book provides an essential guide to understanding Trump’s political resilience. He suggests that the 2022 midterm elections were the closest America has come to being seized by a far right fringe that is redoubling its efforts to orchestrate an authoritarian seizure of power in 2024.
After Trump failed to retake office in 2020, the MAGA intelligentsia, led by Steve Bannon and his War Room podcast, contended that the true subversives were not the liberals who opposed Trump but another group: the traditional Republicans who balked at reversing the election results, like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and county supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona. The aim of Bannon and company was to develop a more pliant GOP, one that would champion his election subversion credo and allow him to sail to the Republican nomination in 2024.
The blueprint of this strategy arrived in February 2021, when a former Breitbart blogger named Dan Schultz told Bannon about his brainchild: a “precinct strategy” that would allow movement leaders to reshape the GOP from the ground up by persuading loyalists to run for local and state party offices, replacing Republicans who were deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. Bannon was elated. “Stop talking about a third party,” Bannon instructed his listeners in February. “Your opportunity to take over the Republican Party is all about your agency. That’s what Schultz keeps saying: This is all about you, this is all about your agency.” Schultz, whose political awakening occurred when he read Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative while serving in the military as an intelligence officer, began appearing regularly on Bannon’s show, and his message went viral.
The MAGA intelligentsia, led by Steve Bannon and his War Room podcast, championed a “precinct strategy” that would allow movement leaders to reshape the GOP from the ground up by persuading loyalists to run for local and state party offices, replacing Republicans who were deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
To help implement Schultz’s plan, Bannon turned to John Fredericks, an influential talk radio host whose show aired daily in Virginia and Georgia. Fredericks was a former advertising executive with the McClatchy newspaper chain who had gone bankrupt during the financial crisis in 2011 and lost his family home. Like Bannon, he despised the “globalist” elites who he believed had destroyed the American economy. After he rebounded by establishing a regional radio network based in Richmond, Fredericks became the Virginia state chair for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Fredericks believed that Trump followers needed to change their strategy. According to Arnsdorf, in the aftermath of the 2021 Georgia runoff elections, when Republicans stayed home and Democrats won both Senate seats, Fredericks realized that the right’s message that elections were rigged was boomeranging.
Bannon and Fredericks wanted to ensure that the MAGA base turned out for Republican Glenn Youngkin in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race. With their encouragement, Arnsdorf writes, county GOPs chartered their own election integrity subcommittees, and signed up supporters as poll watchers and poll workers. This grassroots infrastructure combined forces with the Youngkin campaign. According to Arnsdorf, “The Precinct Strategy was working exactly as Bannon had hoped: once he got people in the door at their local party meetings, the local party would take it from there, providing its own structure and momentum.”
The question hovering over Bannon and Fredericks’s efforts to stir up the base on behalf of Youngkin, however, was whether the MAGA movement could simply be manipulated, or even hijacked, by establishment Republicans. Youngkin was a former partner at the private equity firm the Carlyle Group—just the sort of moneyed elitist that Bannon loved to denounce. Bannon tried to spin Youngkin’s victory, Arnsdorf writes, as a triumph for the MAGA movement, claiming, “This is the coalition that works … Youngkin came toward our policies, these policies that were the backbone of this.” But Youngkin simply updated the old establishment tactic of nodding to the right on social issues while appealing to independent voters by emphasizing education and economic ones.
But if the Youngkin victory was an equivocal sign of MAGA influence, the grassroots takeover of the GOP mostly ended up backfiring in the November 2022 midterm elections. “Democrats,” Arnsdorf writes, “discovered that Trump’s MAGA brand was widely disliked and exploited it to portray Republican candidates as extreme and dangerous, a rogue’s gallery of election-denying wackos who alienated swing voters and even some Republicans.”
Indeed, one of Arnsdorf’s most illuminating chapters centers on the takeover of the Arizona GOP by a radical-right faction. His explanation of the purges that took place in Maricopa County in 2022 has the whiff of the French Revolution, as successive waves of old-line Republican leaders were suddenly deemed insufficiently loyal to conservative principles by newcomers. Indeed, formal reprimands mushroomed across the country: The Republican Party in Hillsdale County, Michigan, censured the Republican state senate majority leader for referring to armed protesters who had stormed the state capitol as “a bunch of jackasses”; the GOP in Washington County, Pennsylvania, censured Senator Pat Toomey for voting to impeach Trump on insurrection charges; and the Republican Party in Dorchester County, South Carolina, censured Senator Lindsey Graham for supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. In adopting these measures and running extremist candidates, however, the GOP simply fortified the perception that it was lurching out of control.
Arnsdorf zeroes in on the political benefits that accrued to President Joe Biden beginning in May 2022 when he began to focus on what he termed the “ultra MAGA” movement during a speech on the economy. It quickly became an effective cudgel for Biden to wield against the GOP. Anti-MAGA efforts also surfaced within the conservative movement: Sarah Longwell ran a $10 million nationwide campaign during the midterms using the testimonials of Republican voters to tar the image of the GOP. In Mesa, Arizona, Republican Mayor John Giles endorsed the Democrats running for governor, secretary of state, and U.S. Senate.
Whether Trump can successfully peddle the MAGA doctrine in a general election is more than a little dubious. Biden has made the right’s extremism the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, starting with his fiery speech in Valley Forge on the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, declaring that “democracy is on the ballot.” Since then, he has gone on the attack, instructing his campaign to emphasize Trump’s increasingly outlandish and reckless statements. As the MAGA crowd fights to return Trump to the White House, its divisive radicalism might well end up disrupting the movement’s dream of finishing what it started.
