Where are we going? Where have we been? P. J. ORourke casts his gimlet gaze on the circus of clowns-people foisted on us by the 2016 electionand demands to know How the Hell Did This Happen? Vanity Fair
ORourke has a real eye for the vagaries of American politics. Guardian (UK)
Entertaining as ORourkes quips generally are, its when he gets to the heart of the matter, discussing the mob mentality and the value of individual dignity, individual freedom, and individual responsibility, that his work is most pointed. Publishers Weekly
Praise for P. J. ORourke
The funniest writer in America. Wall Street Journal
P. J. ORourke is like S. J. Perelman on acid.
Chris Buckley
[P. J. ORourke] was really the first to inject non-liberal hilarity into political discourse But more important, he was able to yank conservatives out of the hands of the humorless and shrill, and make such writing accessible He changed my life. Greg Gutfeld
Whether you agree with him or not, P.J. writes a helluva piece. Richard Nixon
Modern Manners
An Etiquette Book for Rude People
The Bachelor Home Companion
A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig
Republican Party Reptile
Confessions, Adventures, Essays, and (Other) Outrages
Holidays in Hell
In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the Worlds Worst Places and Asks, Whats Funny About This?
Parliament of Whores
A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Give War a Chance
Eyewitness Accounts of Mankinds Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
All the Trouble in the World
The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
I Was Tragically Hip and I Recovered! You Can Too!
Eat the Rich
A Treatise on Economics
The CEO of the Sofa
One Year in the Life of a Man Who Said, Mind If I Put My Feet Up? I Think I Will Take This Lying Down.
Peace Kills
Americas Fun New Imperialism
On The Wealth of Nations
A Minor Mister Opines upon a Masters Magnum Opus
Driving Like Crazy
Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending Celebrating America the Way Its Supposed to BeWith an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn
Dont VoteIt Just Encourages the Bastards
A Treatise on Politics
Holidays in Heck
A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun
The Baby Boom
How It Got That Way And It Wasnt My Fault
And Ill Never Do It Again
Thrown Under the Omnibus
A Reader
How the Hell
Did This
Happen?
The Election of 2016
P. J. ORourke
Copyright 2017 by P. J. ORourke
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover illustrations by donkeyhotey.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educationalinstitutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .
Caricatures created by DonkeyHotey (donkeyhotey.com) were adapted from these Creative Commons and public domain images: Donald Trump, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Bernie Sanders, Nick Solari/Flickr; Melania Trump, U.S. State Department/Flickr photostream and IIP Photo Archive/Flickr; Ivanka Trump, Pattie/Flickr; Steve Bannon, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Vladimir Putin, Press Service of the President of Russia and Press Service of the President of Russia/Wikimedia; Jeff Sessions, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Ben Carson, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Hillary Clinton, East Asia and Pacific Media/Flickr and Department of State; Ted Cruz, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Marco Rubio, Gage Skidmore/Flickr.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2017
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: January 2018
ISBN 978-0-8021-2765-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-8938-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Morgan Entrekin
My editor, my publisher, and, best of all, my friend
A pity they both cant lose.
comment on the Iran-Iraq War
attributed to Henry Kissinger
I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.
There isnt, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, May you live in interesting times. The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And lets not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own.
What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.
The inevitable, inexorable, predestined Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, was an embodiment of liberal orthodoxy as it has been handed down from on high for eighty-four years, since FDRs election in 1932.
Clinton was an ancient monument of liberalism. If Washington were Pharaonic Egyptand sometimes it isHillary would be the Sphinx. With the exception that she never shuts up. And shes hardly immobile. For the past quarter of a century shes been everywhere we looked.
So there was the monumental Hillary out in the American electoral desert surrounded by a Republican horde of of whatever small, feckless, puny fauna Egypt has. Ive Googled the matter. Yes, there it is exactlyGiza gerbils.
These were the forces of the resurgent American conservatism that began its rise with the election of Ronald Reagan and then quit rising and started to droop into simplistic Tea Party obstructionism.
However, the outcome of the battle was not a foregone conclusion. Even a gerbil might be able to outsmart something with a head full of rocks.
And the Obama Administration, which was supposed to be the Great Pyramid of Cheops, had turned out to be a somewhat aimless enterprise. Not that it didnt take aim at a lot of things, letting feeble, sanctimonious darts fly in every direction that right-minded people could think of. But only one arrow sank homea perhaps well-meaning but ridiculously complex and dubiously viable healthcare reform. And the president had just barely managed to avoid standing fully in the way of an overdue economic recovery.
