On the approaching 250th birthday of the United States, a double-edged moment in the history of America unlike anything they could remember, Southern journalists Frye Gaillard and Cythia Tucker, one white, one black, who came of age during the civil rights years, paused to take a hard look at where the country is in the age of Trump. They acknowledge that the great, flawed men who gave us America understood the ways they were falling short even as they aspired to "a more perfect Union"-not a finished product, but a nation in a state of becoming more just.Over the next two centuries, in fits and starts, progress was made. Gradually women and people of color won rights and measures of acceptance and equality that seemed to follow that North Star of possibility bequeathed by the founders.But there was another story. Sometimes it was told in naked violence by men in hoods sowing terror in the night. Other times it traveled in the company of greed and the cynical pursuit of power. Washington"was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America."Then came Trump, and the dog whistles grew more explicit.Four years later, there was hope in the fact that Trump's first term did not end well. In the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden by the landslide total of seven million votes.But Trump rejected the peaceful transfer of power, was not punished for it, and in 2024 persuaded enough citizens in a polarized America to let him back into the Oval Office to install a presidency of "retribution"-a radical agenda untethered to the Constitution and driven by a grifter's misunderstanding of the heart and soul of America's promise. By 2026, the erratic, sometimes violent unfolding of this agenda has raised questions about Trump's fitness-both mentally and morally-to be the President of the United States.In this book, Gaillard and Tucker consider how all this happened, the breadth and depth of what America has lost, and whether the country our founders envisioned can be redeemed. They begin as they must, with the aftermath of January 6.
