Liar's Circus

“A brilliant riveting funny terrifying journey intothe beating heart of Trumpland.”—Liza Mundy author of Code GirlsIn this daring work of immersive journalism New YorkTimes bestselling author Carl Hoffman journeys deep inside Donald Trump’srallies providing a definitive portrait of the strange and powerful tribe thatforms the former president’s base.Hoffman who has written about the most dangerous and remotecorners of the world pierced this alternate society welcomed in and initiatedinto its rites and upside-down beliefs and finally ushered to its innersanctum. Equally freewheeling and profound Liar’s Circus tracks theMAGA faithful across five thousand miles of the American heartland during acrucial arc of the Trump presidency stretching from the impeachment saga to thedawn of the coronavirus pandemic that ended the rallies as we know them.Trump’s rallies are a singular and defining force inAmerican history—a kind of Rosetta stone to understanding the Age of Trump. Yetwhile much remarked upon they are in fact little examined with the focusalmost always on Trump’s latest outrageous statement. But who are the tens ofthousands of people who fill these arenas? What do they see in Trump? And whatcurious alchemy—between leader and adoring crowd—happens there that mightexplain Trump’s rise and powerful hold over both his base and the GOP?To those on the left the rallies are a Black Mass ofAmerican politics at which Trump plays high priest recklessly summoning thedarkest forces within the nation. To the MAGA faithful the rallies are a formof pilgrimage a joyous ceremony that like all rituals binds people togetherand makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Both sideswould acknowledge that this traveling roadshow is the pressurized combustiblecore of Trump’s political power a meeting of the faithful where Trump isunshackled and his rhetoric reaches its most extreme with downstreamconsequences for the rest of the nation.To date no reporter has sought to understand the rallies asa sociological phenomenon examined from the bottom up. Hoffman has done justthis. He has stood in line for more than 170 hours with Trump’s most ardentsuperfans and joined them at the very front row; he has traveled from Minnesotato Texas Louisiana Mississippi and New Hampshire immersing himself in theirculture. Liar’s Circus is a revelatory portrait of Trump’s Americafrom one of our most intrepid journalists.