Also, people will talk to you more extensively and kind of more openly if they know it’s for a book. When it’s 2023 and you tell someone whose job is very in-the-moment that the book isn’t coming out until March of 2025, that literally sounds like “never,” right? They speak more candidly and can share more, and you sort of interview them in a different way. You’re not trying to get a new story out that day. I’m usually writing daily stories off the news, and it was so much fun to do these more in-depth interviews and have people tell me stuff in a different, less guarded way.
Your opening reference to politicians seeing Congress as “a bunch of clowns” is so vivid. When do you think that shift in the American imagination happened?
Everyone’s hated Congress, specifically, for a long time; Congress as an institution has had an abysmal approval rating forever. But our book is really about the MAGA House Republicans who actually broke the institution for good, which was the 118th Congress. This was a new level of dysfunction, where they ground the House floor to a halt. They couldn’t pass any bills. Most of what they did was fight with each other—not even fight with Democrats, but Republican-on-Republican fighting. Struggling to do the bare minimum of keeping the lights on is basically all they did last Congress. It didn’t happen out of nowhere, but I think it was really with the last Congress that something different took place.
You devote a lot of time to Nancy Mace, who has made news lately for her anti-trans bigotry. What’s something you feel more people should understand about her?
What I found most interesting about Nancy is how much she says the quiet part out loud. I started spending time with her a few years ago, when she was still seen as a unicorn—this kind of moderate-on-social-issues Republican who had defeated a Trump-backed primary challenger, who had criticized Donald Trump after January 6, and who was somehow succeeding in this tribal party. Everyone was interested in her, and she’s very attractive, so she got on TV a lot. But she got redistricted, so her district became more red, and she’s openly very ambitious. She wants to move up, she wants to be the governor, she wants to be a senator, and she thought she had a chance to be on Trump’s ticket. She wants to be the first female president, and she realized there’s no way to rise as a Republican right now and be anti-Trump.
