The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

July 15, 2017
The 2016 election finds the author on a search for the real America.Sexton (Creative Writing/Georgia Southern Univ.; I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, 2016, etc.) found himself in the political cross hairs when some of his reportage on the Trump campaign drew attention--and even death threats--from his supporters. "Trump wasn't the cause, he was the disease personified," writes the author, and then continues, "Trump's true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument." Yet these people are as recognizable to Sexton as his own family and the blue-collar milieu in which he was raised, and he understands how and why Hillary Clinton couldn't connect with them. He has more of an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who inflamed the passions of the left just as Trump had with the right and whose campaign went from making a statement to a surprisingly strong bid for victory. The author reserves his deepest exasperation for those purists of the far left who refused to see a significant difference between Trump and Clinton and who even turned on Sanders when he attempted to unify the party. "They were purists," he writes. "To them, there was right and then there was wrong." Sexton's campaign coverage comes from a ground-floor, grass-roots perspective. The only convention that gave him press credentials was that of the Green Party, so he generally writes from the periphery, among the crowds who sometimes seem more like mobs at the rallies. Whatever he learned didn't make him more prescient, since pretty much until election night, he strongly believed (as did millions of others) that "Donald Trump will not be president." His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it's clear that Sexton couldn't believe what he had seen until it was too late. Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.

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May 15, 2017
Political columnist and fiction writer Sexton (I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World) shares a chilling account of his cross-country tour covering the 2016 presidential election. He follows Trump to rallies in South Carolina, where attendees he dubs the “White and the Angry” taunt Black Lives Matter protesters, and to the carnivalesque Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he observes the surreal juxtaposition of Nazi salutes and a “Gays for Trump” event. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, is a snooze fest “engineered down to the last detail,” which Sexton criticizes for failing to mobilize embittered young Sanders supporters. Sexton highlights other pivotal events, such as the shooting at a black church in Charleston that ignited debate about the Confederate flag, and he traces the modern political divide to Fox News’s founding. He also covers the chaotic inauguration, where protesters were teargassed blocks away from tux- and gown-clad ball attendees. While the Trump-acolyte demographic has been explored ad nauseam, Sexton’s reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating. Readers still feeling raw from the election, however, may not appreciate its rehashing. Agent: Christopher Rhodes, the Stuart Agency.