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FINISH WHAT WE STARTED: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy
Author: Isaac Arnsdorf
Publisher: Little, Brown
Pages: 247
Price: $30
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Despite Steve Bannon’s Wall Street pedigree, his taste for five-star hotels and billionaire-owned yachts, he is truly a man of the people — that, at least, is the impression he strains to convey each time he appears in Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, a new book by Isaac Arnsdorf, a journalist at The Washington Post.
As far as Bannon is concerned, anyone who complains that Donald Trump’s far-right supporters are on the fringes of the fringe is just a whiner who can go cry some more. As he put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2022: “All they talk about on MSNBC is ‘democracy, democracy, democracy.’ We’re gonna give them a democracy suppository on November 8!”
The line was classic Bannon: Gleeful, bombastic, mildly disgusting. It would also turn out to be wrong. The “red wave” that he and other MAGA enthusiasts envisioned for that year’s midterm elections never materialised.
There have been several books about the Trumpification of the Republican Party focused on the politicians and operatives who allowed such a transformation to happen. Finish What We Started focuses instead on the ordinary foot soldiers in the MAGA grass roots — who, in the aftermath of January 6, continued to insist that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and are determined to never let such an outrage happen again.
The rampage at the Capitol had been spectacular — maybe too spectacular for its own good; what the MAGA movement needed was something stealthier and more tedious, less likely to draw the attention of anyone who would try to thwart it. Arnsdorf recounts how, a month after the attack, Bannon invited a Breitbart blogger named Dan Schultz to his “War Room” podcast to explain what Schultz called “the precinct strategy.” The plan was to take over the Republican Party from the ground up: Get some true MAGA believers into the humble yet foundational building blocks of the party structure — “precinct positions that were often vacant because no one was paying attention.”
Instead of state legislatures staffed by RINOs (Republicans in name only) who had shown themselves too willing to betray the MAGA cause by abiding by the Constitution and certifying the 2020 election, an influx of new precinct committee members would ensure that the 2024 election would reflect the will of the real people — the MAGA faithful.
One person who heeded the message was Salleigh Grubbs, who ran for Republican county chair in Cobb County, Ga., in 2021 and received a phone call from Trump when she won. Arnsdorf juxtaposes Grubbs’s trajectory with that of Kathy Petsas, a Republican Party chair for a legislative district in Maricopa County, Ariz, who went from fielding maybe three applications a month for precinct committee membership to an astonishing 40 a week.
In the months leading up to the 2022 midterms, Petsas was formally reprimanded by her new MAGA colleagues and saw her preferred Republican candidate for Arizona governor get trounced in the primaries by the Trump-endorsed Kari Lake; Grubbs, meanwhile, seemed to be flying high on MAGA fumes until she began to grasp “how much more complicated things are, how much you couldn’t see from outside, how there are always unintended consequences.” Arnsdorf describes her growing discomfort with efforts to purge the party of anyone who doesn’t toe the new line.
Arnsdorf mostly hangs back, presenting his subjects’ thoughts in free indirect style. His stated aim is to convey “what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action.” Petsas seems baffled by the takeover of her party and clings to the old mode of doing things. Incredulous that the MAGA wing doesn’t think of her as a “real Republican,” she emphasises her decades of experience as an insider — when that lengthy tenure is obviously considered a mark against her.
Grubbs, for her part, is initially fuelled by a sense that official explanations for political results she doesn’t like seem very, very fishy. After January 6, she blasted out a message to her Facebook group: “All. DO NOT BELIEVE THE NEWS. Trump people are not violent. The Capitol protest was fine until Antifa co-opted and committed violence.” She suggests she’s mellowed a bit since becoming a county chair, but mellower MAGA still runs hot. At Georgia’s state Republican convention in 2023, she poses for a photo with Trump. Grubbs deems it “one of the happiest days of her life.”
Arnsdorf’s book arrives at a moment when Democrats are warning that Trump and the MAGA movement are seeking to end democracy as we know it. Bannon’s extravagant bluffing — “We’re two-thirds of the nation!” he bragged at CPAC — can’t hide the fact that MAGA extremism is still terribly unpopular. An NBC News poll last year put the share of Americans with a favourable view of the MAGA movement at a meagre 24 per cent. The precinct strategy has become another way of energising the base.
And the base turns out to have infinite patience for the nitty-gritty of local politics, as long as the ultimate goal is not governance but domination.
“Now they understand how important the rules are,” a merry Bannon tells Arnsdorf. “We’re having a civics lesson here. We’re exploding, and the reason we’re exploding? We’re really getting into the granular, and people can’t get enough of it.”
The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times ©2024 The New York Times News Service
