Donald J. Trump triumphed over sixteen well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become President of the United States -- and an extremely successful one at that. Award-winning historian Victor Davis Hanson sets Trump in his broad political and social context to explain his ongoing appeal to American voters. Hanson is not naive about Trump's behavior, but ultimately sees him as a tragic political character from a Sophocles play or an American Western. His accomplishments are a direct result of his personal excesses, and his bold decisiveness has brought long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy. While Hanson acknowledges that we could not survive a series of Trump presidencies, half the population wanted some outsider, even with a dubious past, to ride in and do things that most normal politicians not only would not but could not do -- before exiting stage left or riding off into the sunset.

The paperback is updated with new material covering Trump's presidency since the midterm elections, where the hardcover edition left off.