It’s a document of decline and fall—a chronicle that should cause future readers to ponder how American leaders in the early 21st century lost the ability and will to govern...Step back from the page-by-page account of congressional Republicans’ desperate grasping for Donald Trump’s favor or the Biden administration’s struggle to pass its legislative agenda: You’re confronted with a world of almost unrelieved cowardice, cynicism, myopia, narcissism, and ineptitude, where the overriding motive is the pursuit of power for its own sake...It’s rare that a politician thinks about any cause higher than self-interest...The book’s Democrats are at least sane, but they’re beset by petty quarrels, forever trying to solve the 'identity politics’ Rubik’s cube,' and dragged down by a pervasive exhaustion; their elderly leaders are unable to grasp the brutal political forces swirling around them...The Republicans are hell-bent on the destruction of American democracy, or else too craven to stand in the way—the result is the same...Each party has a handful of impressive young politicians, but because they take governing seriously, they’re probably doomed to obscurity or defeat...The failures of the book’s Democrats do not threaten the republic...The rotten core around which our democracy has begun to collapse is the Republican Party...It remains Trump’s party as long as he keeps his grip on its voters and can defy the medical odds against an old man who eats badly and never exercises...This Will Not Pass raises a question that isn’t easy to answer: What is it about political power that leads people to desecrate themselves so nakedly in its pursuit?.

This Will Not Pass is a blockbuster...Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 473 pages of essential reading...Martin and Burns make their case with breezy prose, interviews and plenty of receipts...In Burns and Martin’s pages, Trump attributes McCarthy’s cravenness to an 'inferiority complex'...The would-be speaker’s spinelessness and obsequiousness are recurring themes, along with the Democrats’ political vertigo...This Will Not Pass portrays Biden as dedicated to his belief his presidency ought to be transformational...In competition with the legacy of Barack Obama, he yearns for comparison to FDR...The Republicans are ahead on the generic ballot, poised to regain House and Senate...Biden’s favorability is under water...Pitted against Trump, he struggles to stay even...His handling of Russia’s war on Ukraine has not moved the needle...Inflation dominates the concerns of most Americans...For the first time in two years, the economy contracts...It is a long time to November 2024...Things can always get worse..

The book spans two years, from the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States through the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency...Bouncing between rapidly radicalizing Republicans and business-as-usual Democrats, it tells a story of an unprecedented attack on democracy and a system distinctly unsuited to respond...The overriding message — that democracy is in as much danger today as it was when rioters smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol — comes through with startling clarity...This Will Not Pass charts the path of two parties and two presidencies at a moment when the democratic system in the United States was becoming increasingly fragile — when, in fact, Trump and his allies in the Republican Party were increasingly committed to dismantling it...Martin and Burns divide that story into three parts: the pre-election period starting in March 2020, when Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee and the coronavirus pandemic upended the presidential race; the long election period, stretching from early November to the Jan. 6 insurrection; and the first year of Biden’s presidency, when the Democrats were challenged to put the country back together and the Republicans were challenged to do anything — anything at all — about the act of terror that marked the end of Trump’s presidency..

Early in the pages of this hard-hitting account by New York Times reporters Martin and Burns, the Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee voices doubt that Donald Triump was interested in or even capable of mounting a coup, adding, 'my perception is, he is a fucking moron'...The events of Jan. 6, 2021, told a different story...Trump had never even bothered to pretend that he governed for all Americans, instead cultivating a reactionary, rural, White base and an ethos within the White House that followed 'the logic of a protection racket, more or less'...The authors also offer nuanced portraits of some of the key players in this saga: Mitch McConnell, ever exercising a political calculus by which he could deem Trump a 'despicable human being' yet twice vote against impeaching him; Kevin McCarthy, so hungry for power that he allowed that Trump bore responsibility for the coup attempt yet rushed to declare fealty to the boss; Lisa Murkowski, who expressed wonder that so many Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen and questions that calculus of McConnell’s, saying of the impeachment vote, 'I wish that it had been different'...Red meat for politics watchers, unsparing in its depiction of a time of torment..

New York Times reporters Martin and Burns debut with an impressively sourced and consistently revealing chronicle of America's 'political emergency' in the months between the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the start of President Biden's second year in office...To an unusual degree for books covering similar subject matter, the authors get lawmakers, congressional staffers, and campaign operatives from both parties on the record...What emerges is a clear-eyed and often dramatic portrait of two major political parties animated as much by internal divisions as by cross-aisle discord...Revelations abound—of Kevin McCarthy’s initial plan to call on Trump to resign after the Capitol riot; of Republican efforts to lure Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into switching parties—as do sharp character sketches...Politics junkies should consider this required reading..