Julian Zelizer-BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party

One of America’s premier historians traces the origin story of our deeply partisan times, examining how Newt Gingrich and his allies reshaped Washington with an anti-establishment, take-no-prisoners approach to politics When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama observed that Trump “is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years.” In BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, author Julian Zelizer, esteemed Princeton historian and CNN Political Analyst, pinpoints the moment when our country was set on a path towards the current era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics. Zelizer argues that Newt Gingrich’s political strategies in the 1980s, when he waged a campaign against Speaker of the House Jim Wright, have inspired some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics, from the Tea Party movement to the Trump presidency. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst. He is a  co-host of the Politics and Polls podcast. His most recent books are Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (co-authored with Kevin Kruse) and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for Best Book on Congress. Zelizer has been awarded fellowships from the New York Historical Society, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and New America. www.julianzelizer.com Twitter: @julianzelizer