Reviewed by John M. Fredericks
Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy
by Isaac Arnsdorf
Little, Brown and Company
April 2024, Hardcover, 272 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0316497510
My father, John Fredericks, an influential MAGA talk radio host, called me in April. He was positively giddy. It was a Wednesday afternoon, one day after he’d won the race for RNC delegate in Pennsylvania’s seventeenth congressional district. He described how, as a Trump conservative and a Virginian, he was able to infiltrate the Republican establishment, as he put it, and upend the RNC’s control over his congressional district in Pittsburgh. Fredericks’ win is part of a long, arduous, and often feverish plan that MAGA conservatives hatched after the 2020 presidential election to take over the Republican party from the bottom up.
Isaac Arnsdorf describes this approach, dubbed the Precinct Strategy, in riveting detail and with a flair for excellent, empathetic storytelling in his new book, Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy (2024). Arnsdorf’s project is to ask a simple question: with the 2020 presidential election behind them, how are MAGA conservatives organizing to further their grassroots movement?
The answer lies in the Precinct Strategy, wherein MAGA conservatives are encouraged to flood their local Republican precincts and get involved with the organization of the party at the local level. The Precinct Strategy was invented by Dan Schultz, a lifelong conservative living in Arizona who spends most of his time worrying that America will transform into a communist regime if everyday conservatives don’t stop it from happening. Schultz, a former U.S. intelligence officer, sees his project as essential to American democracy. It’s a lesson he learned in his high school civics class. If you want to change the direction of the country, don’t run for governor, get involved in your local Republican party and control who runs for governor.
Arnsdorf, who works as a national political reporter for the Washington Post, is at his best when he’s focused on people like Schultz. He writes cogently about the cast of characters who make up this MAGA-fueled, GOP annexation. He spends much of the book describing the life and motivations of this group of GOP insurgents: from Steve Bannon and John Fredericks, brash mouthpieces of the Precinct Strategy, to Salleigh Grubbs, an election-denier who has risen to prominence in the Georgia Republican Party.
At the center of the book is Bannon, who has become ubiquitous as the leading thinker in the MAGA movement thanks to the success of his podcast, War Room. Arnsdorf casts Bannon as a truthsayer to MAGA conservatives. War Room, created in conjunction with Fredericks, functions as a populist pipeline and a kind of evangelical one stop shop for all of Donald Trump’s favorite ideas.
In some of the most entertaining moments in the book, Arnsdorf describes Bannon wearing his military style field jacket and scouring chat rooms to mainline the frenetic ebbs and flows of his listeners’ emotional output. In the book’s epilogue, Bannon is glued to the television as Matt Gaetz orchestrates his motion to vacate former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, from his position. Bannon takes this as a huge win for MAGA conservatives and the scene Arnsdorf describes is a fitting coda: Bannon, with his feet on the desk, narrates the events on C-SPAN and curses at RINO’s (Republicans in Name Only) every chance he gets.
Arnsdorf describes Bannon and Fredericks as both the intellectual leaders of the MAGA movement and the smooth salesmen of the Precinct Strategy: equal parts smarm and passion. Bannon is the one who discovers Schultz and provides him with a massive platform to advocate for the Precinct Strategy. Schultz’s message goes viral and the Precinct Strategy becomes the most important idea in the MAGA movement, motivating people like Salleigh Grubbs to take matters into her own hands.
The Precinct Strategy is basic American civics: get involved and influence the party platform. Yet, for American democracy to work, the system relies on optimism, a belief that politicians can set aside their differences and work together to move the country forward. The fanaticism of the MAGA conservatives rests on cynicism and conspiracy, a fundamental belief that the world (the Republican party, Democrats, Hollywood elites, paper shredding trucks) is out to get them, to squeeze their voice—and their vote—from existence. In their view, the only way to fight this grand conspiracy is through a ferocious commitment to ideology and an organized grassroots movement, sponsored by MyPillow.
Arnsdorf’s book is a testament to his ability as a writer and a journalist. The book often reads like one long, MAGA-focused episode of This American Life. He dives into why people like Bannon, Fredericks, and Schultz are so committed to the cause. He allows readers to empathize with people like Grubbs and Kathy Petsas, an old school McCain Republican in Arizona who is swept out of her party precinct by the MAGA wave. Arnsdorf’s most impressive ability is to take everyone in the book seriously, to push any personal misgivings or politics aside and allow each person to speak for themselves. It’s why my father endorsed Finish What We Started on his radio show, despite its subtitle.
Still, readers come away with an overwhelming sense that these MAGA firebrands, addicted to Bannon’s War Room, would benefit more from an actual high school civics class than from flooding their local precincts and ousting any Republican who dares dissent with their figurehead, that monolith of groupthink: Donald J. Trump. As a high school teacher, I’d be happy to help.
About the reviewer: John M. Fredericks is the ninth and 10th grade ELA and AP English Literature teacher at West Tallahatchie High School in Webb, Mississippi and is a 2023-2024 Teach Plus Senior Writing Fellow. His work has been featured in Newsweek, The Hechinger Report, and the Clarion-Ledger, among others.