Weapons of Mass Delusion is the title of a non-fiction book published by Robert Draper in 2022, but it is the book's subtitle that gets right to the point. Draper may have been just a little clever for his good in harking back to the administration of George W. Bush in devising the title of his book as a pun on the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "When the Republican Party Lost its Mind" is a subtitle that demands the reader be taken back not just to the Bush, Jr. administration, but to the era of the GOP's "Contract with America" in the mid-1990s since the insanity referenced in the subtitle began way back then. The focus of Draper's book is not even, however, directed toward the years dominated by the specter of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.
The entire premise of the book fails the logic test and proves unsound right from the very first pages when the author writes that the focus of his narrative will be limited only to the eighteen months following the overwhelming defeat of Trump in his bid for re-election. This period is defined, according to the author, by "the tension between the party’s reality-based wing and the lost-its-mind wing" which "most acutely revealed itself within the 211 Republican conferences, the minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives." Essentially, the book proceeds to examine its stated questions of when the Republican Party went nuts by suggesting this process of transforming did not kick into high gear until January 6, 2021
Thus, the key players in this drama as it plays out in Draper's narrative are such immediately familiar names destined to become footnotes to history as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Kevin McCarthy, and even the already forgotten former Representative Madison Cawthorn. (Search if you will for the name Rudolph Giuliani, but be prepared to learn that that, according to the author, the man who seemed to be on the news every single night during the eighteen months covered by this book was so marginal to the story that his only role was as a sidekick to Gosar.) By focusing on such marginal characters who barely even register as blips on what had been a six-year-long Trumpian radar system, the author becomes a collaborator in what might be considered the second Great Lie of the era: that there is both the Trump wing of the GOP as well as a wing more steeped in reality that bears no responsibility for anything which occurred the day after Trump was officially nominated as the Republican nominee in 2016.
The focus of this book is entirely reserved for what happened after Trump's humiliating defeat and his pathetic success in convincing millions of his followers to believe that he won. The title carries the implicit promise that it will reveal the moment when the GOP became the party that began openly and eagerly supporting anti-Semites marching in Charlottesville, confessed serial sexual predators, violent acts directed toward every minority group in America, hypocrisy on issues related to impeachable offenses, praising Vladimir Putin as knowing more about voter integrity than the collective U.S. intelligence apparatus, and widespread faith that liberal celebrities and politicians are sacrificing and drinking the blood of young children.
One can fairly argue whether this turn began with the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump or whether it began with the simultaneous rise of Fox News and GOP control of Congress in the 1990s. One thing that cannot be done is what the author of Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind seemed determined to do: set the date for that loss of marbles on January 6, 2021.
