Amanda Carpenter, "Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us" (Broadside, 2018)

Summary

CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter was an early conservative critic of Donald Trump when she was targeted in a smear campaign falsely accusing her of an extramarital affair with Trump’s 2016 Republican primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz. In her words, she was “gaslit,” driven crazy by bald-faced lies. In Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us (Broadside, 2018), Carpenter argues Trump lies in a methodical fashion designed to maintain loyalty from the Republican base, keep Democrats off-balance, and manipulate the media. She place her own traumatic experience in the broader context of how Trump campaigns and governs, and offers advice on how people can “fireproof” themselves from Trump’s tactics.


Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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