Robert Draper has covered wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

But his new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion, when the Republican Party lost its mind, is about a war closer to home.

It just looked otherworldly. It looked like something out of a Francis Ford Coppola movie, you know, Apocalypse Now.

And I could see police and these soon-to-be rioters duking it out.

I'm Ryan Liza, this is Playbook Deep Died.

There are a lot of great books about the Trump presidency.

But Roberts is the first to focus exclusively on the GOP during the crucial 18-month period after January 6th.

You know, the subtitle of the book originally was how the Republican Party lost its mind.

And I realized actually, no, it's not a history book.

The subtitle of Robert's book, emphasizing when, not how, is important.

And it's when the Republican Party lost its mind.

And so, as a kind of narrative framework, I said, this is the way we ought to be thinking about this as a moment.

It's a period when a group of Trump-inspired elected officials helped the former president solidify his grip over the party.

The book is character-driven. You'll travel along with far-right representatives Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Green

and Matt Gates as they fight their GLP elders.

And you'll see up close how Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell grapple with this insurrection.

Robert, a contributor for the New York Times magazine and National Geographic, has long been one of my favorite chroniclers of the right in America.

And not just because he's a gifted writer who understands people as well as politics, which you can't say about every political reporter,

but also because he approaches the subject within empathy that I've always suspected comes from his own background.

He grew up in deep red Texas, the son of a conservative, politically active dad,

and the grandson of Leon Jaworski, the Democratic lawyer who Richard Nixon appointed as Watergate Special Prosecutor after he fired the first one.

Robert joined us from his home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Washington, D.C. the day after the book was released.

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