These themes segue perfectly into their new book, “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported.” Today, these three wise men are influential voices of the anti-Trump resistance. If someone had hibernated through the 2016 election, woke up early this year and logged onto Twitter or turned on cable news and wondered, what the hell happened?, this would be the book to read. “One Nation After Trump” devotes considerable space to tackling the unprecedented nature of Trump’s election and presidency — his vulgarity, racism, authoritarianism, cronyism and reverence for America’s longtime enemies. But the book is particularly useful in showing how, despite all the talk of Trump as an aberration in American politics, his rise reflects the longer-term trends that have shaped the modern Republican Party: the four-decade war on the “liberal media”; the delegitimatization of political opponents; the appeals to racism and xenophobia; the hostility to democratic norms. “Trump is less of an outsider than he seems, and he was building on rather than resisting recent trends within the G.O.P.,” the authors write. “This history helps explain why so many Republican leaders are reluctant to call out Trump’s excesses and to acknowledge the risks he poses to our political system.”

The book is less a rallying cry and more a sober examination of how someone so obviously unfit and unqualified to be president could be elected anyway, and the authors make skillful use of social science research to better understand the Trump phenomenon. Their observations defy easy conclusions. “Trump clearly appealed to two broad, overlapping streams of discontent,” they write. “One was animated by race, immigration, religion and culture. The other was inspired by economic discontent, the flight of well-paying jobs overseas and the hollowing out of many of our communities.” Trump’s widely mocked “Make America Great Again” slogan brilliantly amalgamated these disparate elements of “populism, nationalism, nativism and protectionism.”

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There’s always a danger in writing a book about fast-moving current events, particularly with someone as volatile as Trump. Since I received my review copy, Trump threatened nuclear war with North Korea, blamed “many sides” for the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, fired his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ended protections for immigrant Dreamers and pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Given the quick turnaround, parts of the book feel hastily assembled, particularly the second half, where the authors offer policy prescriptions for “a new economy, a new patriotism, a new civil society and a new democracy.” While many of their ideas are good ones, they read like a laundry list of proposals, the very thing the authors criticize Hillary Clinton for. “Clinton’s failure owed less to the merits (or demerits) of her particular policies than to her campaign’s lack of focus on the depth of the economic difficulties so many Americans face,” they write.