Like the deity on the sixth day of creation, Donald Trump has recast the Republican party in his own image. Aggrieved and belligerent is the new normal. The soul of the party has migrated from the sun belt to the Bible belt, from the suburbs to rural America, from a message suffused with upward arc to one brimming with resentment.

The 45th president has won the hearts and minds of the faithful while turning off the rest of America. According to a recent poll, Trump has garnered the approval of seven in eight Republicans even as he trails Megan Rapinoe, the star of the champion US women’s soccer team, 42%-41%. All this despite an economy that moves forward.

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, has written a masterful must-read. Across 600-plus pages, he chronicles more than a decade of transformation and turmoil within what was once but is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the past half-century, the GOP has dramatically changed. New England and New York’s tony bedroom communities are now Democratic. The old Confederacy is a contiguous sea of Republican red. In the 2018 midterms, the GOP captured 9% of the black vote. In 1972, they got twice that.

The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing Paul Ryan

Subtitled On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, American Carnage delivers a lively tick-tock on how the party moved from George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the jagged contours of Maga. Trump emerges as the vehicle and voice of white evangelicals and white Americans without a four-year degree, the operative word being “white”.

Alberta is mindful that the winds of proto-Trumpism were present before Bush had left office. In his telling, Sarah Palin – who once bragged of her husband and herself: “He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack” – was a harbinger of a post-Bush world.

American Carnage records Karl Rove, Bush’s political brain, branding Palin “vacuous” and evidencing a Republican tropism toward “wanting people who would throw bombs and blow things up”. While Trump was the “ultimate expression” of that impulse, Rove says, Palin was an “early warning bell”.

As framed by Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and 2012 vice-presidential candidate: “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.” Against the backdrop of failure in Iraq, the Great Recession, displacement and globalization, Trump delivered “hope” to voters Hillary Clinton discounted as deplorable.

Alberta’s storytelling is bolstered by his access to powers that be and were. Trump, Ryan and John Boehner, another ex-speaker, all go on the record. American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness.

For example, Alberta lets us know the fix was in at Fox News for Trump during the Republican primaries, in a manner akin to the Democratic National Committee putting its thumb on the scales for Clinton. Ted Cruz, Texas’ grating junior senator, never had a real chance with the network built by the late Roger Ailes.

One Fox staffer told Cruz: “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on the air.” Or, as Cruz put it after Ailes’ death in 2017: “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.” Alberta lets us know that Ailes believed Barack Obama “really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States”.

American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness

American Carnage also crystalizes Trump’s own penchant for eavesdropping. In early 2012, as the primaries were heating up, Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, met with Michael Cohen, Trump’s then consigliere who is now a resident of a federal correctional facility. They discussed the prospect of Trump meeting Romney. Alberta lays out what happened next: “Cohen was suddenly interrupted by a voice crackling over a speakerphone on the table. It was Trump. He had been listening the entire time …”

In describing the 2012 race, Alberta conveys the mistaken belief held by Romney’s team that that he would win based upon pre-election polling. American Carnage, however, makes no mention of a poll circulated on the Saturday night before the election by Alex Gage, which showed Obama with at least 300 electoral votes. Gage was a veteran of the Bush 2004 re-election effort and Romney’s 2008 campaign. His then wife, Katie Packer, was Romney’s deputy campaign manager.

Sarah Palin endorses Trump during a rally at Iowa State University in January 2016. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

Alberta sheds light on Trump’s thinly reported May 2016 meeting with Rove. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s then campaign manager, called the get-together “good” without saying more. American Carnage brings color and detail.

Trump appears both ignorant of the realities of the electoral map and appreciative of the tutorial. The two men review Trump’s path to an electoral college majority, Rove correcting his eager but pride-filled pupil. Trump poses the possibility of winning California, New York and Oregon, only to be shot down. The last time any of those states went Republican was more than 30 years ago.

Rove explains that Iowa, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are winnable if the campaign husbands its time and energy. Trump turns to Steve Wynn, a casino magnate subsequently felled by allegations of sexual misconduct, and exclaims: “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”

Alberta makes clear that Trump was the only candidate capable of harnessing populist fury into something more than a collection of raw emotions. Clinton’s worship at the altars of identity politics and political correctness helped cost her the election, just as Trump’s lack of a filter endeared him to his base.

Although Clinton finished with nearly 3 million more votes, Trump sits in the Oval Office. As Alberta observes, authenticity remains in high demand, more so than reality.

Trump is embattled but far from despairing. “I fucking love this job,” he “howls” to no one in particular, backstage at a rally in Columbia, Missouri, in November 2018.

He knows he is transformative.

“Honestly,” Trump tells Alberta. “Can there even be a question?”

