Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
In Where Tyranny Begins, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the country's two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department non-partisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.
Where Tyranny Begins exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the post-Watergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A five-word warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: 'Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.'
Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East distills eleven years of expert reporting for the New York Times, Reuters, and the Atlantic into a clarion call for change. Here Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde exposes how a dysfunctional Washington squandered billions on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, neglected its true allies in the war on terror, and failed to employ its most potent nonmilitary weapons: American consumerism, technology, and investment. The author then surveys post-Arab Spring Tunisia, Turkey, and Egypt, and finds a yearning for American technology, trade, and education. He argues that only Muslim moderates, not Americans, can eradicate militancy. An incisive look at the evolving nature of war, Beyond War shows how the failed American effort to back moderate Muslims since 9/11 can be salvaged.
