Fear and Fury Era - How Rage Became Strategy and Violence Became Politics with Heather Ann Thompson’s Account #945854

On January 20, 2025, a man who incited an insurrection to overturn an election was inaugurated as President of the United States for the second time. Within hours, he began pardoning the rioters who attacked the Capitol in his name. This was not an accident. It was the culmination of choices made over nine years—and four decades.

Fear and Fury Era is the definitive account of how American democracy buckled under the weight of manufactured rage, racialized fear, and deliberate amnesia. From Trump's 2016 escalator ride through Charlottesville's torches, the pandemic's body count, George Floyd's murder, the Big Lie, January 6, and Trump's stunning return to power, this book chronicles not just what happened, but why it happened—and who paid the price.

Drawing on meticulous research and unflinching analysis, each chapter examines a critical moment in democracy's unraveling: the fake elector scheme that nearly succeeded, the officers beaten defending the Capitol, the election workers driven from their homes by death threats, the thousands of victims we forgot. But this is not just a chronicle of the Trump years. It is an excavation of the throughline connecting Bernhard Goetz's 1984 subway shooting to MAGA's mass movement—a forty-year arc of white rage, media-manufactured fury, and the politics of fear that proved devastatingly effective.

This is the story of Heather Heyer, killed fighting hate in Charlottesville. Of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, destroyed by presidential lies. Of Gianna Floyd, who will never have memories with her father. Of Brian Sicknick and the Capitol Police who held the line. Of the unnamed thousands—separated children, banned refugees, targeted trans youth—whose suffering became acceptable collateral damage.

Written in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson's political journalism, Fear and Fury Era refuses to sanitize or equivocate. It names names. It documents crimes. It centers victims over architects. And it argues that what happened was not inevitable—it was chosen. Americans chose to believe lies about stolen elections. Media chose profit over truth. Politicians chose power over country. And in 2024, voters chose to return an authoritarian to power, knowing exactly who he was.

The throughline from vigilante violence to January 6 is real, documented, and unbroken. The only question is whether enough people will choose to break it—or whether the next forty years will finish what the last forty started.
This is not ancient history. This is right now. And what comes next depends on whether we finally choose to remember.