American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and Doge Butchered the Us Government

A gripping narrative of federal workers caught in Trump's second-term purge, and the devastating consequences for American democracy.

American Carnage follows eleven federal workers, in eight government agencies, from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald Trump's second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. With Trump having empowered the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency, to make dramatic cuts to many of the country's most important agencies, what unfolded in these months was a cascading tragedy of historic proportions.

Their stories, which show a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation, are America's stories. What happened to them-the bullying, the intimidation, the deliberate removal of financial stability--also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees. A fierce reckoning with the intimate and far-reaching effects of these layoffs, both on the individuals who lost their jobs and on the millions of Americans who found their access to basic government services curtailed, American Carnage is the first book-length account of how these cuts dulled and denuded our city on the hill, leaving a morally impoverished landscape in their wake.

Sasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western correspondent and the author of a weekly political column for the magazine. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He is the author of eleven books, including The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Abramsky teaches writing at UC Davis. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.