Edgy and interesting

Every once in a while, one of the best things about a book are its footnotes. That's how I felt about Tina Nguyen's The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out). Rather than burden her text with explications of the catalogue of right-wing think-tanks, conferences, and media outlets that she wandered through in her early career, she simply footnotes explanations. She knows most readers don't keep this map of right infrastructure in our heads.

(Okay -- to a considerable extent I do carry this stuff in my head, because I was employed when Nguyen was still a small child by a left think-tank that tracked those rabbit holes. Many are still the same outfits, but with new names. The personnel migrate. But such familiarity is rare where I come from.)

Nguyen explains the purpose of writing a memoir in her early 30s:

... if you are a liberal wondering why all this nativist populism seemed to come out of nowhere, to the point that it is on the precipice of subsuming American civic life, this book is for you. If you're a Republican who thought the GOP looked like a Mitt Romney paradise in 2012, believed that Trump was an aberration in 2016 and 2020, and have no idea why he's still a presence in 2024, this book is for you. ...

She disappointed her immigrant mother, Thanh Nguyen, by not getting into Harvard. A less than diligent student in high school at the private Milton Academy, she ended up following a boyfriend to Claremont McKenna in California with no idea she'd put herself on a conservative fast track that was invisible to world from which she came.

I'll give everyone else a pass on not knowing about the sheer scale of the right inside American civic life, because when I was a young conservative activist, I didn't know what they were trying to do either. Between 2008 and 2012 -- from college until my early twenties -- I was simply a politics nerd with an unnerving obsession with the US Constitution and American history, who dated an odd but highly ambitious conservative boy in high school and followed him to Claremont McKenna College, a renowned college with a notoriously conservative government department, and a deep affiliation with a right-wing think tank whose scholars and papers formed the backbone of the Trump doctrine.

From there I found some interesting internships through a local think tank, got involved in some weird ghoulish groups in Washington, DC, met Tucker Carlson, wanted to be Tucker Carlson, went to work for Tucker Carlson, experienced an identity crisis (as one does in their early twenties), and then left the movement to pursue a career in normal journalism (assisted by a nice favor from Tucker Carlson). In a bizarre twist, it brought me back to covering the movement ... when Donald Trump was elected. ...To the rest of the world, the things I'd taken for granted were actually obscure, esoteric, and hidden knowledge.

It's a convoluted story, but eventually she escaped the conservative news arena and has reported for Vanity Fair, Politico, and Puck, often covering Trump and the right wing boys emerging from the same swamp where she'd been nurtured. She writes it all with lingering amazement: these people are both formidable and a bit pathetic. She knows many of them are truly nuts; she's not convinced they won't someday take over America.

The warmest notes in the book are the descriptions of her mother, who pushed but also encouraged this strange American daughter to make a success of herself. When she was briefly hired by Tucker Carlson, her mother wondered:

"Oh, he's on television?" Mom asked. "You should ask him to help you get on TV. I think you'd be good on TV, like Connie Chung."

By the end of the book, her encouraging mother has died. Nguyen's book and still rising career seem a kind of memorial from a not very dutiful daughter who, perhaps, has made it in American journalism.