American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government

Please join e and Nighthawk for a conversation with journalist Sasha Abramsky about his new book , a reckoning with the consequences of Donald Trump’s war on the so-called deep state, told through the experiences of 11 fired federal workers as their lives are thrown into chaos.

American Carnage follows 11 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 writes a weekly political column for The Nation magazine. He is the author of 11 books, including Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It, Inside Obama's Brain, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, and Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar.

This event is part of the new series Juxtapositions: Conversations on Art, Ideas and Global Cross-Currents, a co-production of and Nighthawk. It’s free of charge and open to the public, but register to secure a spot — seating is limited.

Copies of American Carnage will be available for sale by the Book Cellar.

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