By Tim Alberta

A Library of American Journalism

Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. Hailing from Brighton, Michigan, he attended Schoolcraft College and later Michigan State University, where his plans to become a baseball writer were altered by a serendipitous stint covering the legislature in Lansing. 

He went on to spend more than a decade in Washington, reporting for publications such as the Wall Street Journal, National Journal and National Review. Tim would ultimately serve as chief political correspondent for POLITICO before moving back to Michigan and joining The Atlantic in 2021.

In 2019 he released his first book, "American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump," and co-moderated the year's final Democratic presidential debate. In 2023 he followed up with, "The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism," and in 2024 he won a National Magazine Award for his profile of Chris Licht, the chairman of CNN Worldwide, who was fired after the story published.

Tim's work has been featured in dozens of other publications, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. He appears regularly as a commentator on American television programs and speaks on politics, culture, and religion at forums around the world. He lives in southeast Michigan with his wife and three sons.
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Invite Tim Alberta to Speak

Represented by Leading Authorities, Inc., author and journalist Tim Alberta has been featured as a keynote speaker, guest panelist, live interviewer and host emcee at events across the United States and overseas. Tim's speaking experience spans from large corporate conventions to elite academic forums, exclusive briefings for military personnel to private receptions with leading industry lobbyists and Fortune 500 CEOs. Having spent more than a decade immersed in Washington politics—and now based in the Midwest, roving the country, reporting from the ground-up on the roots of our unrest—Tim is uniquely positioned to address the cultural and political trends shaping American life. To book Tim for an event, please fill out the contact form below.

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"The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism."

Spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list

The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.

Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.

For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.

Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from scripture: Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.

Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta asks: If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?

To purchase a copy, visit the book's official website. To request signed copies, fill out the contact form below.
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"American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump"

Debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list

Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.

American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?

Loaded with explosive original reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many others—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

To purchase a copy, visit the book's official website. To request signed copies, fill out the contact form below.
Inside the Meltdown at CNN

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.” It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.

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‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Tanked Trump

‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Tanked Trump

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who claimed to have an old audio recording of Trump making exceedingly lewd remarks about women, had sent over the alleged quotes and was requesting comment from the campaign for a story that would run later that day. “Wow, this isn’t good,” Reince Priebus said, his eyes fixed on a single line. “This is really, really bad.” The group inside the Trump Tower conference room was paralyzed with silence. Finally, Jared Kushner piped up. “You know, I don’t think it’s all that bad.”

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Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win

Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win

The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.” LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.”

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John Boehner Unchained

John Boehner Unchained

Long considered one of Washington’s finest golfers, he is spraying shots left and right with choppy, self-doubting swings. Sensing my surprise, the former House Speaker says his handicap has skyrocketed since leaving Congress two years ago. After he misses a 10-foot putt, and we climb into our cart, I ask why. “You have to concentrate while you hit the ball,” he says. “That’s my biggest problem in golf these days. I just can’t concentrate. I could always concentrate on what I had to do. But these days..."

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Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything.

Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything.

Inmate No. 15000-030 is released into the frigid January morning at 8:46, a gray custodial suit of sweatpants and long-sleeved thermal clinging to his immense frame, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard wrapping around his face, a guard escorting him with a high-powered rifle slung over his right shoulder. Most politicians would appear hopelessly—dangerously—misplaced in a federal prison. Kent Sorenson is not most politicians.

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'I Was Responsible for Those People'

'I Was Responsible for Those People'

In 1997, M. H. Reed, the New York Times restaurant critic, called Glenn Vogt “the best front-of-the-house manager in the business.” A year later, he accepted an offer to become the general manager of Windows on the World. “It was like being asked to play center field for the Yankees,” Vogt told me. “Every day was surreal. From the day I walked in until the day I watched it burn.”

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Nikki Haley's Time for Choosing

Nikki Haley's Time for Choosing

Late last year, Nikki Haley had a friend who was going through a hard time. He had lost his job and was being evicted from his house. He was getting bad advice from bad people who were filling his head with self-destructive fantasies. He seemed to be losing touch with reality. Out of concern, Haley called the man. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” she told him. “You’re my president, but you’re also my friend.”

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The Nicest Man in Stand-Up

The Nicest Man in Stand-Up

If comedy is a proxy for the mood of American society, Nate Bargatze’s sudden popularity suggests that he’s tapped into something powerful: the discontent with our discontent. He insists that stand-up can be a great unifier, bridging the divides that have emerged within families, among friends, between red states and blue states. “People are worn out,” he said.

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The Thrill of Defeat

The Thrill of Defeat

We’d outgained the Packers, out-converted them, outplayed them. But we’d lost anyway—in dramatic, dream-shattering fashion. It was too much for my 7-year-old emotions to process. So, I wept. First in the stands as time expired, then in the swarming, beer-soaked concourse as my family searched for the exit, and for the entire hour-long car ride home. Finally, as we pulled into our driveway, my dad spun the radio knob leftward, turning down the postmortem show. “It’s just a game,” he said, smiling gently. “We’ll win the next one.” It was the only lie my dad ever told me.

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My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet. The traffic in downtown Washington was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book. Now I had one final interview. After the car pulled over on M Street, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

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A Journey Into the Heart of America’s Voting Paranoia

A Journey Into the Heart of America’s Voting Paranoia

History will record that in the summer and fall of 2020, at the peak of the most unusual and bitterly contested election in modern times, the president and his team made a sport of plucking minor incidents from local news feeds and distorting them into data points of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. History will also record that their efforts have been wildly successful.

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Requiem for the Spartans

Requiem for the Spartans

College is something more than classes and keggers, caps and gowns. It is a process of ripening, of discovering the outer world but also one’s inner self. It is a collection of experiences and memories that shape a foundation for life. It is a gift. That gift was snatched away from Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, and Alexandria Verner—and my alma mater will never be the same because of it.

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Invite Tim Alberta to Speak

Represented by Leading Authorities, Inc., journalist and author Tim Alberta has been featured as a keynote speaker, guest panelist, live interviewer and host emcee at events across the United States and overseas. Tim's speaking experience spans from large corporate conventions to elite academic forums, exclusive briefings for military personnel to private receptions with leading industry lobbyists and Fortune 500 CEOs. Having spent more than a decade immersed in Washington politics—and now based in the Midwest, roving the country, reporting from the ground-up on the roots of our unrest—Tim is uniquely positioned to address the cultural and political trends shaping American life. To book Tim for an event, please fill out the contact form below.