Norman Solomon has spent decades watching American politics unfold through the vigilant lens of a media watchdog and journalist.
Throughout his career, the West Marin-based author has documented the ways what he terms “corporate media” have degraded the political landscape, as well as how the priorities of establishment Democrats have helped shape the country’s current political moment. In his new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, released this month, Solomon compiles nearly a decade of writings and reflections on the willful missteps of Democratic Party leadership—and is making his work available to readers completely free of charge.
Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005), which was adapted into a 2007 documentary narrated by actor Sean Penn.
He has written for publications including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and has focused throughout his career on media interests and corporate influence in politics. In The Blue Road to Trump Hell, Solomon draws on this depth of experience as a media critic and progressive to chronicle, in real time, the forces that led Democrats to consequential losses in 2016 and 2024.
The book is structured as a series of essays, capturing Solomon’s real-time reflections on the news of the day. “I just kept writing as events unfolded,” he says, “mainly to push back against a culture of political passivity…” Over time, however, he began to recognize that what he—and Democrats across the political spectrum—feared most, another Trump presidency, was becoming increasingly likely, due in large part to the Democratic Party establishment’s failure to learn from previous mistakes.
“When 2024 turned into a kind of Groundhog Year, with Trump’s second win, and 2025 became ever more terrible,” Solomon says, “the potential value of a book about how this happened came into focus.”
In shaping his contemporaneous writings into a book, Solomon chose to preserve their integrity by presenting them as they were originally written, as individual, chronologically dated articles, rather than reworking them into a single retrospective narrative. As he explains, “In politics, we easily forget important details and subtexts. The spin cycle is nonstop—if we’re paying close attention, it can make us dizzy.”
To avoid incorporating media spin or altering his perspectives in light of subsequent events, Solomon deliberately left the essays intact, noting in the introduction that “nothing has been revised for hindsight.” Even so, the book functions as something of an autopsy of two elections the Democratic Party fumbled. As Solomon puts it, “The Blue Road to Trump Hell exhumes history that’s been buried in avalanches of later events.”
This dysfunction is inseparable, in Solomon’s telling, from the structure of American media. Throughout the book, he critiques what he calls “corporate media,” saying “Media outlets owned by huge companies are dedicated most of all to maximizing profits,” a priority that shapes coverage in ways that undermine public understanding. In contrast, he points to smaller, often independent outlets operating outside that system as evidence that another media model remains possible.
Even within this dysfunctional media landscape however, some turning points appear with clarity. As he reflects on how certain events and perpectives—both his own and those of the figures he was chronicling—aged over time, Solomon notes, “We didn’t really need hindsight to realize that the corporatized politicians like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were giving ground to—and, in effect, often enabling—the monstrous politics of Donald Trump and his cronies.”
On the other hand, one figure continues to stand out to him as a progressive sage: “Looking back at the history presented in this book, I’m intensely reminded of how prophetic Bernie Sanders has been and continues to be,” Solomon says.
Solomon chronicled the descent into the “real-life Shakespearean tragedy of President Biden” as he made his choice to run for reelection in 2024. He points to Democratic Party leadership as Biden’s “enablers,” arguing that they worked to suppress primary challenges while pushing the narrative that Biden—who had defeated Trump in 2020—was the strongest candidate to do so again, despite polling that suggested otherwise.
“A gap has grown vast,” he writes in late 2023, “between current assessments from media, largely based on voter opinion data, and current public claims from congressional Democrats who keep their nose to the talking-points grindstone.”
He extends his critiques of the current political landscape to the concentration of wealth and power more broadly, frequently using the term “American oligarchs” to describe U.S. elites. Billionaires, he argues, now exert enormous influence over mass media, technology platforms and electoral politics.
Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg wield “colossal undemocratic, actually anti-democratic, power,” Solomon says, a reality he believes the language of oligarchy captures more accurately than euphemisms about elites or donors. “The extreme concentrations of wealth and economic power are extreme concentrations of political power,” he writes.
While the subject matter of The Blue Road to Trump Hell is often weighty, the book’s tone is lightened by Solomon’s collaboration with political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, whose illustrations appear on the cover and at the beginning of each section. Solomon and Wuerker first became collaborators in the 1990s, when Wuerker illustrated the covers of several books Solomon co-wrote with media critic Jeff Cohen.
Wuerker, a founding member of Politico, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2012 and continues to satirize the increasingly absurd excesses of Washington’s elite as the outlet’s editorial cartoonist. “Matt is one of the great political cartoonists of our era, or any era,” Solomon says. “In vivid colors, Matt brilliantly draws the absurdity and tragedy of current events,” offering readers moments of levity and catharsis amid relentless political disappointments.
True to his critique of corporate media greed, Solomon chose to make The Blue Road to Trump Hell freely available online. “I’m excited that the book is free for everyone from the start, via BlueRoad.info, as an e-book or PDF,” he says. “The media world has far too many paywalls.” The decision was both ideological and practical. “As a practical matter,” he adds, “the book will reach far more people because anyone can read it without charge.”
The book’s reception suggests it has found an audience among activists and progressive leaders alike. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna praised the book on X in November, calling it “a must read” for its analysis of “the bad trade deals, financial deregulation, bad wars, & offshoring that created the anger and resentment for a populist revolt.” For Solomon, such responses affirm the book’s core goal: not merely to document political failure, but to interrupt it.
Ultimately, The Blue Road to Trump Hell is both a memorialization and a warning: a chronicle of Democratic Party leadership’s mistakes and the political and economic conditions that produced them. The book stands as an act of resistance to complacency and collective amnesia, offering a moment of accountability, while being in and of itself an artifact of cautious optimism about a party’s ability to learn from its failures. Despite setbacks, Solomon, a lifelong activist, remains hopeful and focused on what he believes truly matters, saying, “I figure that I should keep adding my voice to outcries for a much better world.”
‘The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy’ can be downloaded for free at BlueRoad.info.
