Robert Draper's Weapons of Mass Delusion begins in the days and weeks before the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the first section of his book, Draper chronicles how a band of misfits—led and encouraged by politicians like Donald Trump and Lauren Boebert—planned to make their displeasure about Trump's election loss known. They had, as Draper details, intended to disrupt the democratic processing of certifying the electors who would confirm Joe Biden's win. Biden cheated, the misfits alleged; Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 Presidential Election.
That rhetoric was represented by the phrase "stop the steal" and "the big steal." Draper says that far-right Republicans believed that Joe Biden and his ilk acted in concert to steal the 2020 Election. There were protests about the alleged (but unsubstantiated) election theft. These protests, Draper shows, fractured the party and contributed to the January 6th invasion.
Then, Draper recounts what happened on January 6th. How politicians like Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert fanned the flames of insurrection and encouraged protestors to turn into rioters and invade the Capitol complex. Boebert told protestors where Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was—ostensibly so that they could find and kill her. Draper recounts how people died during the invasion and shows how the invasion harmed the United States irreparably.
Much of Draper's book focuses on the period between the insurrection and the 2022 midterm elections. The delusion in the far-right faction of the Republican party was further inflamed after the 2020 Election and January 6th because of conspiracy theories, including about COVID-19 and vaccines, Antifa, pedophiles, Black Lives Matter, and many more.
The sane Republicans who remained in the party attempted to fight back against these theories, but they were on the defensive and not very effective in doing so. The voices of the sane people in the Republican party were overwhelmed by those who operated under the mass delusion that the title of Draper's book references. And that mass delusion, Draper details, affected the way that people thought about the midterm elections in 2022, which Draper says will determine how, and if, the American Republic will continue to endure despite those who don't want it to.
