A Revolution of Common Sense review – powerful, honest Trump book

Politics, Scott Jennings argues in A Revolution of Common Sense, stopped listening to ordinary people long ago and disappeared into a maze of elites, bureaucracy and “woke” ideology that ignores reality.

In Jennings’s telling, Donald Trump’s 2024 comeback and second term form a “revolution of common sense” that pits working-class instincts against a professional political class that, he believes, broke the country and then lied about it.

Jennings builds his case from insider interviews with Trump, cabinet officials and advisers, from the Oval Office and Air Force One to late-night strategy calls, and anchors it in polling, election data and contemporary reporting on tariffs, immigration, Ukraine and energy policy.

External analyses of the 2024 election do show a broad county-level shift toward Trump—he improved the GOP vote share in roughly 1,400+ counties across three consecutive elections, while Democrats improved in only a few dozen.

A Revolution of Common Sense will resonate most with readers already sympathetic to Trump’s populist narrative, people curious about how his second administration works on the inside, or anyone studying the class realignment in American politics; it is not for readers seeking a neutral, academic account, nor for those who find pro-Trump apologetics intolerable.

1. Introduction

Scott Jennings’s A Revolution of Common Sense: How Donald Trump Stormed Washington and Fought for Western Civilization was published in 2025 by HarperCollins, with Trump himself offering a glowing jacket endorsement that promises “the TRUTH about Team Trump and our Agenda.”

The book positions itself somewhere between political reportage, insider memoir and campaign manifesto.

It claims to tell, from “inside the room,” how Trump’s second term has unfolded as a coherent effort to restore national sanity.

Jennings is a veteran Republican strategist and CNN conservative commentator who worked in the George W. Bush White House and on multiple high-profile GOP campaigns, from Mitch McConnell’s Senate races to state-level battles in Kentucky and New Mexico.

Those credentials matter because A Revolution of Common Sense is not written by an academic historian looking back from a safe distance.

It is written by someone still in the arena, who advises Republican candidates, fights nightly battles on cable panels, and clearly sees himself as part of “Team Trump.”

That closeness gives the narrative its energy and access, but also its blind spots and biases.

At its core, the book advances a simple thesis: after four “disastrous years of the Biden administration,” Trump returned to Washington in January 2025 determined to “begin a revolution of common sense” by acting fast, taking risks, and refusing to be strangled again by what Jennings calls the “anaconda” of official Washington.

Jennings structures the story chronologically and thematically—campaign, inauguration, the first six frenetic months of Trump 2.0—and organizes chapters around big fights: bureaucracy, media, Ukraine, immigration, tariffs, and energy.

Each is presented as a clash between elite orthodoxies and the instinctive, common-sense judgments of Trump and his supporters.

Whether you buy this framing will largely determine how you experience the book.

2. Background & Context

To understand A Revolution of Common Sense, you have to place it inside the extraordinary political context of Trump’s second term.

Trump won the 2024 presidential election by carrying both the Electoral College and the popular vote, only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988, with most counties in the country swinging further toward him compared with 2020.

Analyses by the New York Times and others found that between 2016 and 2024, Republicans increased their vote share in roughly 1,400+ counties—sometimes estimated at 1,433—while Democrats improved in only 57, a pattern concentrated in poorer, less-educated, more working-class regions.

Jennings reads this as hard proof that a class-based political realignment is underway: working-class voters of various races drifting toward a Trump-led GOP, affluent metropolitan areas consolidating around Democrats.

What he calls the “revolution of common sense” is, in this sense, statistical as well as emotional.

The book also leans heavily on the perceived failures of the Biden years: persistent inflation, border chaos, an unresolved and grinding war in Ukraine, and revelations (or at least allegations) about Biden’s declining health and the effort to conceal it.

Jennings cites reporting by journalists such as Alex Thompson of Axios and CNN’s Jake Tapper—whose book Original Sin exposed how Biden’s inner circle and many media outlets “covered up” his deterioration—as evidence that establishment institutions lied to the public in ways that dwarf earlier controversies.

Against that backdrop, Trump’s January 20, 2025 inauguration and his call for “a revolution of common sense” become, for Jennings, both political event and moral reckoning.

He argues that millions of Americans were not just voting for a person but trying to claw back control of their own reality from what they saw as hostile experts and dishonest elites.

3. A Revolution of Common Sense Summary

Highlighted overview

Timeframe & political setting

• 2024 – Donald Trump wins the presidential election again, after what Jennings describes as four disastrous years under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
• 20 January 2025 – Trump is sworn in for his second term and uses his inaugural address to promise a “revolution of common sense” in government, culture, and foreign policy.
• First 100 days (Jan–Apr 2025) – The book focuses almost entirely on these opening months, arguing they are the most consequential since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term.

Core thesis

• America under Biden is painted as “off the rails”—economically, culturally, and at the border. Trump’s second term is framed as an emergency effort to restore normality and optimism via common-sense decisions that elites allegedly hate but ordinary people intuitively support.
• “Common sense” becomes the ideological brand of the GOP: Trump’s party is the party of common sense, Democrats are cast as the party of “uncommon nonsense.”

Key domestic moves

• Culture/education:
• The Department of Education pressures the University of Pennsylvania to bar biological males from women’s sports and to restore women’s records and titles, an episode Jennings calls a “common sense victory” for women and girls.
• Bureaucracy & DOGE:
• Trump creates the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and brings in Elon Musk as the “Godfather” of the effort to cut bureaucracy and waste.
• Within months, DOGE claims to have saved taxpayers over $160 billion, with the potential to double that figure, and exposes absurdities like 4.6 million government credit cards for 2.3 million employees and the NIH running ~700 IT systems with 27 CIOs.
• Musk’s effort triggers pushback from the GAO and Democrats, but Jennings presents it as a model of private-sector efficiency finally unleashed on Washington.
• Later, Musk turns against Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” calls it a “disgusting abomination,” and launches “The America Party”, sparking fears of a split on the right.
• Immigration & border security:
• In Chapter Seven – “Alien Enemies: The Immigration Fights”, Jennings describes Trump using aggressive executive orders and enforcement to “effectively close the southern border”, with early 2025 statistics from sources like Reuters and Axios cited for record-low crossings.
• Tariffs & trade:
• Trump revives and expands his tariff agenda, claims critics’ warnings of economic catastrophe are wrong, and by mid-2025, Jennings notes that the S&P 500 hits new highs and consumer confidence remains strong despite the “tariff chaos” elites predicted.
• On 8 May 2025, Trump and UK prime minister Keir Starmer announce a new U.S.–UK trade agreement reducing tariffs on autos, energy and agriculture, presented as proof that a tough initial stance leads to better “fair deals.”
• Energy policy:
• In Chapter Eleven – “Unleashing American Energy”, Trump reverses what Jennings calls the Obama–Biden “War on Coal” and climate “extremism,” centering reliable fossil fuel and nuclear power while attacking what he quotes journalist Robert Bryce calling the “anti-industry industry.”
• Interior Secretary Doug Burgum oversees new leasing in the newly branded “Gulf of America,” arguing that more drilling both strengthens the grid and pays down debt through royalties.

Foreign policy flashpoints

• Ukraine & Russia – “Fighting for Peace” (Chapter Six):
• Trump inherits the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, which Jennings blames heavily on Biden’s “minor incursion” comment and Nord Stream 2 decision.
• February 2025: a televised Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy erupts into a very public argument, derailing a planned mineral rights deal that would have given the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, oil and gas and created a joint investment fund (50% U.S.-funded) with future military aid counting toward America’s share.
• Trump then halts U.S. funding and intelligence sharing, pushing Europe to “double down” on supporting Ukraine; Jennings cites polling and reporting to argue that U.S. and European public opinion had already soured on an open-ended war.
• 30 April 2025: after a quiet reset—including a meeting beside Zelenskyy at Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome—the U.S. and Ukraine finally sign the minerals agreement, seen as both economic partnership and de facto security pact against Russia.
• Middle East & Iran/Israel:
• In spring and June 2025, Trump orders strikes on Houthi rebels and Iranian nuclear facilities and then brokers a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Jennings suggests this achievement alone should earn Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, portraying him as a “peace through strength” president.
• Hostage diplomacy & “peace through leverage”:
• The book also describes hostage releases (e.g., an American teacher from Russia) and pressure campaigns as examples of Trump’s willingness to combine military, economic and rhetorical pressure to force breakthroughs—though we only see fragments of those stories in the excerpts.

Political realignment & working class

• Jennings leans on Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Second Class to argue that from 1965–2020, GDP and corporate profits soared while working-class wages barely moved, as manufacturing shrank from about 25% of the economy to ~11%, replaced by finance, real estate and insurance.
• He weaves in his own family history of factory layoffs in Kentucky to illustrate why working-class voters who once trusted Democrats now see Trump as their champion.
• The 2024 election and early 2025 polling are framed as proof that “common sense” populism has reshaped the Republican Party and turned it into the natural home of those who feel betrayed by elites.

Communication style & media wars

• Jennings repeatedly highlights Trump’s unscripted, comic, pugilistic style as the end of “political pablum”—a model for authentic communication that resonates far more than scripted talking points.
• The book is studded with scenes of Jennings on CNN sparring with liberal commentators, using his platform to defend Trump’s tariffs, border crackdown and Ukraine strategy, and mocking what he sees as the “self-therapy” of defeated elites.

Ending frame

• The book ends with Trump’s 100th-day rally in Macomb County, Michigan (29 April 2025), where he repeats that the last fourteen weeks are simply a “revolution of common sense”—a line that Jennings says inspired the book itself and that, for him, captures the new identity of the GOP and its movement.
• The epilogue recounts Trump calling Jennings onstage at that rally, praising him for defending him on CNN, and then gifting a signed hat “To Jeff,” Jennings’s working-class father—a symbolic closing of the loop between elite politics and the blue-collar world the book claims Trump now represents.

4. Extended summary of A Revolution of Common Sense

1. Setting the stage: Why a “revolution of common sense”?

Jennings opens by explaining why, in his view, Trump’s return to the White House was both improbable and inevitable. After the trauma of January 6 and Trump’s 2020 defeat, the conventional wisdom was that he was politically finished.

Yet four years of Biden–Harris governance, he argues, produced inflation, a border crisis, and an increasingly radical cultural agenda that most Americans felt they had never voted for.

Biden is portrayed as having campaigned as a moderate but then “turned the government over to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,” leading to record illegal immigration, crime committed by undocumented migrants, and cultural flashpoints around gender and activism.

Jennings insists that millions of voters were exhausted by being told to accept “random and extreme” phenomena—men in girls’ locker rooms, climate protestors blocking traffic, sports turning into political theater—and that they were desperate for someone who seemed “normal.” Trump, paradoxically, becomes that “normal” politician because he says aloud what many feel but are afraid to express.

In his 20 January 2025 inaugural address, Trump explicitly brands his second term as a “revolution of common sense.”

For Jennings, this phrase is not rhetorical wallpaper; it is the key organizing idea of the administration, and the book follows how that idea plays out across domestic and foreign policy, the bureaucracy, media fights, and international realignment.

2. Day One: governing at “breakneck speed”

The first substantive chapters argue that Trump, having learned from his first term, arrives for Trump 2.0 determined to move faster than the bureaucracy can stop him. Jennings contrasts him with previous presidents who campaign on bold change and then complain about red tape once in office. Here, the promise is the opposite: if a program doesn’t make sense to the American public, “it will soon be gone,” and if a popular campaign idea exists, the administration will “ram it through” despite media outrage or bureaucratic resistance.

Trump’s pollster John McLaughlin tells Jennings that the president knows he has a “finite amount of time to save the country,” which explains why he is doing “so many things at once.” The book’s structure mirrors that chaos: each chapter covers a different front in the “revolution,” but the narrative constantly loops back to the sense of urgency and the feeling—among Trump’s supporters—that now or never has arrived.

3. Culture war and civil rights, “common sense” style

Early on, Jennings highlights moves he presents as restoring sanity in civil rights and gender debates. The signature case is the Trump administration’s intervention in women’s sports via the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

According to the book, the office pressures the University of Pennsylvania to ban biological males from competing in women’s sports and to restore titles and records to female swimmers whose achievements were eclipsed by a trans competitor. The university even sends apology letters to affected women, which Jennings hails as a “common sense” win and an almost unimaginable act under any other administration.

This episode illustrates a recurring pattern: Trump is cast as the only leader willing to “stand up to political and media mobs” and to say, in effect, that two plus two is still four. Here, that means reasserting sex-based categories against gender-identity activism and daring elites to call that bigotry.

4. DOGE and the war on bureaucracy: Elon Musk’s rise and fall

Chapter Two, “DOGE: The Deep State Chainsaw Massacre,” is one of the book’s centerpieces. Jennings describes how Trump creates the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and taps Elon Musk as the unofficial architect of a massive effort to shrink and streamline the federal state.

Musk brings in teams of engineers and technologists who fan out across agencies, combing through budgets and IT infrastructure. Jennings relishes the findings:

• The federal government has ~4.6 million credit cards for 2.3 million employees, a ratio that screams bloat.
• The National Institutes of Health operate around 700 separate IT systems overseen by 27 chief information officers, hampering research and collaboration.

Within months, DOGE claims more than $160 billion in savings, and officials think the figure could soon double.

Jennings emphasizes that DOGE’s biggest impact isn’t just money; it’s operational culture. Agencies start clearing backlogs as IT systems are rationalized, and cabinet secretaries—from EPA chief Lee Zeldin to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—praise Musk’s team for lighting “a fire under an entire federal bureaucracy.”

The chapter also chronicles the backlash. The GAO releases a report accusing Musk of destabilizing agencies; Democrats warn that DOGE cuts will make people “die” by undermining public health; media figures treat Musk as a reckless interloper.

Jennings portrays himself on CNN mocking these fears and coining Musk as Trump’s “instrument of destruction” against the deep state.

The story then takes a twist. By mid-2025, Musk and Trump fall out over Trump’s “one big beautiful bill”—a sweeping package that extends Trump’s original 2017 tax cuts, funds border security, emphasizes work over welfare, and deregulates energy.

Musk publicly denounces the bill as a reckless fiscal mistake, calling it a “disgusting abomination,” and later founds The America Party, scaring conservatives who worry he’ll split the vote in future elections.

Jennings reacts with both anxiety and admiration: he chugs Pepto Bismol on-air to dramatize conservative nausea at the feud, but insists that Musk’s DOGE campaign proved what private-sector, risk-tolerant leadership can do when unleashed on government bloat.

5. Foreign policy I: “Fighting for Peace” – Ukraine, Europe and Trump’s leverage

Chapter Six, “Fighting for Peace,” argues that Trump inherits a “mess” from Biden, none worse than the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Jennings blames Biden’s “minor incursion” comment, slow-walked aid, and reversal of Trump-era policies on Russian energy for encouraging Putin’s attack.

Trump’s campaign promise to “end the war in twenty-four hours” is framed as rhetorical shorthand for a real strategy: break with the “forever war” establishment by using leverage—financial, diplomatic, military—to force both Ukraine and Russia toward a deal.

The book’s signature scene is the February 2025 Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The day is supposed to culminate in signing a minerals and investment agreement giving the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s rare earths, oil and gas and setting up a joint fund with future U.S. military aid counting as part of the American contribution.

Instead, Zelenskyy, in Jennings’s telling, goes off script. He appears in casual clothing, pushes back on Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks about Biden’s failed Russia strategy, and warns that Americans will “feel” the war in the future—prompting Trump to snap that the Ukrainian president is in “no position to dictate” what the U.S. will feel.

The confrontation, broadcast live, causes the planned deal to collapse and sparks media uproar. Jennings goes on CNN that night insisting that Ukraine still needs the U.S. more than the reverse and that Zelenskyy blew a vital chance to secure both economic partnership and security. To his surprise, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin agrees with him on-air, which Jennings treats as evidence that elite opinion is starting to shift.

Trump responds by pausing all U.S. funding and intelligence sharing with Ukraine in early March, betting that Europe will have to fill the gap and that Zelenskyy will return to the table. Jennings cites polls showing 50% of Americans willing to end the war even if Russia keeps captured territory, and Guardian polling suggesting Europeans want Ukraine helped but don’t want to pay more themselves.

The gambit appears to work: European leaders soon announce they are “doubling down” on aid, determined to arm Ukraine enough to negotiate from strength.

Behind the scenes, diplomacy restarts. At Pope Francis’s funeral in late April, Trump and Zelenskyy are photographed sitting side-by-side at St. Peter’s, calm and businesslike. Days later, on 30 April 2025, the U.S. and Ukraine finally sign the minerals agreement at the Treasury Department, with Ukraine’s deputy economy minister calling it a “win-win” based on investment.

Jennings concludes that this episode shows Trump’s “superpower”: provoking opponents to react emotionally and then discovering that their reaction drives them, unintentionally, toward the outcome he wanted all along—here, Europe paying more and Ukraine formalizing a long-term economic partnership with the U.S.

6. Foreign policy II: Iran, Israel, hostages and “peace through strength”

The same chapter and related sections broaden the foreign-policy canvas. Jennings describes Trump’s 2025 actions in the Middle East:

• A campaign of strikes against Houthi rebels who threaten shipping.
• A bold decision in June 2025 to send B-2 bombers against Iranian nuclear facilities.
• A subsequent ceasefire between Iran and Israel, negotiated quietly after firm military pressure, which Jennings regards as Nobel-worthy.

He repeatedly insists that Trump is not an isolationist but a “peace through strength” president willing to take risks and use force while keeping the focus on ending wars rather than extending them. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, tells Jennings that Trump combines extraordinary risk tolerance with a strong survival instinct, a rare combination in politics.

Other foreign-policy vignettes—hostage rescues, reassertion of American leverage in trade and energy, the appointment of Marco Rubio as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser—reinforce the idea that Trump’s second term is about stabilizing a chaotic world by making America stronger and more self-interested, not by retreating.

7. Immigration: “Alien Enemies” and closing the border

In Chapter Seven, “Alien Enemies: The Immigration Fights,” Jennings argues that Trump’s most immediate and visible success comes on immigration. From Day One, Trump signs aggressive executive orders, restores and strengthens prior enforcement policies, and directs agencies to treat the border as a security threat and invasion problem, not a mere administrative issue.

Jennings leans on reporting and official data to claim that by March and April 2025, illegal border crossings hit their lowest levels in decades, referencing reports from Reuters, Axios and CBS News.

He frames this as a direct reversal of the Biden years, during which, he says, millions of illegal migrants entered and crimes by a small but vivid number of offenders became national cases—from the murders of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray to everyday stories of overwhelmed towns.

Internationally, figures like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni are shown aligning rhetorically with Trump, with the BBC-documented line about hoping to “make the West great again.” For Jennings, this is proof that Trump’s border stance resonates beyond U.S. politics, as part of a wider civilizational defense.

8. Economics and class: tariffs, reshoring, and working-class betrayal

The economic chapters revolve around tariffs, reshoring, and a narrative of working-class betrayal by both parties, but especially Democratic elites.

Drawing heavily on Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Second Class, Jennings recounts how between 1965 and 2020, U.S. GDP, corporate profits, and labor productivity surged while working-class wages barely budged; manufacturing shrank from about one-quarter of the economy to around 11%, while finance/real estate/insurance grew to about one-fifth, extracting value via speculation rather than production.

He then weaves in his own story of growing up in Kentucky: textile plants closing, Goodyear layoffs, parents commuting long distances, and the erosion of once-stable factory jobs.

This personal history is used to explain why many working-class voters who once liked Bill Clinton now back Trump, seeing him as the only leader who “stood up to China” and global outsourcing.

On tariffs, Jennings chronicles the battle between Trump’s team and critics like Elizabeth Warren, who warns of “tariff chaos” that will hurt investment.

As the book moves into mid-2025, Jennings notes that the predicted collapse fails to appear: the S&P 500 sets new highs, consumer confidence stays strong, and even skeptical economists like Torsten Sløk of Apollo Capital Management grudgingly concede that Trump “may have outsmarted all of us” on tariffs.

This economic strategy extends into foreign policy. Trade deals like the U.S.–UK agreement are presented as the maturation of “America First” into a new global order, where countries understand that aligning with the U.S. means fairer deals but also clearer expectations around China and industrial policy.

9. Energy and infrastructure: “Unleashing American Energy”

In Chapter Eleven, Jennings turns to energy, which he treats as a litmus test for common sense. He argues that Barack Obama and Joe Biden used environmental rhetoric and complex regulatory language—“pablum”—to camouflage an agenda that deliberately constrained reliable energy (coal, gas, nuclear), driving up costs and endangering the grid.

He quotes energy journalist Robert Bryce on the “anti-industry industry,” which spends billions blocking reliable sources in favor of renewables, and cites officials like Doug Burgum, Trump’s Interior Secretary and chair of a National Energy Dominance Council, who call the Biden climate agenda “extremist” and warn it defied physics, economics, and common sense.

Trump’s answer is to:

• Expand leasing in the Gulf of America and elsewhere, with Burgum explaining how lease sales bring immediate payments and future royalties that help reduce debt and deficits.
• Slash regulations slowing energy and grid development.
• Rebrand energy policy as a pro-working-class, pro-reliability agenda rather than an elite climate project.

Jennings frames all this as yet another arena where elites use technocratic language to hide what he sees as simple truths: people need affordable energy, the grid must be stable, and making energy scarcer and more expensive hurts ordinary families first.

10. Media, elites and the narrative war

Interwoven through every chapter is Jennings’s critique of media and expert elites. Figures like Jennifer Rubin, Norm Ornstein, Joy Reid and Norm Eisen are singled out as having been “spectacularly, historically wrong” about Trump’s supposed authoritarianism, Russia loyalty and incompetence, yet they continue to be treated as serious voices.

Jennings treats his nightly role on CNN as part of the “revolution of common sense”: he is there to represent the half of the country that likes Trump and is bewildered by elite hysteria. He describes debates where he simply repeats his opponents’ statements back to them and watches them scramble to deny what they just said, one of the “underrated joys” of his job.

Polls become his counter-weapon. When pundits insist Trump’s base is regretting its vote, Jennings cites CNN’s own data reporter, Harry Enten, showing Trump’s approval rising in early May 2025 and Americans more optimistic about the country’s direction than at any point in years.

For Jennings, this disconnect—elites panicking while voters cheer—proves that “common sense” has moved out of elite institutions and into the populist camp, and that media hysteria is often a form of therapy for people who cannot accept that they lost the argument.

11. The 100th day and epilogue: movement, not moment

The book culminates in the 100th-day rally in Macomb County, Michigan, on 29 April 2025, where Trump rolls out his greatest hits: border success, tariffs, jobs, energy, foreign policy. Banners proclaim “The Golden Age,” “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” and “Buy American Hire American.”

In a 90-minute speech, Trump ties everything back to the original inaugural promise:

The last fourteen weeks are “a revolution of common sense… You’re conservative, you’re liberal, whatever the hell. It’s about common sense.”

Jennings, standing on the press riser and cutting away periodically for live hits with Jake Tapper, feels the line hit him “like a ton of bricks.” It is the full-circle moment: the phrase that inspired the book has now been stress-tested in policy and politics and is, in his eyes, shaping both the GOP and a new political realignment.

The epilogue then pulls the lens tight. Trump calls Jennings onstage, jokes that CNN will fire him for defending him, and later invites him up to his office aboard Air Force One.

After reviewing media coverage and talking tariffs, Trump offers Jennings his hat. Jennings asks if he can give it instead to his father—“one of the working-class guys who predicted Trump’s rise and never lost faith”—and Trump signs it “To Jeff. You are great.”

That gesture encapsulates what Jennings wants the book to prove: that Trump’s second term is not just a return of one man, but a revolution of common sense rooted in the lives of people like his father—factory workers, small-town residents, voters who felt abandoned by both parties and now see, rightly or wrongly, a champion in Donald Trump.

5. A Revolution of Common Sense Analysis

Jennings’s central argument is that Trump 2.0 is a focused, purposeful project: this time, Trump arrived determined not just to “own the libs” but to dismantle elite illusions and put ordinary intuition—“common sense”—back at the center of governance.

He insists that Trump learned bitter lessons from his first term, when investigations, impeachment and the pandemic “wrapped around the neck of the presidency like an anaconda,” choking off momentum; in this second term, Jennings writes, Trump and his team “crushed and defeated the snake before it ever got out of bed.”

On the evidentiary front, the book is strongest when it stays close to scenes, documents and identifiable data.

Jennings gives you specific episodes: Elon Musk drafted to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before their spectacular falling-out; hostage negotiator Steve Witkoff securing the release of an American teacher from Russia within thirty hours of a meeting in the Oval Office; the fraught Oval Office confrontation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy over Ukraine aid and mineral rights; and a harried Trump juggling tariffs, media combat and late-night Air Force One strategy sessions.

These passages are vivid and, where possible, cross-referenced to contemporary news sources, transcripts and polling.

For example, Jennings argues that Trump’s decision to halt U.S. military aid to Ukraine and publicly berate Zelenskyy was not simple impulsiveness but part of a strategy to push Europe into “doubling down” on funding the war; he backs this with Washington Post reporting that European leaders did indeed pledge to arm Ukraine more heavily to strengthen its hand in peace talks.

He notes that a CBS News/YouGov poll at the time found exactly 50 percent of Americans prepared to end the war even if Russia kept occupied land, which he presents as proof that Trump was channeling common-sense fatigue with an open-ended conflict.

The trade and industrial policy chapters work similarly.

Jennings draws on Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book Second Class to argue that between 1965 and 2020, U.S. GDP and corporate profits soared while working-class wages stagnated, especially after manufacturing’s decline from roughly a quarter of the economy to around 11 percent, with finance, real estate and insurance taking a dominant share.

That diagnosis largely matches mainstream economic research on wage stagnation and sectoral shifts.

He then uses his own family story—parents cycling through layoffs at textile and Goodyear plants, driving more than 100 miles each way for work—as a kind of micro-case study in how deindustrialization hardened working-class resentment and made men like his father, once devoted to Bill Clinton, into Trump voters.

From a purely narrative standpoint, this is compelling; it grounds macro claims in a kitchen-table memory and gives the book a human pulse.

Where the argument becomes shakier is not in the facts it includes, but in the facts it omits or rushes past.

Jennings often presents Trump’s high-risk decisions—halting Ukraine aid, slapping sweeping tariffs, shredding DEI mandates, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” or restoring Denali’s name to Mount McKinley—as obviously sensible corrections without fully engaging with their legal, diplomatic or cultural blowback.

Opposing voices appear mostly as caricatures (“elite hysterics,” “forever-war establishment,” “woke bureaucrats”), not as serious arguments that deserve careful rebuttal.

Outside critics have noticed this.

Kirkus Reviews, for instance, describes A Revolution of Common Sense as “a passionate and unapologetic defense” of Trump in which Jennings “seemingly can do no wrong,” and questions where “the common sense” lies in some of the president’s more grandiose symbolic gestures.

Similarly, commentators at the London School of Economics and other academic venues have treated the broader “common sense revolution” narrative as part of a longer populist tradition—powerful in its emotional resonance, but often selective in its treatment of evidence and blind to groups it casts as enemies.

So the book succeeds, in my view, more as a primary source for understanding how pro-Trump conservatives see the world in 2025 than as a balanced policy analysis.

It gives you a clear, emotionally charged picture of one side’s mental universe, but it rarely steps outside that universe to test itself.

6. Strengths and Weaknesses

The first great strength of A Revolution of Common Sense is access.

Jennings is not speculating from the sidelines; he is interviewing Trump in the Oval Office, flying on Air Force One, and texting with policy advisers like immigration lawyer-turned-official Stephen Miller when he needs to “understand the technical or legal rationale” behind an executive order.

This embedded vantage point produces moments that feel like political cinema: Trump summoning Jennings at a rally in Michigan, joking about CNN firing him, Jennings sprinting to the stage and cracking a line about needing “a farm in Michigan” to house all the liberals he’s owned on TV; the president later offering to give Jennings his MAGA hat—for Jennings’s working-class father, not for him.

Those scenes are funny, self-aware, and vividly human.

They also show why Trump’s style, not just his policy, continues to bind supporters to him.

The second strength is thematic coherence.

Jennings does not simply list events; he tries to thread them through recurring ideas: elite versus commoner, risk versus timidity, national interest versus global abstractions.

In the foreign-policy chapters, for example, he argues that Trump’s moves on Ukraine and the Middle East, including the “12-Day War” that degraded Iran’s capabilities and paved the way for expanded Abraham Accords, reflect a consistent “peace through leverage” strategy rather than impulsive isolationism.

Here, Jennings quotes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent describing Trump’s “incredible risk tolerance” combined with a sharp “survival instinct,” an unusual mix that allows him, in Bessent’s view, to push hard without courting self-destruction.

Whether you agree or not, the book works as a guide to how Trump-world justifies its own gambles.

A third strength is the way Jennings weaves political data into his storytelling.

He doesn’t just assert a realignment; he points to county-level shifts over three elections, shrinking Democratic margins in working-class, racially mixed places and steady Republican gains even in some big urban counties—patterns backed by outside analyses from think tanks such as the Economic Innovation Group and election-data aggregators.

That said, my reading experience had real frustrations.

The most obvious weakness is the lack of critical distance.

Jennings is candid about his admiration for Trump; he describes watching the president command issues and staff and thinking he suddenly knew “who is in charge now: Donald J. Trump,” a sharp contrast, he says, with the Biden years.

But this admiration often slides into unexamined hero worship.

Controversial acts—shredding DEI programs, threatening corporate critics, leveraging tariffs that alarmed markets, renaming geographical features—are presented almost entirely through the eyes of Trump’s cheering section, not those who worry about legal constraints, minority rights, or global stability.

When evidence cuts the other way, Jennings tends to minimize or mock it.

For example, he skewers media figures like Jennifer Rubin and Norm Ornstein as “spectacularly, historically wrong” about Trump’s authoritarianism, but does not spend much time engaging with substantive criticisms about norms, pardons, or the longer-term risks of executive overreach.

Another weakness is that “common sense” is never fully defined.

It appears alternately as populist instinct, as anti-woke backlash, as willingness to use state power aggressively, and as hawkish nationalism.

Yet what feels like common sense to one group—say, deporting more migrants or slapping tariffs on allies—can feel like reckless cruelty or self-harm to another.

A more self-aware book might have wrestled with that relativism instead of assuming that the author’s camp owns the term.

Finally, Jennings acknowledges Trump’s polarizing persona but does not really face the darker parts of the coalition he celebrates.

Voting-rights controversies, extremist rhetoric among some supporters, and the long-term consequences of normalizing constant institutional warfare are largely absent or waved away, even though they are central to any honest account of how Trump “stormed” Washington.

That omission narrows the book’s usefulness for readers looking for a full spectrum of facts rather than a polished tribute.

5. Reception, Criticism and Influence

So far, A Revolution of Common Sense has been received as you might expect in a deeply polarized media ecosystem.

Conservative outlets and pro-Trump commentators have praised it as the first serious inside account of Trump 2.0 that “gets” both the policy and the emotional stakes, highlighting its readable style and its defense of ordinary voters against elites.

HarperCollins’s own marketing leans into Trump’s public endorsement and the promise that Jennings will tell “the TRUTH” about the administration versus the “fake news books” written by critics.

On the other hand, mainstream and liberal-leaning reviewers have been more skeptical.

Kirkus, as noted, calls the book a “passionate and unapologetic defense” of Trump that offers little space for nuance; outlets such as The Daily Show and The Daily Beast have used Jennings’s on-air persona to question whether he can separate analysis from advocacy, dubbing him a “MAGA panelist” whose commentary often seeks viral confrontation.

Yet that very polarization may enhance the book’s influence.

For Trump supporters and many on the populist right, Jennings has become a familiar face on CNN—the guy who will take on four or five liberals at once, as the book’s “About the Author” section cheerfully notes—and his book reads like an extended, footnoted version of that persona.

Among political professionals, the book is likely to become a go-to source for understanding how the Trump camp itself narrates the second term: how it justifies tariffs, immigration raids, the DOGE experiment with Musk, and a more confrontational approach to institutions from the Pentagon to the press.

For scholars of populism and democratic backsliding, it offers raw material rather than settled judgment.

In that sense, its influence may lie less in changing minds across the aisle and more in hardening and clarifying the worldview of people who already think of themselves as soldiers in a “common sense” revolution.

7. Conclusion

Should You Read A Revolution of Common Sense?

If you want a neutral, dispassionate, multi-voiced history of Trump’s second term, A Revolution of Common Sense is not that book.

It is openly, almost joyfully partisan, written by a man who likes the president, shares his enemies, and believes that “common sense” now lives primarily on one side of the political divide.

But if you want to understand how Trump’s supporters—especially those working inside the system—see their own project, Jennings’s account is invaluable.

It shows you why they think tariffs are not reckless but overdue, why they see DEI and “woke capital” as existential threats, why they describe Biden’s decline as “the real big lie,” and why they frame aggressive moves in Ukraine, Gaza, and trade as peace-seeking rather than destabilizing.

The book will be most rewarding for readers who already follow American politics closely—journalists, activists, students of populism and democracy, or general readers who have enough background to fill in the silences and question the spin.

General audiences with little prior knowledge may find the lack of opposing perspectives confusing; specialists may wish for more engagement with legal and institutional constraints.

For an engaged reader willing to pair this with more critical or left-leaning accounts, though, A Revolution of Common Sense can be a stimulating, sometimes infuriating, but undeniably revealing tour through Trump 2.0’s self-image in the age of realignment.