An essential take on the stranger-than-fiction 2016 presidential election from a quintessential voice on American politics and culture.With new, updated material, P. J. O'Rourke covers the whole election process from the pig pile of presidential candidates circa June 2015, through his come-to-Satan moment with Hillary and the Beginning of End Times in November 2016, to the current shape of US politics.How the Hell Did This Happen? answers the key question of the 2016 presidential election: Should we laugh or should we cry or should we hurl? (They are not mutually exclusive.)

P. J. O'Rourke wrote more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panellist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. Long a resident of rural New England, as far away from the things he wrote about as he could get, he died in 2022 at the age of 74.