In March 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was settling back into the Oval Office from a weeklong vacation at the luxurious Palm Springs ranch of California businessman Paul Helms when the rogue antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy caught his attention. In frustration, the Republican president penned Helms a letter expressing his misgivings with McCarthy’s escalating anti-communist witch hunt, writing, “It is a sad commentary on our government when such a manifestly useless and spurious thing can divert our attention from all the constructive work in which we could and should be engaged.”

In his zealous pursuit of socialist subversives, McCarthy gave exaggerated voice to the political sentiments that animated many business and conservative elites. But McCarthy, a solo flyer inflamed by his own grandiose passions and paranoias, did so without their input. As McCarthy’s demagoguery intensified, they feared he would embarrass their cause and create unnecessary political and economic turbulence. He was a loose cannon. And so, over the next year, corporate and Republican Party elites lent their unified support to the congressional censure hearings that abruptly taped McCarthy’s loud mouth shut.

Paul Heideman begins his new book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, by contrasting McCarthy’s swift disciplining by GOP grandees with the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump. Trump, too, was always controversial and erratic, spooking many in the business class and the Republican establishment. But by 2016, the ties that had bound GOP leaders with America’s titans of industry had disintegrated. There was no one to crack the whip. In fact, there was no whip at all — just a million loose and fraying threads. And a lot of anger, and a lot of cash.