About Craig Unger

Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of five books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat.

The former editor in chief of Boston Magazine, he was also a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years. His work has appeared in many other publications including New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Republic.

A native New Yorker, Craig grew up in Dallas, and is a graduate of Harvard University. He has appeared as an analyst on dozens of broadcast outlets and podcasts, and he has lent his expertise to numerous documentary films including Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and Jack Bryan's Active Measures. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.

In October 1992, just before the presidential election, he co-wrote, with Murray Waas, In the Loop, a 16,000-word investigative piece in The New Yorker that revealed for the first time that the Reagan and Bush administrations had secretly given more than $5 billion in loan guarantees to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The article also exposed a 1986 so-called “peacekeeping mission” to the Middle East as a covert operation for then Vice-President Bush, a former CIA Director, who used the occasion as an opportunity to secretly funnel strategic military intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

In 1995, after two years as deputy editor of the New York Observer, Craig became editor in chief of Boston Magazine where he was hailed by MediaWeek Magazine as one of America’s top editors for transforming a “tepid” magazine into a vital publication. The magazine’s circulation and ad sales soared. In 1997, it won first prize from the City and Regional Magazine Awards as the best city or regional magazine in the country, and, over the years, won more than a dozen other awards from CRMA, Folio, and the Society for Publication Designers. In 2001, Craig, as founding general manager, launched nymag.com, the website of New York Magazine, which became the most successful city magazine site in the country.

Then, in 2001, after the attacks of 9/11, Craig began to write House of Bush, House of Saud, the first of five books on the anti-democratic tactics of the Republican Party that, taken as a whole, provide a road map showing how the party of Lincoln morphed into the party of Putin—how its leaders secretly cultivated lucrative relationships with foreign powers for personal riches and political conquests alike, how they conducted covert operations that sabotaged presidential elections, how GOP secretaries of state aggressively fostered voter suppression campaigns to prevent African-Americans from voting, how it began taking over the judiciary in Texas and Alabama in the Nineties as a prelude to taking over the United States Supreme Court in the 2020, and more.

At the time, it was not widely accepted that the Republican Party was a threat to American democracy. Craig’s books show how the GOP repeatedly breached norms, violated the law, lied and lied again, and, ultimately began a full-scale assault on American democracy. In House of Bush, House of Saud, he chronicled the secret relationship of two of the most powerful dynasties in the world—the Bushes and the Saudi royal family—and exposed how more than $1.4 billion in shared financial interests coincided with the Bush administration’s willingness to overlook and downplay Saudi Arabia’s role in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil in history. The book became an international bestseller published in more than half a dozen countries and it also provided the reportorial underpinning for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

In The Fall of the House of Bush, Unger became the first American reporter to go to the embassy of the Republic of Niger in Rome, the site of a break-in on New Year’s Eve 2000(three weeks before George W. Bush was inaugurated), at which documents were stolen to provide the basis for forgeries that President Bush cited as the casus belli for the Iraq War.

In Boss Rove, Craig took on the GOP’s brilliant Machiavellian operative of pre-Trumpian times, Karl Rove, and dissected how he took over the state judiciary in Texas and Alabama, and his deployment of a vast array of strategic political weapons including massive voter suppression, deliberately unequal distribution of voting machines (i.e., almost none in Black neighborhoods), at winning Ohio—and the entire election—for George W. Bush.

And Craig’s two books on Donald Trump, House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, provide richly detailed narratives of how Trump real estate laundered vast fortunes for the Russian Mafia, and how the KGB cultivated the 45th president of the United States as an intelligence asset.

These are the books that show how American democracy has become so deeply imperiled. They have been hailed by Kurt Vonnegut, Garry Kasparov, Bill Moyers, Jamie Raskin, and many others.