No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

Sure, it’s preposterous for a self-described billionaire sitting on a golden throne to pass himself off as a savior of the working class. But a pitch as patently irrational as “Trust me because I cheated the system” could only have sold to a significant portion of the American public because what passed for “business as usual” in Washington well before Trump looked a whole lot like corruption to everyone else. That’s why so many people have been happy to treat electoral politics as macabre entertainment. Once politics has reached such a debased state, why bother protecting it from a boor like Trump? It’s a cesspool anyway, so let the games begin. As a resident of Toronto, this is a pathology that I’ve lived through before. Our former mayor, Rob Ford, was something of a municipal rehearsal for Trump. Ford, who died in 2016, created a performance-based image that was impossible to shame—because his brand was being shameless. Even when he was caught on tape smoking crack, it didn’t finish him off, because it was still the wacky Rob Ford show, and his supporters were his semi-ironic loyal audience, taking it all in like a Saturday Night Live sketch. But, as with Trump, the over-the-top performance and the personal scandals distracted from a sinister agenda, a pseudopopulism that specialized in handouts to corporations, a blank check for police, and eroded services for the most vulnerable.