Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

by Sarah Kendzior

The crises of political corruption, organized crime, and endemic racism are all connected, and they shape everyday American life.

There is a reason they call it a criminal underground: you walk over it every day, unaware it exists until the earth shakes below your feet.

The last four decades have led to the hoarding of resources on a heretofore unimaginable scale by people who have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future. Their destructive actions have programmed a desperate generation to settle for scraps instead of settling the score.

while thieves demanded our gratitude and supplication. The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imagining the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration. This book tells the story of how they cornered that market.

It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession—a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect? To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe.

In fall 2015, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and that once installed, he would decimate American democracy. It was the latest in a career of issuing unheeded warnings.

had warned of the widespread erosion of American institutions and social trust.

later published in my first book, The Vie...

Missouri, the state I call home, a state that had long been the bellwether of American politics and now served as th...

But the crisis I documented was nationwide: rising political paranoia, opportunity-hoarding by wealthy elites, a “post-employment economy” of side hustles and unpaid labor, the weaponization of digital media by dictators and extremists, and the catastrophic consequences of unchecked corruption. These were not abstract concerns. The cumulative effect was a collective agony intensified by the all-American shame of seeing systemic break...

(Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves.”)

Karimov was no exception. He began his tenure proclaiming that he would make Uzbekistan great again and plastered his catchphrase, “Uzbekistan—a future great state!,” on ubiquitous signs.1 He called independent media “the enemy of the people” and hid information about national crises from the public.2 He persecuted political opponents, LGBT citizens, pious Muslims, and other marginalized groups.3 He had an intense yet strange relationship with Russia. And he had a glamorous fashionista daughter who kept inserting herself into political

In eras of economic decline and political chaos—like America in 2015—demagogues and dictators tend to arise.

The media whom Trump called his enemy acted like his best friend, airing his rallies in

full, letting his lies linger, and treating the prospect of

his win as a joke or a ra...

American exceptionalism—the widespread belief that America is unique among nations and impervious to autocracy—is the delusion that paved Trump’s path to victory.

Trump did not strike me as stupid, like pundits kept proclaiming, but as a master manipulator who preyed on pain like a vulture.

Trump views Russia’s brutal hypercapitalism with envy. Putin, who stripped Russia of resources and rights, is rumored to be the wealthiest man in the world.6

What I did not know was that they also shared a history.

It was not until Trump asked Russia for Hillary Clinton’s emails at a July 2016 press conference that Trump’s illicit ties to the Kremlin became a mainstream media topic—but even then, most of the story remained untold.

Trump’s reverence for Russia was framed as mere improper behavior instead of what it was: an ominous twist on a long dark-money trail. For decades, Trump had relied on oligarchs and mobsters from the former USSR for support after Wall Street blacklisted him following his bankruptcies in the 1990s.10 The one bank that agreed to take him on—Deutsche Bank—is notorious for facilitating Russian money-laundering.11 But Trump’s illicit dealings went as far back as the mid-1980s—when the first Russian mobsters moved into Trump Tower—and his network of criminal associates has expanded ever since. By spring 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had spent most of his adult life connected to a transnational mafia with ties to the Kremlin.

Trump’s illicit foreign ties constituted a profound national security threat, but few US officials would acknowled...

covering up crime with scandal—

Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate

any structural protections you had before the majority

realizes the extent of t...

Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more—some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country. Their loyalty is to themselves and their money. Many are criminals without borders who have moved from hijacking businesses to hijacking nations. Some call them fascists; I avoid this term because being a fascist requires an allegiance to the state. To these operatives, the state is just something to sell.

This elite criminal network has been building for decades. It is linked to other groups: right-wing Republican extremists, apocalyptic religious movements of varied faiths, social media corporations, advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, and parts of the mainstream media. It is pervasive but not all-encompassing. I am not arguing that every entity has been corrupted by it, but I would argue that total domination is the outcome they seek. Now that members of this network hold the reins

the goal is to strip each nation down and sel...

The network is not uniform in its desires—some are in it for the money, some for territorial ambitions, some to satisfy their religious or white supremacist fanaticism. But over the course of decades, disparate parties have joined together to destroy democracy. They permeate the very institutions tasked to stop them. How that t...

But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example—means it lacks true historic precedent. Climate change is another factor that makes our current crisis distinct from any other. It is doubtful that this group of roving criminals and kleptocrats are the climate skeptics they purport to be. It is far more likely that they are, as Naomi Klein phrases it, “disaster capitalists” who see opportunity in a dying planet, and who will spare no expense in pursuit of their own preservation.

But now the state has become a proxy for the mafia, an arrangement overt in Russia but present to various degrees in countries worldwide.

Trump is a node in a sadistic network whose ambitions extend beyond borders, and whose ties go back decades.

His rise was made possible by a coterie of criminals who do not want to be punished but delight in being caught. Flaunting their criminal impunity is part of the thrill. Their belief that they would never be held accountable is logical since they had never faced serious consequences despite spending decades committing illegal acts. In fact, they had reaped ample rewards. Now, finally, they had the greatest reward of all: the power to rewrite law itself.

In 2016, the same phenomena took place all over the Western world. Demagogic white nationalists rose, elites falsely played down their loss or the ramifications of their win, and hate crimes exploded when victory was achieved. It was all predictable, but now there was no clear organized process to stop it. Instead, vulnerable people waited for responsible officials to intervene. They are still waiting.

Pundits and politicians like to say that “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized—groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory.

“No one” also included a slew of scholars of authoritarian states who saw parallels to Trump in figures like Hitler, Milosevic, and, of course, Putin, but who were dismissed as alarmist despite their expertise.

But we all saw the same danger: that is how predictable autocracy is and how reliably Trump meets its criteria. Our shared insistence that, yes, American democracy is destined for destruction unless we radically change course should disconcert you.

Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget. Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.

This is an American authoritarian kleptocracy, backed by millionaire white nationalists both in the United States and abroad, meant to strip our country down for parts, often using ethnic violence to do so.

This is a moral loss and a dangerous threat for everyone in the United States, and by extension, everyone abroad.

am writing this not for those who oppose him, but for those who support him, because Trump and his backers are going to hurt you too

what he said about his desired outcome for the United States: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

He is right about that last part. No one holds Trump accountable, because he is exactly what he claimed to be railing against: an elite billionaire with no concern for the average person, a kleptocrat who enjoys taunting people less powerful than him with threats. When you have that kind of money, which Trump was given at birth and further gained through fraud, there are few limitations to the ways you can hurt people.

He is right that the system is rigged: it is rigged in his favor. And now it is rigged against you, unless we find a way to stop

Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.

because the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter until it dies.

That voice is your conscience, your morals, your individuality. No one can take that from you unless you let them.

before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.