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

by Sarah Kendzior

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.

(Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves.”)

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.

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 the damage.

“What they’re trying to do is establish power: they are lying to flaunt power. They are saying to us: ‘We know that you know that this is a lie, and we don’t care, because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.’”

Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.

There was no mention of Trump’s criminal ties in the Washington Post puff piece, a pattern of omission that is blinding in hindsight. Maybe the paper did not know about them, despite his mentor, Cohn, being a well-known mafia fixer. Maybe they did not want to find out.

This is not “The Sopranos,” with six guys sitting in a diner, shaking down a local business owner for 50 dollars a week. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.

Members of the mob that had taken up residence in Trump Tower in the 1980s—the Semion Mogilevich Organization—are now tied to the White House. This development belies any claim of surprise from federal law enforcement about the threat posed by Trump’s campaign. Instead we are left with institutional failures and unanswered questions.

American and former Soviet operatives are a linked entity, and prestigious institutions manufacture history in a way that would make George Orwell shudder and Roy Cohn proud.

When the press works against its own financial interest—as it did by rejecting the harrowing truth of Trump—there is a deeper problem. As described throughout this book, the tactics Cohn devised to tame the press worked all too well.

Starting in 1980, the incomes of the very rich began growing faster than the entire economy, while the poor and middle class began to fall dramatically behind. Growth in worker productivity between 1979 and 2017 grew by 70.3 percent while hourly compensation grew by 11.1 percent.28 (Earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americas grew 343.2 percent by comparison.)

In the twenty-first century, the corporate loopholes that enable white-collar crime double as nooses around the neck of Western democracy. In the Reagan era, Trump’s Republican backers helped devise the dissolution of corporate regulations. In the Bush era, they chipped away at political checks and balances, with the near elimination of accountability as a result. The Republican party provided the structure for an American autocracy enabled by corporate corruption. But it was television producers who gave the future autocrat his most important script.

White-collar crime is violent crime: it’s called blood money for a reason. Over the last forty years, white-collar crime, state crime, and organized crime have merged to the point that criminal networks now control governments, which allows them to redefine what they are doing as legal, exonerate themselves, and persecute those who seek to uphold the rule of law.

The most influential industries—policy, law, academia, entertainment—were restructured to hire and service the wealthy by the end of the 2000s, often using the recession as a pretext to do so.

The Trump administration is often described as a “kakistocracy,” a word that means rule by the least competent.2 I have never used this word, and prefer the term “kleptocracy,” which describes countries where rulers steal their nation’s resources to enhance their personal wealth. “Kakistocracy” assumes that the Trump administration’s malice is the result of incompetence, and that the dismantling of departments is the incidental result of appointing unqualified people. In the Trump administration, people are hired to dismantle the departments they lead, and the main quality for which they are valued is blind and total fealty.

The main tactic of the Trump camp and their backers, I would discover over the next few years, was not to directly threaten you with violence, but to smear you to the point that a fanatic might find murdering you an appealing prospect. This was the strategy they used in “Pizzagate,” when a vigilante convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilic cult out of a D.C. pizza parlor nearly shot up the place. The hit piece on me was standard fare for Kushner. Throughout his tenure as owner of the Observer (which he relinquished in 2017), Kushner used the newspaper as a way to target his enemies.44 The paper was one of two in the United States to endorse Trump in an official capacity: the other was the National Enquirer.

There are people who believe that the current American political crisis began with Trump and will end with Trump if he leaves office. But it is Ivanka and Jared, and their burgeoning kleptocratic dynasty, with whom they should be most concerned. They are the products of an intergenerational crisis of inherited corruption and stolen opportunities.

I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom.

American exceptionalism was always an illusion, and Americans had long been prone to paranoid conspiracies, but even I was surprised by the quickness with which US political culture came to mirror that of surveillance states. I had not anticipated how quickly the cyber-utopianism embraced by internet corporations would turn into nihilist abdication of the public good.

Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe.

In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.

What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice, and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains.

Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go. Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race. In the last few chapters, I laid out networks of nepotism and power: almost everyone in them is not only wealthy, but white. As the son of a Kenyan, bearing the middle name Hussein, Obama shattered the image of what an American president could be. To many Americans, this change was exhilarating. To wealthy white men of limited merit, who had long benefited from racial and ethnic exclusion, it was a threat—and a rich source of propaganda.

Whiteness was always social and economic currency in America, and the myth of a “postracial” society after Obama’s win was as illusory as the myth of a post-2008 economic recovery. These twin myths enabled a crisis that liberal power brokers did not seem to recognize, even though it is the classic path to demagoguery. They did not see the danger of a rise in bigotry coinciding with an explosion of economic pain—or how savvy political operatives could play the two off each other if the law did not constrain their malicious intent.

There are many ways to rig an election. This one was carried out in plain sight, under the auspices of lawmakers who proclaimed America to be well and good. The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance.

The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.

You can be prepared for something but that does not make the pain of it any less: the pain you feel for others, or the pain you feel inside, the pain you push away daily because if you gave in to it you would never get out.

The Dutch audience asked whether a Trump phenomenon could happen there, and I said, “Yes, it can happen anywhere.” This is the same answer I give everywhere I go, because the surest route to a kleptocratic takeover is to deny it’s happening, and the surest way to solve it is to sever it before it blooms.

This confidence was compounded by the valorization of Mueller as a consummate G-man, a neutral arbiter whose fealty was to the law and not to the leader. Mueller’s reticence to speak to the press led many to assume he was the strong and silent type instead of what he was revealed to be at end of his probe—a weak-willed bureaucrat who either failed to understand the stakes or found them tolerable.

Autocratic consolidation is a matter of power, not protocol, and if you cannot tell the difference between the two, you have no business leading an investigation. You cannot go by the book while the book is burning.

Those who noted Mueller’s missteps were pummeled with insults from those clinging to the vestiges of institutionalism. Those who had studied or lived through autocratic consolidation screamed about these missteps like spectators on the sidelines of our own demise. To point out the failures of the Mueller probe—many of which were caused by the Trump administration’s purges and threats; but some of which were caused by the Mueller team’s poor judgment—was to become a heretic. But it’s better to be a heretic than a liar. A heretic these days is a temporary occupation: the sin lies in telling the truth too early. Much like Trump’s crimes, Mueller’s failures were hiding in plain sight. Establishment analysts were afraid to discuss them because of what these failures signified—that the system was broken and the good guys had lost. Or worse, that the good guys were never that great in the first place.

When Mueller testified to Congress in July 2019, it was under subpoena and after months of delay. Under oath, the Godot of prosecutors became the Bartleby of witnesses: Mueller spoke with extreme reluctance, deflecting or declining to answer questions 155 times. He refused to answer basic inquiries about key players in his own probe, like whether he had wanted to interview Donald Trump Jr. He never discussed the Russian mafia, and none of the members of Congress would raise the topic.

The answer you’re supposed to give to children—one I heard myself as a child—is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say, “Lots of good people owned slaves,” or, “It was legal then.” You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present. You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.

If we survive the current era, it will not be due to a savior from above, but to the refusal of ordinary people to accept elite criminal impunity as normal.

Children force you to envision the future, and doing that today is an act of mental violence. But children also force you to fight for the future—to insist that there will be one, to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice through sheer force of will, because it sure as hell doesn’t bend that way on its own.