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July 11, 2022 - January 14, 2023
as Trump played his most reliable trick—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.
here is 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.” This is what “Make America Great Again” means to Donald Trump.
This was Trump’s first visit to St. Louis, and it would be his last, because St. Louis was the first city to kick him out. As is usual with St. Louis, this claim to fame was forgotten, with Chicago taking credit, having booted Trump later that evening to greater fanfare. But St. Louis, which had been holding protests centered around race for nearly two years straight by the time Trump arrived, was ready for battle, and as usual in St. Louis, the battle was bloody. Pro- and anti-Trump factions brawled on the opera house steps in what would be the most violent protest until after his election.
I am often asked to describe what “the Trump voter” is thinking, but this is an inane question. The Trump voters are no more a monolith than any other group of voters. There is also a difference between the voters—who were at times reluctant or one-issue voters focused on topics like abortion or guns—and the base, for whom Trump’s most hateful and destructive qualities are the core appeal. Rally-goers tend to be the base, but in March 2016, they were simply the curious.
Whereas once mere publicity about his scandals would have prompted resignation, Greitens proved that hanging on to executive power to dodge or manipulate prosecution remains a viable option in an era of unfettered corruption—a lesson the Trump administration knows well.
A 2019 investigation indicated that many of the 2018 ads for Hawley had been illegally coordinated by the NRA.46
(The NRA gave more to Hawley than to any other Senate candidate,
Missouri is not a red state, but it is becoming a one-party state—a party ruled by mysterious megadonors, a party that openly disregards the will of its electorate. In the most damning of ways, we are the bellwether for the United States. We are losing not only our freedom but our sovereignty to forces we do not fully understand, but which understand our own vulnerabilities all too well.
“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles …
You know who really wants me to do this? Roy … I’d do it in a second.”
questions about how Trump’s interests were propelled in this direction. The answer lies in Roy Cohn, one of the most notorious figures in US political history:
Power was information—its closed-door accumulation, its careful release—and information was different than truth.
Trump remained drawn to Cohn’s shamelessness. Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.
Trump and Cohn would call each other fifteen to twenty times a day.
In 1984, one year after the tower’s completion, Soviet army veteran David Bogatin purchased five luxury condos for six million dollars—a purchase so substantial that Trump made sure to personally oversee the closing.14 In 1987, Bogatin admitted he had purchased the Trump Tower condos “to launder money, to shelter and hide assets,” and a Senate investigation revealed him to be a leading figure in the Russian mafia.15
They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military.
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.
In 2016, shortly after Trump was deemed president of the United States, the German publication Bild published a series of documents showing that Trump had not paid federal taxes since 1977—an allegation that echoed a vague claim Hillary Clinton had made during a debate but never fully explained.30 The files came from the Czech security services—
While designating Canada, Mexico, and the EU to be enemies of the United States, Trump—aided by daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner—sought out an axis of autocrats to take their place. This axis includes Saudi prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, millennial murderer Kim Jong Un, and, of course, Vladimir Putin.
On February 21, 2017, the New York City medical examiner’s office announced that Churkin’s autopsy suggested the need for a toxicology test. Trump’s State Department, with Russia’s backing, immediately issued a gag order and prevented public disclosure of the cause and manner of death.40 Churkin had been the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly and in an unexplained fashion since Trump won the election.41 There has been no follow-up reporting or official investigation of his death, and the documents remain sealed.
That is the template of expectations for my generation and all that followed: crime committed brazenly is over time redefined as something other than crime. It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.
Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern. He would rather be seen as a married man who had an affair than a man who raped his wife and assaulted countless women and girls. He would rather be seen as an overconfident tycoon racking up bankruptcies than a skilled and powerful man associated with the mafia running a series of shakedowns for foreign backers. He would rather be a president mocked as an idiot in a “Make America Great Again” cap than be known as a vindictive traitor who seeks to strip America down and sell it for
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Trump Tower had effectively functioned as a dorm for the Russian mafia since David Bogatin first used it to launder money in 1984,
It was a warning that apparently no one in law enforcement thought extended to Donald Trump—despite Trump’s long history of corruption, bankruptcies, a tower full of Russian mobsters, and desperate need for money.
To this day, Lorber’s involvement in Trump’s businesses or in the election is not explained. We are simply supposed to accept the endless reappearance of a cast of characters tied to Russia over multiple decades as an amazing coincidence.
Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP operative who worked in Russia for assorted officials and oligarchs throughout the 1990s.
In 2015, Caputo, like Stone, became one of Trump’s campaign advisers. He was yet another longtime Trump contact with decades-long ties to shady Russian businessmen involved in the presidential race.
In 2012, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were on their way to being charged with felony fraud until the district attorney backed off and received a large campaign contribution from Trump’s lawyer.21
In many respects, academia operates like a cult.
I sometimes refer to my husband’s sixteen months without a full-time job as “the time he was unemployed” and then remember he was overemployed. He was working over fifty hours per week but making wages so low that our family of four hovered near the poverty line. For over a year I would wake up shaking.
Adult children of authoritarian leaders are useful in multiple ways.
In 2017, it was revealed that Kushner had lied on his security clearance forms more than any person in US history.7 Ivanka had lied too, but not quite as much as Kushner, who was also reported to have committed the following acts: lobbied for a Qatari blockade after Qatar refused to provide his family a loan to pay off its massive debt; met with the president of a sanctioned Russian bank as part of yet another debt payoff scheme; met illicitly with other Russians connected with plots to subvert the 2016 election; worked with now convicted felon Michael Flynn to devise a secret back channel to
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In March 2019, I went on MSNBC and proclaimed to AM Joy host Joy Reid: This is like the twelfth time I’ve been on your show talking about Jared Kushner and the fact that he lied on his clearance forms, that he’s done illicit dealings, that he’s giving away state secrets and that he’s a massive national security risk and so is Ivanka Trump. The only way we can finally stop having this conversation on national TV is if he’s indicted.
Had Kushner not been Trump’s son-in-law, he would have never been considered for an advisory role, given his lack of qualifications, history of financial disasters and fraud schemes, and ties to gangsters, oligarchs, and dictators. The same can be said of Donald Trump, and he is the president. Unlike Trump, however, Kushner was not elected.
The result of ubiquitous paranoia is not disbelief. It is credulity.
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.
by summer 2016 it seemed obvious that the Kremlin saw the Trump campaign as a useful vehicle for its anti-American objectives—at the least—and that Trump had no objection to being used.
Death threats are now part of my life. Over the years, the threats have varied in their intensity, and I have had to have a private security team at several speaking events. As a writer, I lack the ability to afford that level of security at home. But as someone who has studied authoritarian states my whole life, I know how this tends to end. I try to take the attitude my fellow St. Louisan writer Elijah Lovejoy held over a century ago and speak out while I have the chance.
strip mall with China King and the husk of an empty Firestone,
On July 29, 2016, two days after he had asked Russia to get him Hillary Clinton’s emails, Trump gave a speech that strikes me as his most revealing. “Look, we have the greatest business people in the world and we don’t use them,” he told the crowd at a rally in Denver, Colorado. “We use political hacks. Some of these business people are not nice people. Who cares? You care? I don’t think so. Some of these business people are vicious, horrible, miserable human beings. Who cares? Who cares?” he muttered.
The problem lies less with his report than with the lack of consequences for the criminals he probed. Mueller’s main sin is omission. He failed to interview key players, including Trump, and refused to indict the most dangerous parties, like Jared Kushner.
There is a fragility to life now that nearly breaks me, one I could handle as a child and as an adult but not as a mother. 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.
