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January 26 - March 30, 2025
The Trump administration is like a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past forty years—
We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like “treason” and “trauma” and “tragedy.”
It had been a long time since I or anyone I knew had dreams instead of circumstances.
That sort of thing does not happen here, commentators scoffed, citing checks and balances and centuries of democratic stability.
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.
In March 2016, Trump hired Paul Manafort as his campaign adviser.
2006. In the 1980s and 1990s, Manafort and Roger Stone—another old Trump friend and presidential campaign adviser—partnered in a D.C. firm nicknamed “the torturers’ lobby” because their clients included the most brutal dictators in the world.5 By the mid-2000s, Manafort had left the firm to pursue his own specialty: serving oligarchs from the former Soviet Union.
Trump added that the United States should stop “knocking Russia” because Russia was going to help ensure a future “win,” the details of which Trump did not specify.
Russian state media outlet RT cheered Trump’s Fox appearance, part of their regular promotion of Trump as a credible American political leader.8
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 increased diversity of America was offset by repressive new voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise nonwhite voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.13
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.
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 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.
There’s a kind of horror that shakes you to your core, when you start believing in the devil because of what you witness and in hell because you want comfort.
don’t remember a time when I felt safe in America, but I remember when I thought it was possible I would be, someday.
2009, Roy Blunt, the father of governor Matt Blunt and a Republican congressman who would go on to become Missouri’s US senator in 2011, compared Obama to a monkey at a D.C. conference.14
McCaskill was losing in the polls until one August day when Akin, asked on TV whether abortion is justified in cases of rape, proclaimed: “It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”21
“Racism is so rampant in Missouri that in 2017, three years after the Ferguson uprising, the NAACP issued a travel warning for the state, telling black people not to come here because they’ll be profiled and threatened.
Corruption is like a weight that you never shed because no one will recognize you are carrying it.
“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles … I think I know most of it anyway.
Trump said this
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.
There is the investigative journalism written in real time on Trump’s nefarious financial affairs by journalists who mostly have since died.
And there is the media morass of 2015 and 2016, when investigative journalists from Trump’s past were censored, threatened, or generally kept out of the news—while journalists of Trump’s present ignored blatant crimes in favor of an obsessive focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails, a misalignment of priorities that was stoked by the FBI itself.
Until 1979, US worker pay rose with productivity. 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.)
Trump arrived on the national scene right as the nation began to crumble.
Cowritten with Tony Schwartz—a ghostwriter who later warned during the 2016 campaign that Trump was a sociopath who would likely bring forth the end of the world if elected—The Art of the Deal could have been subtitled How I Became a Russian Asset.36
A friend of Trump’s accurately forecast Trump’s ceaseless ambition: “No achievement can satisfy what he wants. What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas.”
These included scathing early 1990s Vanity Fair profiles, including one in which twelve-year-old Donald Trump Jr. told a reporter that Trump did not love him, did not love himself, but only loved his money;52 to
In winter 2019, in his federal testimony, Michael Cohen admitted to making at least five hundred threats under Trump’s orders for over a decade, describing him as akin to a mafia boss—without using the word “mafia” itself.57
“normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them.
Occasionally a great horror would shake Americans out of their smug voyeurism, a tragedy so awful it could not be sold as spectacle—the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre—but these were dismissed as anomalies instead of sparks for future flames.
Cable news made fame for fame’s sake a valid aspiration, even if you were, for example, the houseguest of a murderer.
In June 2016, an anonymous plaintiff, using the pseudonym Katie Johnson and later Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her when she was thirteen years old—the same age that Ivanka was that year. Jane Doe’s claim was consistent with verifiable facts from the court
In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that he had known Epstein, a financier with a mysterious past, for fifteen years and thought he was a “terrific guy.”5
It’s hardest to read it now that my daughter is the same age as Jane Doe, and I can’t tell her that nothing has changed since the 1990s, because things have changed: the alleged rapist of a thirteen-year-old is now the president.
Defendant Trump initiated sexual contact with Plaintiff at four different parties. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. Exhs. A and B.
Defendant Trump threatened Plaintiff that, were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual and physical abuse of her by Defendant Trump, Plaintiff and her family would be physically harmed if not killed.
He is a public figure, you tell yourself—if he is lying, surely someone will call him out. If he is hurting people, surely someone will stop him.
Younger generations had been trained to work for a future that never arrived. By the time they realized the truth, they were too deep in debt to escape.
Everyday necessities—housing, health care, child care—became luxuries, and survival became an aspiration.
The 2000s ushered in an era of credentialism that prevented ordinary people from rising through the ranks. Jobs that once required a high school degree now required a BA, jobs that required a BA now required an MA, and the choice was pay to play or get locked out.
All news was BREAKING all the time, breathless coverage often elucidating nothing. This is one of the longest-lasting artifacts of 9/11.
But while the trivialization of 9/11 was a gradual cultural phenomenon, Trump’s callousness about 9/11 dates back to the day it happened, when he responded to the death of thousands of New Yorkers by bragging about his buildings.
When the foreclosure crisis and the recession destroyed the American economy, he thought only of how he would profit, saying, “People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is. I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”
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.
In 2015, Sater and Cohen exchanged a series of emails saying they were conspiring to gain Vladimir Putin’s support in bringing Trump to power.29 “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in an email to Cohen. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
The Apprentice conditioned Americans to accept fraud as entertainment, to expect the reputational rehab of ruined celebrities, and to not consider that behind the fakeness of the show lay something very dark and real.
In 2015, after Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, NBC canceled The Apprentice on moral grounds.
