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

by Sarah Kendzior

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 parts. The crimes are much worse than the scandals, but the media will always take the scandal bait. The public, having been assured that it’s just scandal, it’s just Trump being Trump, will then surrender its own demands for accountability. This is called “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. “Normalcy bias” is the psychological counterpart to “American exceptionalism.” You can see these dual myths at play in every massive American oversight turned tragedy, from 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis. (Notably, you see many of the same elite scammers, men who profit off the good faith that informs normalcy bias, in each of these atrocities as well.) But no one held Trump accountable—not in the 1980s, not now. That is to say, no one held Trump accountable in a meaningful way, the only way he and his criminal kind recognize: indictment and imprisonment. He remained a distant folk villain, a TV and tabloid monster...

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.

the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.

Dwight Eisenhower museum and tomb in Abilene, Kansas. Engraved on its wall is a quote from his 1953 speech “The Chance for Peace.” It says: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”