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December 12 - December 26, 2020
From then on, the website led the paper, gradually improving its technology to mirror the 24/7 news crawl that—once a rarity—now never left the TV screen. All news was BREAKING all the time, breathless coverage often elucidating nothing. This is one of the longest-lasting artifacts of 9/11.
Rudy Giuliani, a washed-up scandal magnet who in August 2001 was making headlines for his illicit affairs and past shady dealings—which include, notably, protecting his longtime friend Trump from being investigated for criminal activity1—became recast by the national media as America’s Mayor.
By 2016, Americans had gotten so used to mass corruption and the commodification of pain that, to some extent, the ability to discern threats had been lost.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The trustworthiness of a process or person was to be dictated from above by “history’s actors,” not decreed from below by the empirical observations of the masses.
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13 “He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”
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.
The Apprentice trust-washed Trump’s criminal enterprises to an unsuspecting public.
The Apprentice was a hate-watch nostalgia trip: here was everything amusing about The Donald with none of the danger. He was now a scripted NBC product, unable to do harm beyond “firing” game show contestants.
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.”
he has taken pains to conceal his well-documented relationship with Sater. The reasons behind his reticence remain unclear, but may have to do with Sater being a nexus between US law enforcement and foreign oligarchs, and probably a revealing resource into the intricacies of dealings that Trump strives to keep hidden.
Dictatorship is a branding operation. The ubiquity of the dictator’s name and image, the repetition of slogans and symbols, the hollow rituals (like “elections” with preordained winners, like “firings” with preordained losers) all contribute to the building of the spectacular state and its captive audience. This pageantry is something authoritarians and reality TV producers understand in equal measure, and Trump inhabits the worlds of both.
Despite this statement, the Treasury did not pursue the legality of Trump’s enterprises when he became the nominee. This is perhaps due to the fact that by the 2016 election, the Treasury had been infiltrated by Russia, an event that occurred in 2015 but was not reported on until December 2018 in an explosive expose in BuzzFeed.38
To this day, nothing has been done about the infiltration of the Treasury, save the indictment of the whistle-blower, Natalie Mayflower Edwards, who exposed that Treasury officials had been communicating with Russia for years via back-channel Gmail and Hotmail accounts.
The Treasury is now run by Steven Mnuchin, a lackey of Trump and fellow protégé of Trump’s old adviser Carl Icahn. Mnuchin has gone out of his way to ease sanctions on Russian oligarchs—in particular, Manafort’s former employer Oleg Deripaska—despite protest from Congress.
But to rationalize Trump’s disproportionate dependence on Russia one has to ignore the broader context every time, viewing each instance as disparate and therefore unimportant.
Older and experienced reporters were replaced by younger and wealthier content producers who could pay to play in the country’s most expensive cities. People who can pay to play are less likely to report on corruption, inequality, or injustice, because they are less likely to recognize it exists.
Journalism had become an industry designed for the Kushners of the world, not for those who would deign to expose them.
A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity. I wrote that in 2013, bemoaning the loss of economic opportunity. I did not realize I was writing about national security as well.
In St. Louis, I saw parks and free museums and a free zoo and free family events every weekend. I saw a place that was unrefined and looked down upon by outsiders, but whose value revealed itself the more you opened up to it.
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
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As in foreign kleptocracies, the glue that holds the Trump administration together is nepotism.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who opposes public education, is the sister of military mercenary Erik Prince, a key operator in Trump’s network of back-channel trades with other kleptocracies. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the architect of the GOP coup. In 2019, the appointment of Attorney General William Barr was followed by the appointment of Barr’s son-in-law, Tyler McGaughey, as Trump’s White House legal counsel and his daughter, Mary Daly, as an employee of the Treasury.
The foreign deals Ivanka made that implicate the emoluments laws or that Jared made with Middle Eastern countries who agreed to pay down his debt as he influenced policies that favored them also serve as a perverse method of résumé-padding, especially to a gullible and sometimes compromised American press.
Adult children of authoritarian leaders are useful in multiple ways. First, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states are. Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough distance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track. Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile, which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with pictures of their happy families or glamorous lifestyle. Fourth, a dynastic kleptocracy is the most reliable way to keep assets stolen from the state
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And what he wanted in 2005 was to own 666 Fifth Avenue, a forty-one-story tower in Midtown Manhattan that became the most expensive real estate deal in New York City’s history—and one of the most disastrous. Kushner bought the property for nearly twice as much on a per-square-foot basis as any previous Manhattan building sale.17 It is unclear why he found this particular building so desirable, and why he would strike such a terrible deal in 2007, when economic experts were warning of an impending housing crash.
Putin, who is not Jewish, has also embraced Chabad through his “personal rabbi,” Berel Lazar.
As investigative journalist Craig Unger notes, “Chabad provides some of the richest and unexpectedly direct sets of connections between Putin and Donald Trump.”31
A 2008 breakup of the couple, who began dating in 2005 and married in 2009, was in part remedied by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi Deng, who seemed to have great interest in unifying two white-collar crime families in matrimony.
Murdoch later insisted that Deng was a Chinese spy, a claim backed up by US intelligence agencies.
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.
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.
In the aftermath of the Andijon massacre, a joke circulated on Uzbek web forums: Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan? A: Yes, but only once.
Networked authoritarianism, a term coined by social scientist Rebecca MacKinnon, describes an internet that is just open enough so that it can be exploited by bad actors, who use it to bombard users with propaganda, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks.3 It is the loudest way of silencing the public voice, and is more effective than traditional state censorship,
The rationale for the open internet became clear when Russian officials used it to publicize the arrests of popular dissidents like the blogger Alexey Navalny and the punk band Pussy Riot over the next few years. Instead of fearing the open internet, Kremlin officials embraced it, using social media to smear the opposition and to release a firehose of propaganda intended to overwhelm citizens’ faculty for critical thinking.
Protesters were screaming into a moral void.
In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l’Nasah Crockett launched the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to expose accounts impersonating black users and making obnoxious political claims.16 Many of these accounts were later revealed to be Russian troll accounts seeking to map the US political landscape and prepare to influence the 2016 election.17
To protest dehumanization, in the digital media era, is to risk your own life. It’s to make yourself a target in a medium that distorts and devours you until you are no longer recognized as real.
If a statement was uttered on television by someone famous, it was worth an article, even if the statement was untrue. Trump understood this system and capitalized on it, spreading the birther myth across cable news and onto the internet, and from his Twitter account to cable news: his own ouroboros of bullshit.
Thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race.
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.
You wish you lived in a time when people were more haunted by the past than by the future.
staring into the tunnel at the end of the light.
his admiration of Putin was his most consistent foreign policy stance.
The best argument that Trump was not a Kremlin asset was the belief that, if a Kremlin asset were running for president, surely someone would step in and stop it.
Every time Trump’s lies were normalized, every insistence that Clinton was destined to win, every day someone proclaimed that even if he won, checks and balances would constrain his agenda, served to soothe the consciences of reluctant Trump voters and cynical nonvoters alike.
The FBI targeting of Clinton, who turned out to be innocent, and simultaneous silence on Trump prompted a second letter from Reid, who stated: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”
