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

by Sarah Kendzior

“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.’”

In 2018, we visited the 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.”

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.