More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 31 - November 6, 2022
In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As climate change brings unparalleled crises, the future becomes a rare asset, meant to be hoarded like diamonds or gold.
In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As climate change brings unparalleled crises, the future becomes a rare asset, meant to be hoarded like diamonds or gold.
The essays were shaped in part by the harsh conditions of Missouri, the state I call home, a state that had long been the bellwether of American politics and now served as the bellwether of American decline.
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.
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.
Trump did not feel like a novelty. He felt like a culmination.
Trump did not feel like a novelty. He felt like a culmination.
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.
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.
We are trapped in a reality TV autocrat’s funhouse mirror, a blurred continuum of shock and sorrow that exhausts our capacity for clarity of thought.
We are trapped in a reality TV autocrat’s funhouse mirror, a blurred continuum of shock and sorrow that exhausts our capacity for clarity of thought.
Over years, ceaseless propaganda and spectacle, exacerbated by corrections and retractions, can destroy your sense of reality. Time spirals forward and lurches backward.
Over years, ceaseless propaganda and spectacle, exacerbated by corrections and retractions, can destroy your sense of reality. Time spirals forward and lurches backward.
If visitors follow the standard recommendations, they see the Arch and the zoo and the Cardinals. If they turn off the tourist trail, they stumble into what looks like an urban war zone of gutted nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings. They wonder what happened to make our city look this way, failing to grasp that what happened in St. Louis was nothing. Our war wasn’t lost, but loss. There was no attack, just abandonment and apathy. Here the world ended, as St. Louis–raised poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
If visitors follow the standard recommendations, they see the Arch and the zoo and the Cardinals. If they turn off the tourist trail, they stumble into what looks like an urban war zone of gutted nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings. They wonder what happened to make our city look this way, failing to grasp that what happened in St. Louis was nothing. Our war wasn’t lost, but loss. There was no attack, just abandonment and apathy. Here the world ended, as St. Louis–raised poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
On Election Day 2008, Missouri began to turn a little redder. And then Missouri began to bleed.
The combination of a massive recession and the first black president unleashed anger that had lurked under the surface since Obama’s candidacy started gaining steam.
It was also the first race held after the Citizens United ruling changed the rules about corporate money in politics, resulting in a dark money spending spree on ads whose conspiratorial sentiments were amplified by outlets like Fox. Within two years, Missouri had become the only state that allowed unlimited donations from unnamed sources, and the result was a Republican sweep and an emergence of Missouri as the dark money capital of America.
it is impossible to live in St. Louis and cover politics—both local and national—without Ferguson shaping your perception. The story never stopped for us because it never had a beginning and it can never have an end. It is a continuum of pain, punctuated by reminders both brutal—like the ongoing deaths of activists—and banal—like the bureaucratic morass that still plagues St. Louis regional government.
Missouri has become a petri dish for the end of the American experiment, combining the worst qualities of the states that border it: the indicted officials of Illinois and the notorious dysfunction of Kansas.
Within months of being elected, Hawley was being investigated for violating many of the same laws he had cited as reasons for Greitens to resign during his time as attorney general, including using apps to make documents disappear and hiding state information from the public.
Why don’t you move? people ask. They ask me both about Missouri, and about America—and in many ways, it’s the same question, for they share the same sins. I always answer: Where is there to go? Missouri is a symptom of the American disease, and America a symptom of an international disease.
Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.
Before Cohn passed, he managed to teach Trump three key skills: how to swindle money, how to get married for maximum benefit, and—though the purpose behind this agenda was never publicly revealed—how to cozy up to America’s enemies, the greatest one at that time being the Soviets.
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.)
The answer is that protest is more of a financial risk than a political one, and financial risks form the backbone of modern American terror. We cannot afford to overcome. We are too busy doing GoFundMe’s for the funerals of our friends whose previous GoFundMe failed to cover their health care. Much as the American Dream is dead, the methods of protest that it enabled are no longer effective—the leverage and fluidity of that era is gone.
We live in the era of the masses versus the mob: but people do not recognize the mob as the mob.
It also parallels Trump’s 1980s social network, which included people like billionaire Saudi arms smuggler Adnan Khashoggi, whom Trump befriended and from whom he bought a “surveillance yacht” filled with hidden cameras.34 (In fall 2018, Khashoggi’s nephew, Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, was hacked into pieces with a bone saw by aides of the Saudi government in their Turkish embassy, allegedly under the orders of MBS with information supplied by MBS’s friend, Kushner, after Khashoggi had criticized Trump.35 Adnan Khashoggi is also dead, having passed on in 2017 due to unknown causes.)
...more
campaign: Ivana had said at the time of her divorce that Trump, angered by a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot conducted by a doctor Ivana recommended, grabbed her, pulled out hair from her own scalp, bellowed, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!,” and raped her. The deposition papers describe a terrified Ivana hiding in a closet in the hours after the rape, emerging in the morning to find Trump sneering at her,
Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern.
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.
With the Soviet Union no more, political elites deemed America the new problem. Not the America of wealthy men like Trump, who had allegedly been shamed or sentenced into submission, but the America of ordinary people. The America of black Los Angelenos outraged by police brutality; the America of abused women like Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt and Anita Hill who were pilloried on a national scale; the America of mythical child “super-predators”—teenagers like the Central Park Five, whose exoneration can never compensate for the brutality they endured. With no external enemy left to fight,
...more
The 1990s was a paranoid era, relentlessly unsentimental. Comedies like Seinfeld proudly proclaimed to be about nothing, because nothing was what mattered now. Dramas like The X-Files warned us to trust no one and we agreed with a smirk, unaware that the truth that was out there in the 1990s was more disturbing than the wildest fictional government conspiracies.
In the end, Burnett got his Putin reality TV series after all. We just mistook it for an election.
It made no difference whether a worker had a GED or a Ph.D., whether they toiled in a prestigious field like law or a blue-collar field like retail or a public sector field like teaching. Across all fields, management had realized they could stop paying people a living wage and get away with it. 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. The past came calling every month in the form of a creditor, dead dreams with soaring interest rates. Everyday necessities—housing, health care, child
...more
Sometimes you paid and got locked out anyway, as wealthy elites purchased careers for their untalented offspring. But I discuss Jared and Ivanka in the next chapter.
Much of what Americans took for granted was lost within that brief window of time. We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race. We lost our sense of safety from foreign threats through the September 11, 2001, attacks. We lost our sense of prosperity through a recession followed by skyrocketing income inequality. We lost what was left of our shame when we went to war in Iraq based on a lie.
Reporters had twenty-four hours to figure out and fact-check a story, and in the year 2000, facts were not yet viewed as optional.
We were grabbing at milestones before they were stolen.
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.
Too many illusions had been shattered, so we built new ones, illusions that shone like the lights beaming out from the cavernous hole where the towers once stood. The initial post-9/11 obedience of the media was forged in grief.
The tragedy was cheapened in national memory by a cynical frustration with the lack of accountability surrounding both 9/11 and the wars that followed. 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. The ability to discern threats is related to the ability to discern facts, and preserving that ability was a struggle well before Trump took office.
When Rove’s comments were revealed in 2004, they shocked Americans with their arrogance. When Trump reveled in similar callousness during his campaign, it was decreed plainspoken authenticity by a press so used to seeing the powerful cover up ugly truths with pretty lies that they could not imagine that the ugliness was covering up something even worse.
“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.”
This is not boldness: crime ceases to be risky when you know you will get away with it. In the twenty-first century, the corporate loopholes that enable white-collar crime double as nooses around the neck of Western democracy.
This point is crucial to grasp: by the mid-1990s, the influence of the Italian mafia in New York City had severely waned. This decline was first spurred by Giuliani’s prosecutions, but was furthered by an influx of criminals from the former USSR due to the loosening of their immigration laws and the abuse of the Israeli “right to return” policy by mobsters who then moved from Israel to the United States. The Russian mafia operated differently than the Italian mafia, focusing less on small-time, local operations.
US and international law enforcement had been cracking down on the Russian mafia as it grew in the 1990s, but in the aftermath of 9/11, those resources were reallocated. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies shifted their focus to combatting terrorism, and the American public came to see al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations as the greatest danger they faced—a grave miscalculation.
In 2006—the same year Trump SoHo was showcased on The Apprentice, the same year Sater took the Trump children to the Kremlin, and the same year Manafort moved into Trump Tower—Michael Cohen became Trump’s personal lawyer. 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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but the 2000s were full of them if you had money and lacked shame.
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.
