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October 31 - November 6, 2022
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. Freed from his contract, Trump continued his reality show through cable news, which lacked the fleeting fortitude of NBC. In the end, The Apprentice canceled America.
In the post-9/11 era, proof lost its value along with the people who produced it. The digital revolution that was supposed to liberate journalists—allowing breaking news to flow in real time and provide clarity into ongoing crises—instead led to mass layoffs. 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.
The most influential industries—policy, law, academia, entertainment—were restructured to hire and service the wealthy by the end of the 2000s, often using the recession as a pretext to do so.
Like most people my age, I did not look for opportunities so much as I navigated obstacles.
To even briefly leave academia for a more lucrative field while looking for an academic job—assuming an alternative job could be found—is seen as a sign that one is not “serious” about research. In many respects, academia operates like a cult.
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.
If there’s a unifying positive trait to St. Louisans, it’s a blunt pragmatism, a radar for bullshit that doesn’t quite cross over into cynicism.
Every ordinary person around my age has a secret self from before the crash, one who dared to dream of more than a life of necessities reclassified as luxuries. There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations. The rage, though—that stays with you.
Kushner is like a hellspawn incubated in the “iron triangle” of state corruption, corporate corruption, and organized crime that Mueller warned of in his 2011 speech. But he did not create it: he inherited it.
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.
You could reinvent yourself on the internet, but you could not start over.
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, which is what more insular authoritarian regimes like Uzbekistan practice.
Above all else, what dominates my memory of 2014 is Ferguson. The Ferguson uprising that summer marked the divide between the tentative hope of the early 2010s demonstrations and the chaotic brutality of the rest. Like other tragedies of 2014, the Ferguson protests against police brutality were a spectacle of online voyeurism, exemplified and exploited in hashtags, and a mainstay of cable news.
Ferguson was a flash point, and it hurts to live through a flash point. A flash point glimmers, it burns, sometimes so brightly it eclipses the pain of day-to-day life. And then it is gone, and you are left alone with that pain, amplified by the apathy with which it was so abruptly received.
Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis, we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning, because Brown’s death is part of a continuum of criminal impunity by the police toward St. Louis’s black residents. There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.
What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s.
The original protests, which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led to disorienting and insulting coverage.
In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief.
It was a loss that was hard to convey to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my representative, and I would explain: “But they gassed my representative too.”20
During the three months McCulloch had been making his case for Wilson’s innocence, two more St. Louis black men, Kajieme Powell and VonDerrit Myers, were killed by police. A movement born in grief kept gaining martyrs.
The most reliable export of St. Louis is pain; its most reliable import is predators.
Michael Brown lost his life because Darren Wilson denied him his basic humanity. The casualties that followed included activists who refused to accept that dehumanization as the final say. 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.
By the 2010s, the media industry had been so gutted by the recession that it relied on online clickbait for profit, creating an echo chamber of lies.
Racism never fixes itself. Throughout US history, bigotry has had to be constrained through law, often through measures that were unpopular with white people at the time.
During Obama’s tenure, the inability of lawmakers to see US society for what it was shattered the rights of vulnerable Americans. Two major Supreme Court rulings—the 2010 Citizens United ruling and the 2013 partial repeal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)—shifted power away from the people and into the hands of elites with extremist views and shady foreign ties.
Meanwhile, the partial repeal of the VRA—which the Supreme Court passed with a statement saying that protections against racism were no longer necessary, one month before George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin—allowed states to pass new repressive voter ID laws that disenfranchised black and Latino voters. In Wisconsin, over two hundred thousand voters were blocked from the polls. Clinton lost the state by only twenty-three thousand votes.
During the Bush and Obama eras, two former heads of the FBI, William Sessions and Louis Freeh, began working as attorneys for the Russian mafia they used to fight.
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 nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of 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.
Caller: I’d like to know how you handle your stress. Trump: I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter—like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.44 You try to tell yourself that this interview doesn’t matter either. But of course, it does. It all matters. And you’re locked alone again in realization, staring into the tunnel at the end of the light.
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 day of inaction by state officials therefore validated the Trump camp’s insistence that the Russia story was a hoax, or at the least, not a serious threat to US security and sovereignty. 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
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Alexandra Chalupa was one of the first Americans to face threats for investigating illicit activity between the Trump campaign and Kremlin operatives. Throughout 2016, she endured break-ins into her home and car, menacing voicemails, stalkers who followed her while she was out with her children, and other acts of intimidation intended to silence her.
One of the most horrific realizations when your government is hijacked from the inside is that there is no official to whom you can turn—because it is rare to find an official who cannot be turned by a corrupt operator.
There is no “normal” narrative anymore. The paranoia of American politics is nothing new, but in the twenty-first century, it was newly exploitable.
Trump administration whistle-blowers have all been women whose findings are marginalized by officials and the press.
Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.
It is a bad moment in American life when you are praying that the president-elect allegedly hiring hookers to piss on a bed may be what forces state officials to stop a transnational crime syndicate.
But the way in which the mass protests of 2017 and 2018 have been dismissed is disturbing, particularly since most participants and organizers were women. Women also comprised the grassroots efforts behind the 2018 Democratic wins, organizing while dealing with the endless agonizing revelations of the #MeToo movement. In the years after Trump’s election, more women ran for and won office than ever before. This flurry of female activism should surprise no one, given that the policies of the Trump administration, whether economic or social, disproportionately hurt women. In Trump’s America,
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The only time Mueller broke his silence during the probe was to condemn a BuzzFeed article claiming that Trump had directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a report that generated widespread talk of impeachment.51 Mueller spoke out more strongly about that BuzzFeed article—which turned out to be accurate—than he did when Barr released a deceitful memo misrepresenting his two years of investigative work. The two BuzzFeed reporters who broke the Cohen story were the same who broke the story of Russian infiltration of the US Treasury less than a month before.
People keep looking for the smoking gun that will end Trump’s corrupt reign. But it has been there the whole time. The gun is in his hand, and it’s still smoking.
There is a difference between institutions weakening, as they did throughout the wars and recessions of the twenty-first century, and the institutions that protect freedom and national security being hijacked or gutted by hostile, anti-American actors.
