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

by Sarah Kendzior

I remember wondering how it could be possible to love my second as much as my firstborn. A friend told me that love for your children is infinite; your heart expands to hold it, and she was right. What I did not realize until the last few years was that the same is true of grief. Whatever well exists inside us to capture the magnitude of loss—of lives, of expectations, of freedom—is vaster than I knew or wanted to know.

I don’t remember a time when I felt safe in America, but I remember when I thought it was possible I would be, someday. The nostalgia for what never was is a familiar feeling for those born in the opening salvo in the symphony of American decline.

Abusive relationships were packaged as entertainment: Amy and Joey, Lorena and John Wayne, Clarence and Anita, OJ and Nicole, Pamela and Tommy, and, capping off the decade, Bill and Monica. At the time, the incessant focus on villains and victims seemed tawdry but not dangerous. After all, America’s big battles had allegedly been won. What was wrong with a circus of pain, when the stakes were so low and the protagonists so low-down that sympathy for the players could be an admission of your own struggle, and disdain a form of self-validation?

another hell sold as a commodity;

Dictatorship is a branding operation.

The Trump administration is, in fact, very competent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidders. That is not kakistocracy but kleptocracy, with elements of burgeoning authoritarianism.

The result of ubiquitous paranoia is not disbelief. It is credulity.

Paranoia

When all information is assumed fraudulent and all sources suspect, when your worst suspicions about your government are routinely confirmed and denied, when online communication—itself nebulous and malleable—is your only means of interaction, what do you do? You follow your principles.…

Principles

I was surprised by the quickness with which US political culture came to mirror that of surveillance states. I had not anticipated how quickly the cyber-utopianism embraced by internet corporations would turn into nihilist abdication of the public good.

Cyber-utopianism

Protesters were screaming into a moral void.

Moral void

political culture today. A nightmarish act of violence was still viewed by most as a nightmarish act of violence; not a meme, not a joke. Now we live in an era when mass shooters livestream their massacres while online forums cheer the body count like it’s a video game.13

Nightmarish Violence

The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe.

Narrative Proximics

There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.

Sequels

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.

Dehumanization Digotal

ouroboros of bullshit.

Ouroboros

These twin myths enabled a crisis that liberal power brokers did not seem to recognize, even though it is the classic path to demagoguery. They did not see the danger of a rise in bigotry coinciding with an explosion of economic pain—or how savvy political operatives could play the two off each other if the law did not constrain their malicious intent.

Liberal idoocy

it’s better to be a heretic than a liar. A heretic these days is a temporary occupation: the sin lies in telling the truth too early.

Heretic