Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
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The Trump administration is like a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past forty years
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From Roger Stone to Paul Manafort to William Barr, it is a Celebrity Apprentice of federal felons and disgraced operatives dragged out of the shadows and thrust back into the spotlight—with Donald Trump, yet again, at the helm.
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In fall 2015, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and that once installed, he would decimate American democracy.
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an American autocracy, wrapped in a tabloid veneer.
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His desire to dismantle democracy was out in the open. He did not bother to hide his goals because he knew few believed he could achieve them.
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And being right felt terrible. Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.
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For the first time since 1956, Missouri did not vote for the winner. Obama lost by 3,900 votes, and he likely lost those votes because he’s black.
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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.19 But
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“Write this down, to remember I said this, because no one is going to believe me. People don’t know how this shit works. I guarantee you that in 2016, you are going to see the return of Richard Nixon. Not just in Missouri, but on a national level. You are going to see a hard move to the right, and a Nixon-style presidential candidate come out, only slicker, more of a demagogue, someone who can work the media, and we will be living in a new kind of hell. The people who vote for whoever it is, they’ll be living in hell too, only they won’t even know it. The rest of us? We’ll know it. We’ll know ...more
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As Trump bellowed conspiracy theories and insults, I watched a crowd become a mob. I watched a process I had studied my whole life in history books play out in real time. As a demagogue screamed “Build the wall” in an opera house, the rally-goers who had greeted me with kindness hailed his calls for violence. I saw mothers and fathers put their children and elderly parents aside to engage in fistfights with protesters.
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“Racism is so rampant in Missouri that in 2017, three years after the Ferguson uprising, the NAACP issued a travel warning for the state, telling black people not to come here because they’ll be profiled and threatened.
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It’s so misogynist that in 2017, the Republicans also attempted to make it legal for women who use birth control to be fired,39 which didn’t work.
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Missouri is not a red state, but it is becoming a one-party state—a party ruled by mysterious megadonors, a party that openly disregards the will of its electorate.
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Trump remained drawn to Cohn’s shamelessness. Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down. Cohn understood the power of the court of public opinion to outweigh the court of law. Media was a weapon: a well-timed bomb, a scalpel to carve a façade.
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“Roy Cohn was the most satanic figure I ever met in my life. He was almost reptilian.
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“No achievement can satisfy what he wants. What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas.”
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president in 2016 with the intention to lose: the real goal being to boost his brand and income. Putting aside the patent ridiculousness of Trump agreeing to lose to a woman, and a Clinton at that, this view also misapprehends Trump’s deep need for predetermined outcomes.
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Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern.
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to strip America down and sell it for parts. The crimes are much worse than the scandals, but the media will always take the scandal bait.
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With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way.
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Across all fields, management had realized they could stop paying people a living wage and get away with it.
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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.
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We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race.
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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.
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Changes in personnel give the impression that power is distributed equitably rather than consolidated around a dictator, while also distracting the press from the regime’s more substantive flaws.
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The longer autocrats stay in power, the smaller the inner circle becomes, and the more kinship ties tend to dominate.
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the elevation of Ivanka and Jared Kushner into the upper echelons of the administration struck many as a violation of basic tenets of American governance. The United States was founded, after all, in rebellion to a monarchy.
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there had never been such a blatant insertion of unqualified relatives into such high positions of power.
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for every asshole, there is an equal and opposite asshole. When Trump says something vile, there is an elite laughing alongside him.
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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. This was the strategy they used in “Pizzagate,” when a vigilante convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilic cult out of a D.C. pizza parlor nearly shot up the place.
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Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.
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Trump loves to be caught and not be punished.
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It is not enough for Trump to commit a crime. He needs to let you know that he got away with it.
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Savior syndrome is a mind-set that flourishes during the unstable period of autocratic consolidation, when frightened citizens seek to find meaning in the inexplicable actions of their failed leaders.