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

by Sarah Kendzior

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. To millionaire elites, many of whom already had an apocalyptic bent, a depopulated world is not a tragedy but an opportunity—and certainly easier to manage as they insulate themselves from the ravages of a literally scorched earth. The last four decades have led to the hoarding of resources on a heretofore unimaginable scale by people who have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future. Their destructive actions have programmed a desperate generation to settle for scraps instead of settling the score.

Unless we were part of the opportunity-hoarding elite—the Ivankas and Jareds of the world—my generation did not get to have choices. Instead we had reactions. We fought to hold on to what we had before it was stolen, while thieves demanded our gratitude and supplication. The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imagining the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration.

The cumulative effect was a collective agony intensified by the all-American shame of seeing systemic breakdowns as personal failings. It had been a long time since I or anyone I knew had dreams instead of circumstances.

Throughout 2016, hate crimes rose as Trump rebranded racism as populism and recruited white supremacists from the dregs of the GOP (like Jeff Sessions) and the extreme right (like Steve Bannon) to join his campaign.

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. The only honest line of Trump’s campaign was that America was broken. Trump would know: he helped break it, and now he and his backers sought to capitalize off the wreckage. Trump did not strike me as stupid, like pundits kept proclaiming, but as a master manipulator who preyed on pain like a vulture.

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. That is why it is important to act early, particularly when that autocrat is backed by a crime syndicate that transcends state borders in its pursuit of power and wealth.

Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more—some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country. Their loyalty is to themselves and their money. Many are criminals without borders who have moved from hijacking businesses to hijacking nations. Some call them fascists; I avoid this term because being a fascist requires an allegiance to the state. To these operatives, the state is just something to sell.

I was not the only one to predict the election results or the reshaping of American political culture under Trump. Pundits and politicians like to say that “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized—groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory.

We have lost a lot over the last few years, but one of the most disorienting losses is our sense of time. This is a common experience for people living in a democratic country that is transitioning into an autocracy. The last three years have been as much about deciphering the truth of the past as they are about debunking the lies of the present or fighting for the freedom of the future.

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.

People ask me how I find hope. I answer that I don’t believe in hope, and I don’t believe in hopelessness. I believe in compassion and pragmatism, in doing what is right for its own sake. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy because hope is inextricable from time. An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock.

Much like I do not remember the era of the American Dream, I do not remember a time before Donald Trump. In this respect, I am like most Americans: he has inhabited our collective consciousness for my entire life, which means he has been committing crimes, unpunished, for my entire life. He has been profiting off American pain for my entire life, and American elites—the elites he pretends to condemn—have been enabling him for my entire life. That is the template of expectations for my generation and all that followed: crime committed brazenly is over time redefined as something other than crime. It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.

My parents had been ridiculous to hide under their desks in the 1950s and 1960s, I thought, waiting for bombs that never dropped and invaders that never came. My main resource on the end of the Cold War may have been the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” video, but my casual conviction that America was indomitable put me in the mainstream. Adults told me I lived in the last superpower and I believed them. I wondered what it would be like to live in a country torn apart from within, like the USSR, and have your whole life upended. I don’t wonder about that anymore.

The 2000s ushered in an era of credentialism that prevented ordinary people from rising through the ranks. Jobs that once required a high school degree now required a BA, jobs that required a BA now required an MA, and the choice was pay to play or get locked out. 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.

The three years I worked at the Daily News—from 2000 to 2003—were possibly the most transformative in US journalism, and by association, the most transformative in terms of how Americans access and process information. 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. I grieved those losses while working in the industry that tells people what is worth grieving, that defines not only the terms of the debate but the participants. I watched the public shed old illusions only to embrace new ones manufactured in my line of work—fantasies spun out of fear and favor. I watched the media industry scramble to turn chaos into a palatable narrative, one the public could follow, one advertisers could sell.

When the United States went to war in Afghanistan—the first US war of my adult life—I thought it was probably the right move, unaware that this war would still be going nearly two decades later. My eight-year-old son once asked me, “Has America ever not been at war?” and I told him that for about half my life, it was not, but for all of his life, it had been. He asked if America would be at war for the rest of his life. I thought of wars that break out within national borders, and wars that come from computers and aren’t called wars, and undeclared wars born of unprecedented treason. I said I didn’t know, but that I would try, in my way, to keep him safe. I didn’t tell him what he needed to be kept safe from, how deeply the lines between protector and assailant in US government had blurred. I didn’t tell him that it was the president, not foreign adversaries, who had called journalists like me “enemies of the people.”2 I told my son how some of my friends enlisted after 9/11 out of a sense of obligation to country, but that they kept having to fight the same wars over and over, and that this left them hurting inside. My son asked if the government could give them a special reward, like not having to work ever again because they had already tried so hard to protect people, and I held his face to my chest so he wouldn’t see me cry.

By 2019, 9/11 had become reduced to slogans and memes of varying severity. Politicians weaponized the tragedy and used it to cast aspersions on their enemies. In April 2019, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar received death threats after Trump tweeted a video falsely implying she approved of the 9/11 attacks. But while the trivialization of 9/11 was a gradual cultural phenomenon, Trump’s callousness about 9/11 dates back to the day it happened, when he responded to the death of thousands of New Yorkers by bragging about his buildings. “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest,” he told New York’s Channel 9 News hours after the attacks. “And now it’s the tallest.”3

This narcissism is typical of how Trump reacts to American suffering. When the foreclosure crisis and the recession destroyed the American economy, he thought only of how he would profit, saying, “People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is. I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”4 His predatory mind-set is evident in his obsession with nuclear weapons, which he believes can be used to create profitable catastrophes, and also evident in his interest in causing civilian deaths abroad. When told in 2018 that the CIA had delayed a drone attack until a target left his family, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?”5 Even as commander ...

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. Much has been made of the Trump administration’s embrace of “alternative facts,” but the confusion dates back to the 2000s: the era of “truthiness” and the rise of reality TV. The Bush years were marked not only by unpunished white-collar and war crimes but blatant confessions of mass manipulation from powerful elites. In 2002, Ron Suskind, a journalist for The New York Times, interviewed a Bush administration official later identified as adviser Karl Rove. Suskind recalls: [Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”12 Rove made these remarks privately during the 2002 run-up to the Iraq War, when news outlets like the one I worked at ran op-eds claiming war in Iraq to be necessary and protesters to be ...

“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.”

As opportunity for ordinary people fell, opportunism for the rich and unqualified flourished. The Trump administration is often described as a “kakistocracy,” a word that means rule by the least competent.2 I have never used this word, and prefer the term “kleptocracy,” which describes countries where rulers steal their nation’s resources to enhance their personal wealth. “Kakistocracy” assumes that the Trump administration’s malice is the result of incompetence, and that the dismantling of departments is the incidental result of appointing unqualified people. In the Trump administration, people are hired to dismantle the departments they lead, and the main quality for which they are valued is blind and total fealty.

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. Like most kleptocracies, the Trump administration has carried out an enormous number of hirings and firings. Kleptocracies like to move players around to create the illusion of debate and dissent. 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. As during his reality television days, Trump shakes up the status of players, and positions are cast more than filled. Firings create court intrigue that reporters will pounce on while ignoring the steady spread of rot. But there is consistency within the contrived chaos. As in foreign kleptocracies, the glue that holds the Trump administration together is nepotism. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who opposes public education, is the sister of military mercenary Erik Prince, a key operator in Trump’s network of back-channel trades with other kleptocracies. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the architect of the GOP coup. In 2019, the appointment of Attorney General William Barr was followed by the appointment of Barr’s son-in-law, Tyler McGaughey, as Trump’s White House legal cou...

The longer autocrats stay in power, the smaller the inner circle becomes, and the more kinship ties tend to dominate. Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control. Nepotism allows for an easy accumulation of leverage: if a staffer dares to diverge from the party line, their relative’s position—and if necessary, their life—can be threatened. (Witness the deadly kin rivalries in the authoritarian governments of North Korea or Saudi Arabia.) Officials who are not related by family ties in Trump’s cabinet are often people who have been working together in corrupt ventures for decades. For example, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross were both protégés, like Trump, of Carl Icahn, who stepped down as a White House adviser after a year following a proposed ethics investigation that was, like so many other investigations, mysteriously dropped. Expand the circle further, and you find political actors who are tied by complicity, including, at this point, the entire GOP, which is contaminated by the influx of dark money in the 2016 election and beyond. For example, in 2017, the GOP made Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer who would later be ...

The most egregious beneficiaries of nepotism in the Trump administration are, of course, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared. In the beginning, 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. While there have been numerous political dynasties—Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes—there had never been such a blatant insertion of unqualified relatives into such high positions of power. We have never seen adult children operate as official advisers from the moment a president took office. Pundits initially attempted to rationalize their rise with a baseless argument that Ivanka and Jared were a moderating influence. But the two never ...

The ultimate manifestation of this national security threat is Ivanka and Jared, who have both seemingly violated the law in serious ways during their time in office yet face no consequences. In 2017, it was revealed that Kushner had lied on his security clearance forms more than any person in US history.7 Ivanka had lied too, but not quite as much as Kushner, who was also reported to have committed the following acts: lobbied for a Qatari blockade after Qatar refused to provide his family a loan to pay off its massive debt; met with the president of a sanctioned Russian bank as part of yet another debt payoff scheme; met illicitly with other Russians connected with plots to subvert the 2016 election; worked with now convicted felon Michael Flynn to devise a secret back channel to the Kremlin; attended the notorious 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Russian election aid was offered and did not report it to the FBI; helped fire FBI head James Comey in an act constituting obstruction of justice; oversaw the Cambridge Analytica–linked digital influence and data-mining operation that became a key subject of the Mueller probe; helped Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman cover up the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi;8 illicitly proposed giving the Saudis nuclear secrets;9 conspired with the National Enquirer to threaten US media figures and publish propaganda for the Saudi regime;10 and used personal email and private apps to communicate with foreign leaders.11 K...

Had Kushner not been Trump’s son-in-law, he would have never been considered for an advisory role, given his lack of qualifications, history of financial disasters and fraud schemes, and ties to gangsters, oligarchs, and dictators. The same can be said of Donald Trump, and he is the president. Unlike Trump, however, Kushner was not elected. He was appointed by a relative, another blight in a society increasingly based on nepotism. 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.

Kushner entered adulthood in an era in which the conditions of American life had been constructed to benefit young people like him—a small band of nepotistic elites whose pursuit of profit over law or country is condoned by their elders in media and government. Given the ongoing danger his actions pose to US national security, many intelligence experts I’ve spoken to throughout my reporting assumed Kushner would be indicted by the FBI or special counsel or, at the least, be forced to relinquish his access to classified information. As of 2019, no such accountability has come, and that should not surprise anyone. Kushner does not need to fear the law when his father-in-law can rewrite it. That is how life works in a dynastic kleptocracy. That is how life works now in the United States of America.

Few prior to 2017 believed that Jared and Ivanka would play a major role in government. Many even believed Trump when he denied that the two were being given high-level security clearances.42 This belief was in part due to American exceptionalism—surely Trump wouldn’t really install his relatives in the White House like a third-world dictator. There was also the mistaken view that Ivanka and Jared represented mere tabloid silliness—surely two Gossip Girl guest stars could not destroy US foreign policy through a series of kleptocratic shakedowns. But this complacency was also because influential young people in media and politics had increasingly come to resemble Ivanka and Jared—rich, connected, and unqualified. Their insertion into the White House was consistent with an increasingly nepotistic America.

The Western view of protest has been marred by the fact that we hear most about those that succeed: the toppled dictators, the noble sacrifices, the inmates turned presidents. In reality, many protests fail and the protesters end up unappreciated and even demonized. There are no clear statistics on failed protests for the very reason that failed protests, especially in repressive countries, rarely reach an audience beyond those who participated. But failures have their own impact. In the aftermath of the Andijon massacre, a joke circulated on Uzbek web forums: Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan? A: Yes, but only once. The joke was a dark reminder of what citizens of authoritarian states know all too well, that protest carries great risk and governments kill with impunity. They do not care who knows the extent of their brutality or the audacity of their lies; flaunting power is the point. But state power depends on the dehumanization of the victims to succeed. In the Uzbek case, the victims needed to be erased. For Uzbeks to even joke about Andijon was dangerous, for that meant acknowledging that the massacre was real. To joke, even bitterly, was to reclaim their power as witnesses to an act of state violence. This is a notable lesson about documentation in our current dictator-ridden digital era, when it is easier to be disappeared than ever before.

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. In Azerbaijan, dissidents were allowed just enough room to speak their mind online, and then were punished by the state for doing so and held up as examples in order to intimidate the public. Two Azerbaijani friends of mine were jailed for two years after releasing a satirical online video where one mocked state lies about agricultural trade by wearing a donkey suit.4 Another journalist friend was the target of attempted blackmail when a state surveillance agency made a sex tape of her and circulated it, with the goal of humiliating and stoking threats against her.5 Both were paraded as cautionary tales for aspiring dissidents, and the government used the very internet that was supposed to be the source of liberation to tell them.

In the early 2010s, Russia also practiced network authoritarianism. “Many have noted the curious absence of censorship on the Russian-speaking internet which largely remains a free-for-all zone, quite unlike traditional media which are kept on a tight leash,” wrote journalist Alexey Kovalev in an optimistic 2010 editorial called “Russia’s Blogging Revolution.”6 The rationale for the open internet became clear when Russian officials used it to publicize the arrests of popular dissidents like the blogger Alexey Navalny and the punk band Pussy Riot over the next few years. Instead of fearing the open internet, Kremlin officials embraced it, using social media to smear the opposition and to release a firehose of propaganda intended to overwhelm citizens’ faculty for critical thinking.7 The emergence of networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Russia’s VKontakte in the 2000s and 2010s made disinformation easier to spread. The arrival of memes allowed eye-catching lies to be delivered via mobile phone, meaning users who lacked home computers could circumvent the internet entirely. Before I left academia for good, networked authoritarianism was my focus—not only because of its danger to citizens of authoritarian states, but because I could see the utility of the model in Western states that were experiencing a similar erosion of institutional trust.

Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.

In the early 2010s, activists around the world often organized together with the expectation of good faith. There was a sense in the early 2010s that awareness in and of itself mattered, that the new mediums making people more aware of citizens’ suffering would therefore make them more empathetic and more likely to stand up for the afflicted. This was most evident in Syria, where activists in 2011 and 2012 sent out daily documentation of Assad’s brutality, with the hope that if his war crimes were witnessed, rather than masked by state propaganda, they would be stopped. Instead, Syria became the most well-documented war in history, a shame and a failure of the international community.11 Protesters were screaming into a moral void.

The complicity and greed of the global elite seemed the biggest barrier to change. What it both masked and enabled was worse: the rebirth of global fascism. The fringes had not yet become the center—or moved into the White House—but the movement was there. The weaponization of social media by authoritarian states and corporate intelligence agencies like Cambridge Analytica had begun; they were mapping the terrain as we obliviously inhabited it.12 Protesters were not yet cauterized by the vicious cynicism that dominates 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 This is the architecture of the internet that Lanier warned about, an algorithmic facilitation of cruelty and pain.

Something had broken in how we treated each other. It wasn’t about civility or respectability, but about empathy, kindness, and respect. By the end of 2014, I was exhausted from a year of documenting nonstop and often inexplicable atrocities: the Syrian war, the rise of ISIS, Ebola, Russia invading and annexing Crimea, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the shooting down of a passenger airliner in Ukraine by Russia, the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Mass harassment and threats had exploded online, fueled by misogynist movements like Gamergate and the rise of neo-Nazis—often halting productive discussions and driving participants off social media.14 Despite pleas from the victims, social media companies did almost nothing to stop it.15 The troll epidemic and spread of toxic online culture is not merely a source of anguish for many users, but an ignored national security threat. Throughout 2014, female and nonwhite online activists—and in particular, black women on Twitter—noticed a shift in social media discourse that left them suspicious. In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l’Nasa...

In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community, others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it was a peace born of ignorance. 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

In 2016, a locally well-known Ferguson protester, Darren Seals, wrote in a Facebook post: “Black death is a business. Millions and millions flowing through the hands of these organizations in the name of Mike Brown yet we don’t see any of it coming into our community or being used to help our youth. I’ve been calling out this shit for months. People see this as an opportunity to not only build a name but make bank at the expense of the lives of people like me.”22 Seals complained about how out-of-town NGOs and online celebrities associated with Black Lives Matter had gained attention off the Ferguson brand, used that attention to raise money, and then left with the resources meant to help St. Louis—a slight St. Louis regional activists, who had suffered severe psychological and economic hardship as a result of the protests, never forgot, as it devastated their community even further. Soon after his post, Seals was shot to death in his car, which was then set on fire. His murderer was never found. But his killing set off another Ferguson media frenzy, and the media Seals derided for their apathy toward the plight of black men created clickbait from his death. When I look back at Ferguson now, I look back not only at Brown, who I did not know, but at dead friends and acquaintances like Seals. I look back at protesters who died due to the common reasons people die young in St. Louis: murder, denial of health care, self-medication through drugs—and whose conditions were made w...

The Ferguson protests turned some local activists into online stars—the worst kind of celebrity, the kind that gives you notoriety but no protection. One of my friends, Bassem Masri, was a Palestinian-American livestreamer who achieved brief national fame for his passionate speeches denouncing police brutality and racism. Bassem was a sweet and generous person, a friend who checked in on my family when we fell on hard economic times. In November 2018, Bassem died of a heart attack at age thirty-one, and he too became the subject of online news stories full of conspiracy theories and vitriol. When one of my friends from the Ferguson movement dies, I am forced to process their death in two ways: through my own grief, and through the media coverage of distant reporters seeking to again capitalize off the Ferguson brand, pretending to care about the local activists they disregarded in daily life. There are not words for the double conscious agony of this experience.

At the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson events, reporters began relaying the lies of a new commentator: presidential candidate Donald Trump. Speaking at an Iowa news conference, he proclaimed, “You know a lot of the gangs that you see in Baltimore and in St. Louis and Ferguson and Chicago, do you know they’re illegal immigrants? They’re here illegally,” Trump said. “And they’re rough dudes. Rough people.”24 Trump’s comments were not tethered to reality in any way. Undocumented immigrants make up less than 1 percent of the population of Missouri and the foreign-born population of Ferguson is 1.1 percent. Given that the Ferguson protests were filmed around the clock for months on end, one would think someone would have noticed the presence of roving immigrant gangs. But Trump’s comments were covered nonetheless, simply because he said them.

Trump had spent his life spreading dangerous racist myths and his comments on Ferguson only continued this lifelong libel streak. In 1989, he notoriously took out a newspaper ad in multiple newspapers, including the New York Daily News, calling for the execution of five black and Latino boys, the Central Park Five, who were falsely accused of rape and battery.25 Accompanying his racist rhetoric about the Central Park Five and deceitful commentary on Ferguson, was his fervent multiyear “birther” campaign against President Obama. Starting around 2010, Trump began claiming Obama was not born in America and was therefore an illegitimate president. This theory gained traction at the behest of Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, who ordered the lies to be printed in the National Enquirer.26 It was then amplified by a network of Republicans and racists. New right-wing websites trafficked in racist propaganda, which was then echoed by the Tea Party at rallies and online. The website Breitbart, established in Israel in 2007 by the American libertarian Andrew Breitbart,27 became more bigoted and conspiracy-oriented after Breitbart died suddenly in 2012 and was replaced with future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. But the peddling of the birther myth was not limited to right-wing extremist sites. As I mentioned in chapter 2, in the early days of the internet most news sites were a replication of print. While flawed in many ways, this system still employed fact-checking as a stan...

Another man couldn’t afford to give me anything. But after he became a US citizen, he wrote me a letter of gratitude that I used to look at when I was feeling bad. It reminded me that I had done something indisputably good: I had helped save a man’s life. After Trump was elected, that man wrote me again, because he was terrified he was going to be placed on the Muslim registry. I hadn’t saved anyone. I had fucked it all up, I had helped him go from one hell to another, a hell that now endangered me, too. 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. You can be prepared for something but that does not make the pain of it any less: the pain you feel for others, or the pain you feel inside, the pain you push away daily because if you gave in to it you would never get out. You lie to your children all day because you have to tell the truth in public, and because your heart can’t bear breaking theirs.

What I had been suggesting for months had been confirmed: Trump was a Kremlin asset. To say that Trump is an asset is not to say he directly follows Kremlin orders, but that the Kremlin had exploited or compromised him in order to carry out their goals. This had seemed probable for years given his relationship with Russian oligarchs and his unwavering reverence for Putin. In fact, his admiration of Putin was his most consistent foreign policy stance. His relationship is only further exacerbated by the many Trump campaign staffers with ties to the Kremlin or subsidiaries like WikiLeaks, and by summer 2016 it seemed obvious that the Kremlin saw the Trump campaign as a useful vehicle for its anti-American objectives—at the least—and that Trump had no objection to being used. 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 voters and cynical nonvoters alike.

Corn reported that an intelligence source, who in January 2017 was revealed by BuzzFeed to be veteran British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, had, during the course of an investigation for a private intelligence firm, discovered that Trump had been working with the Kremlin since at least 2011. Corn said Steele maintained that “Trump and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.”8 Steele told Corn that he was shaken by what he had found, and that he had gone to the FBI with evidence, only to see those members of the FBI turn around and give the information to members of Trump’s inner circle. Later, the founder of the private intelligence firm who hired Steele to compile the dossier, Fusion GPS, stated that the publication of the dossier had led to the sudden death of one dossier source, implying that Steele’s life might also be at risk.9

Steele was horrified when The New York Times ran a story on November 1—the day after Corn’s bombshell—titled INVESTIGATING TRUMP, FBI SEES NO CLEAR LINK TO RUSSIA. The article, which was frequently cited over the next year to validate Trump’s claim that his illicit ties to Russia were an elaborate hoax, contradicted what both Steele and other interviewees had said. The editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, had ordered the article to be rewritten so that it reflected an alternate and inaccurate narrative—one contradicted by his writers’ own interviews with FBI officials.10 One of the authors of the article, Eric Lichtblau, later quit the Times in part because of the way Baquet had handled that article. The New York Times public editor, Liz Spayd, wrote about how the newspaper had chosen to ignore or play down Trump’s Russia ties and illicit attempts to influence the election in a November column.11 She was harshly criticized by upper management,12 and in May 2017 The New York Times fired Spayd and then eliminated the public editor position entirely.13

In 2018, Winner was jailed under the Espionage Act and was given the longest sentence in US history for her particular offense, totaling sixty-three months.25 She is banned from speaking to the press. No government official has bothered to interview Winner about her explosive findings, not even Robert Mueller.26 There remains to this day a publicly available NSA document showing that US voting infrastructure was attacked. It floats around cyberspace like an unheeded warning, attracting no hearings beyond the one that sent Winner to prison. Winner was soon joined by other federal whistle-blowers: Natalie Mayflower Edwards, indicted for exposing that Russia had infiltrated the Treasury in 2015; and Tricia Newbold, a White House employee suspended for exposing that security clearances had been knowingly given to staffers who violated national security protocol.27 Among those staffers were Jared and Ivanka. The Trump administration whistle-blowers have all been women whose findings are marginalized by officials and the press. This is not surprising. To take the evidence seriously means to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of Trump’s election, and all of the decisions—appointments, laws, arrests—that came after. Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.

At 3 A.M. on November 9, after Trump had been announced as president-elect, I called Andrea Chalupa. We had never spoken on the phone, but I did not know who else to turn to. She was among the few people unsurprised and determined to face this grim new reality head on. We spent hours reviewing the results and examining the possibilities of what had happened. By the morning, we had come to the conclusion that Trump, working with an international criminal syndicate connected to the Kremlin, had illegally influenced the 2016 election, possibly altered vote results, and would build a kleptocracy while curtailing civil rights, starting with immigrants and anyone who is not white. This turned out to be what happened, but at the time our serious concerns were dismissed as hysteria. The level of denial in the media, especially among New York and D.C. establishment reporters, was staggering. I spent weeks privately begging high-profile reporters with more connections and resources than me to follow the Trump team money trail. I urged them to start with Manafort, only to be told by them that Manafort was not a problem. Manafort had been on the Sunday shows, they assured me, and networks don’t put criminals on the Sunday shows. Despite these obstacles, Andrea and I kept going. Autocracy moves fast, and once an autocrat gets in, it is very hard to get them out. We figured we had two and a half months to educate the country about what to expect when your country is expecting a dictator...

I barely slept from Election Day until the inauguration. I reached out to everyone I saw expressing the same concerns I did in an attempt to build a coalition. I did multiple interviews nearly every day, trying to warn the public. I wrote a series of articles explaining how American authoritarianism would happen. This is the same work I had done throughout 2016, writing mostly for Canadian and Dutch outlets because they were more willing to print stark criticisms of Trump than American outlets. They were also more willing to abide my most controversial Trump thesis, which was that he would win. Meanwhile, my book The View from Flyover Country, a collection of essays discussing the collapse of institutional stability and social trust in the United...

In January, I was invited to a conference of journalists and tech corporation employees in Palo Alto to discuss the problem of “fake news,” a hot topic after the election. This event was one of many post-Trump misadventures in which I was invited somewhere fancy as a token “red state journalist who had predicted Trump would win,” leading people who had apparently never read anything I had written to assume I also approved of that outcome. When I opened my mouth to speak, they seemed as startled by my warnings about Trump as they were that I had all my teeth. I learned over the next year that many in coastal media seemed to assume I led a Deliverance-style life surrounded by a squad of MAGA acolytes. At one point, NPR requested an interview with me about rural life, which I declined, explaining that I lived in St. Louis. They said that’s why they asked me, and I then had to explain to them that St. Louis was a metro area of three million people. Finally, I had to clarify, once and for all, that yes, I lived in Missouri, and no, I did not live on a farm. A variation of this theme has followed me for years, often recited by the same people who accuse the residents of my state of living in a bubble.

Almost no one I met at the Palo Alto conference seemed to grasp the severity of the Trump crisis, which was disappointing given the oversized role social media companies had played in fueling it. But there were encouraging developments happening elsewhere. That week, the Steele dossier was published on BuzzFeed. I remember sitting in my California hotel room, relief rushing through me. I was grateful that it had dropped before the inauguration, thinking that its publication had to bring repercussions or at least a straightforward inquiry. 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 there were no meaningful consequences. The salacious details stuck; the serious problems lived on. No one could see the forest for the treason.

Trump was part of a wider movement of white supremacists and international kleptocrats seeking to dismantle Western democracy. I was one of the few American journalists to warn of this crisis in advance, and this unwanted distinction resulted in my being in great demand to speak on the issue abroad. In January, I was flown to the United Kingdom for a conference on press freedom and disinformation, where some Brits told me horror stories of Brexit while others assured me that they would figure it out, they would keep calm and carry on, this idiotic crisis surely would not undo a millennium of British sovereignty. I was not so sure. Brexit was a direct precursor of the US election, featuring not only the same largely unexpected result, but the same players behind the scenes.