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

by Sarah Kendzior

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 ...