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

by Sarah Kendzior

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...