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

by Sarah Kendzior

US and UK citizens who protested this criminal impunity read each other’s works from across the pond, while also watching the developments in our respective governments. Each side hoped the other would enforce accountability and thus prompt our own side to do so as well. A blatant crime would occur—Trump confessing to obstruction of justice on television in May 2017; the Kremlin poisoning a woman to death on UK soil in Salisbury in March 201833—that would make the danger so immediate and obvious that we would tell ourselves, “OK, now they have to act.” But no officials did—not with the courage and speed required, and not on behalf of the people they were supposed to serve.

An audience member asked the panel about what the election of Trump meant for American values. I couldn’t help the answer that came out from me: There is a gulf between the president and the public. I love my country. But I am horrified that this man, this autocrat, who is struggling against a democratic framework of checks and balances that may or may not hold, has become my president. I want to point out that his victory was both narrow and flawed. Only about 25 percent of the country voted for him. The election was marred by Russian interference, baseline voter suppression, and flaws in our electoral system that go back to the founding of the United States. We have never been a perfect democracy. We have never been an equal country. But generally, at least through my lifetime, we have tried to progress toward that kind of change. I live in the center of the United States. I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I live in a majority black city in a bright red state that voted for Donald Trump. What I saw when he came into St. Louis and campaigned was that he was preying on people’s pain, and he was preying on people’s prejudice. He was taking the economic devastation that is real in the heart of America—he was right about that—and exploiting it for the most awful and xenophobic instincts that you could bring out in Americans. He is hurting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our country, and as he stays in office, that’s going to get worse. I don’t think that this is ...

In June 2017, I spoke under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis at the “March for Truth,” a national demonstration demanding a justice system with integrity, an independent investigation of Trump’s relationship with Russia, and transparency about the 2016 election. I closed with this statement: We need not only investigators that we can trust to do their jobs honorably, but a justice system that can be trusted to act on the findings of the investigation, and if crimes are confirmed, to hold criminals accountable. The administration likes to portray citizens, especially out here in the Midwest where we live, as passive, as compliant, as uninterested in justice and law. What they are really hoping for is that we will be complacent, that we not defend the honor of our country or the sanctity of our laws, that we’ll just stand by silently and let them get away with it. But we are St. Louis! We have witnessed injustice so many times, and we do not always win, but Lord knows we let everyone know when justice has not been served. We correct the lies. We come for the liars, and the grifters, and the traitors. We come hard, and we will not quit. Never let anyone tell you that you do not deserve the truth or that truth itself has no value. When they say that, what they’re really saying is that you, as a citizen, have no value, that you have no voice. You deserve so much better than this. You have value, and you have a voice, so use it.38

Americans like to romanticize protest. As a scholar of the Andijon massacre in Uzbekistan and a firsthand witness to the brutality of Ferguson, I tend to do the opposite and emphasize that demonstrations rarely achieve an instantaneous result and are often dangerous. But the way in which the mass protests of 2017 and 2018 have been dismissed is disturbing, particularly since most participants and organizers were women. Women also comprised the grassroots efforts behind the 2018 Democratic wins, organizing while dealing with the endless agonizing revelations of the #MeToo movement. In the years after Trump’s election, more women ran for and won office than ever before. This flurry of female activism should surprise no one, given that the policies of the Trump administration, whether economic or social, disproportionately hurt women. In Trump’s America, women run for their lives.

Trump loves to be caught and not be punished. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he recited the poem “The Snake,” a story of treachery that mocks the victims: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in.” It is not enough for Trump to commit a crime. He needs to let you know that he got away with it. Others in his camp, like Roger Stone, share the same predilection. The thrill is in the flaunting, the in-jokes, the admissions so blunt that, perversely, few take them seriously. That’s also where the tell is, if you are working for law enforcement, but these days, federal law enforcement works for Trump.

Mueller had long been an enabler, intentional or not, of the corruption he was tasked to investigate. He headed the FBI from 2001 until 2013, doing little to stop the criminal behavior carried out by operatives from his own political party. When Paul Manafort was indicted by Mueller in October 2017, for example, it was for crimes he had committed in the early 2000s. Why did Mueller not arrest Manafort earlier? If Mueller was so aware of the danger of this transnational crime syndicate that he gave a speech warning it would destroy democracy in 2011, why did he do so little to stop it—and why did he not speak out when Trump began receiving classified information during his campaign? At best, Mueller was guilty of negligence—but in 2017, negligence seemed a forgivable sin given the stakes and the competition. Negligence was a step up from money-laundering or treason or rape. The country was willing to overlook negligence and naivete in return for someone willing to root out the rot.

By the end of 2017, “Mueller will save us” had become an internet mantra, chanted by legal experts and armies of trolls alike. “Mueller will save us” had replaced “Comey will save us,” and was later supplanted by “Pelosi will save us” and “the 2020 election will save us,” all while the damage of the Trump administration grew more irreparable. Rumors swirled throughout 2017 and 2018 about imminent indictments and secret plans, and Mueller disciples found a funhouse mirror in the “QAnon” cult surrounding Trump. The QAnon phenomenon—in which Trump acolytes believe an anonymous high-level official named “Q” leaves them coded tips about secret prosecutions as well as other enticing developments, like the underground revolution they claim is being led by a still-alive JFK Jr.—is a disturbing example of savior syndrome. 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. To those under the sway of savior syndrome, once trusted officials are not incompetent or corrupt: they are merely “playing 3-D chess.” It doesn’t matter if officials are, in reality, resorting to the weakest moves (“When you don’t know what to do, push a pawn” could have been the motto of the Mueller probe), their motives must be presented as pure, their tactics impeccable and impenetrable. The abdication of the admired is too much for those seeking saviors to proce...

Impeachment hearings should have begun after the report’s release, and the report inspired many elected officials to deem them necessary. But it’s critical to remember that Congress could have started in 2017, when the first articles of impeachment were filed by Representatives Brad Sherman and Al Green. The Mueller report was never necessary for impeachment, because Trump had committed impeachable offenses outside the purview of the probe—like emoluments violations, abuse of migrants, and abuse of the pardon power—every week for over two years. Impeaching the person responsible for these ongoing atrocities was deemed by Nancy Pelosi in March 2019 to be “not worth it.” The House, presented with a menu of incriminating offenses, took the pursuit of justice off the table.

Over the last two years, when people have asked me for advice on dealing with the Trump regime, I told them to learn to think like the enemy (but not act like them) and have infinite backup plans. Given that the enemy telegraphs its intentions, the first part of this strategy should be easy to achieve, yet officials often do not practice it. The failures of the judiciary, the strongest bulwark against authoritarianism, led to terrible political calculations. When officials saw the Mueller probe flailing, they should have sought other avenues to protect the American people. Instead, Mueller and his boss Bill Barr—notorious for being the Iran Contra cleanup guy40—were given the benefit of the doubt even after the probe was shown to be in trouble.

People keep looking for the smoking gun that will end Trump’s corrupt reign. But it has been there the whole time. The gun is in his hand, and it’s still smoking. It’s smoking because he is shooting our country to death. It’s smoking because no one will take away the gun. It’s smoking because the very people tasked with protecting you reload it for him again and again. They will keep firing until all constraints are removed and there is no one left to gaze at the carnage and ask why nothing is being done.

In fall 2016, I said to a friend, “I don’t know who has it worse—the people who understand what is going to happen, or the people who don’t.” Her answer was simple: “Neither of them: it’s the kids.” For the past four years, I have been taking my children on road trips around America, in the event of its demise. This compulsion began in September 2016, when I became certain that American authoritarianism loomed. National landmarks that I had long taken for granted seemed newly vulnerable to destruction or desecration. It was important to me that my kids see America with their own eyes, and not through mine. I want my children to have their own memories of the United States, so that if they’re confronted with a false version years from now, they can say, “No, I saw it. We had that. This was real. That America was real.”

How did a president commit impeachable offenses on a weekly basis—refusing to divest from his businesses, abusing private citizens and migrants, obstructing justice—without facing consequences? How did mafia associates infiltrate US institutions right under the nose of federal officials? How did white supremacist groups rise from the shadows into the spotlight, countenanced by the president and his advisers? How could a politician show more respect to foreign dictators than to US veterans and civil rights leaders, yet still be treated as legitimate by his party? There is no “That’s just the way things were” to answer the question of what happened to the United States of America. It’s “That’s the way things became,” as a transnational crime syndicate took the place of government. There is a difference between institutions weakening, as they did throughout the wars and recessions of the twenty-first century, and the institutions that protect freedom and national security being hijacked or gutted by hostile, anti-American actors. US history is beset with partisan divides and corruption, but we have never been ruled by a man whose only loyalty beyond himself is to an authoritarian foreign power.

I don’t know what my children will remember of the America I have shown them. I am trying to teach them while I can, so they will know the difference between a deeply flawed democracy and a country that ceases to be a democracy at all. They know that practices like slavery that were accepted as “normal” in US history are today considered an abomination, and that rationalizing cruelty was what allowed them to last for so long. I told them to never consider cruel policies as normal, no matter what politicians and pundits tell them.

I am trying to show them our country was always vulnerable, always flawed, but that people fought back. We’ve survived as long as we have due to self-criticism and sacrifice, a willingness to examine our faults and try to fix them. In the past, we survived because good Americans answered the question “Why does nobody stop people from doing bad things?” with laws and actions that prevented people from doing them. If we survive the current era, it will...

In 2018, we visited the Dwight Eisenhower museum and tomb in Abilene, Kansas. Engraved on its wall is a quote from his 1953 speech “The Chance for Peace.” It says: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” I don’t get sentimental about presidents. As a rule, I oppose making heroes out of public servants. But the vast gulf between the present and the era of Eisenhower’s speech hurts, not because our problems are so different but because our leaders have so profoundly failed us. We live in Eisenhower’s nightmare realized. “This is not a way of life at all” could be the motto of our time. My son was impressed by the giant statue of Eisenhower that stands in front of the museum. He was surprised, and touched, that surrounding it was a plea for peace from a man who was a general.