| HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America Sarah Kendzior New York: Flatiron Books, April 2020 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-21071-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-21071-2 | 273pp. | HC | $27.99 | |
A spectre is haunting America.1 It is the fearful prospect of a nation governed by the likes of Donald J. Trump that arose in summer 2015: predicted by some, yet doubted by many, it came to pass eighteen months later as a perfect storm of disparate factors aligned to give Trump a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. I will not rehash the details of the campaign. I aim to describe the book Sarah Kendzior has written here and, as well as I can, her purposes in writing it.
Born in 1978, Sarah Kendzior was raised in Meriden, CT and attended Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1990s. She worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News from 2000 to 2003. Later she earned a Master's degree in Eurasian Studies from Indiana University, learning Uzbek and Russian and working as research assistant to an anthropologist. He suggested she get her PhD, and thanks to a scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis she was able to obtain a PhD in anthropology. Her specialty was the study of totalitarian countries, especially in Uzbekistan. She returned to St. Louis largely for financial reasons: the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and the rise of Internet publishing put jobs in journalism and academia out of her reach, while steadily rising wealth inequality led to the gentrification of coastal cities. The heartland was more affordable.
It is often said that modern communication systems — cable television, cell phones, the Internet — have annihilated physical distance. In a very real sense, they have also removed the psychic distances between our personal, professional, and political lives. In the days of Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, and Reasoner, political news (like news of all sorts) was something we watched before or after dinner, and mostly ignored. Then came Ted Turner's Cable News Network (CNN), giving us news 24/7, followed by the Internet which brought news tumbling into our personal computers and later to the smart phones we carried everywhere. As Maggie Jackson puts it in Distracted:
"So what stories are we weaving as we look to the machine to comfort and transform us—indeed, to be a part of us? Within this messy convergence, we are on the brink of redefining humanity, but in ways that ultimately may impoverish us. In a distracted time, our virtual, split-screen, and nomadic lives nurture diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. We begin to forget how to pay attention to one another deeply and begin to attend more to fallacy and artifice. Trust, depth of thought, and finally a certain spirit of humanity begin to be lost. Such changes are harbingers of a wildly inventive, marvelously technological dark age." – Maggie Jackson, Distracted,, Page 206 |
The simultaneous fragmentation of news services and their constant grabbing for our eyeballs proved pernicious for deep attention and reflection. This constant bombardment made us pay attention more to news sources that give us what we want to hear — paradoxically distancing us into separate interest groups. Putting party above country, Republicans long ago adapted their campaign strategy to this voluntary segregation by stovepiping: presenting selected or slanted information in order to bolster their candidates and demonize the opposition.
Inept as he may be at performing the duties of governing, Trump is a past master at exploiting our separation into camps to sow distraction and discord. If we wish to get America back on track toward greatness, we must remove Don the Divider and his enablers from office. Vote blue in November.
This book is an attempt to tell the truth about the time before, the story most people missed the first time around, and how the refusal to tell it led to our current plight. It is a history of crime and corruption that ran underground for decades only to emerge in ways that are stark and unavoidable, like bedrock jutting out in a fallow field. Trump's path to power parallels a decades-long erosion of American stability, integrity, and democracy. I tell some of this American story through the lens of my own life and reporting, as I tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; or the right place at the right time, depending on how you see it. Trump's rise in the late 1970s coincided with my birth, and as I grew up I watched the consolidation of that corruption not so much shape my future as steal it. I don't remember a time when I felt safe in America, but I remember when I thought it was possible I would be, someday. The nostalgia for what never was is a familiar feeling for those born in the opening salvo in the symphony of American decline. Whether as a scholar covering authoritarian regimes abroad, a journalist covering the decline of the United States, or an involuntary dissident in my own country, my recourse has been to write things down: to try to find clarity through words and give the madness meaning. The last three years forced me to not only reevaluate my nation but my place within it. I don't believe in hope. I believe in facts and history. I believe my own eyes and ears. I believe the American people deserve the truth about what happened to their country. To understand that truth you need to understand the history of America—the raw, mean version. I will begin in the center; in Missouri, the bellwether state turned corruption capital, the broken heartland that got the sneak preview to the national shitshow. – Pages 19-20 |
Her life is inextricably bound up with the changes that led to Trump's accession to the Oval Office. Central to both are the changes in St. Louis and the state of Missouri that she describes in an early chapter.
But the crucial content of the book is the maelstrom of misfeasance which Trump rode into the White House. Trump was, in a sinister sense, in the right place at the right time to climb through crime. Early on, he had a superficial charm and an opulent lifestyle that made him a darling of American celebrity culture. At the same time he was becoming involved with members of the Russian mafiya who purchased suites in Trump Tower, often for purposes of laundering money. Russian money propped up his operations after Western banks refused to fund him due to his many business failures. His admiration of Putin's Russia has been an open secret at least since 2013 when he managed the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.2 He was also known to be an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, although many details of their association remain hidden.
Sarah Kendzior looks deeply into all these matters, and more: how Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen ran interference for Trump; the assistance provided by David Pecker's National Enquirer; Jared Kushner's closeness with Israel's Netanyahu and Chabad; his reliance on financial bailout from Qatar; his dubious qualifications for security clearance (or for any of the jobs Trump assigned him); his attempt to set up a back channel to the Kremlin; the influence of social media. Ms. Kendzior's account is a grim and angry one, pervaded by her own intense dismay at the way things are going. Yet it is an essential addition to the unfolding picture of an organized effort to subvert American democracy which swirls around the hapless Gospodin Trump.
Villains aplenty are named in this account. But heroes appear also: Anna Politkovskaya, a murdered Russian journalist; the sisters Andrea and Alexandra Chalupa; UK journalist Carole Cadwalladr; Wayne Barrett, reporter for The Village Voice, to name a few. I call Ms. Kendzior herself a hero, for like so many she has received death threats for her reporting and lecturing.3 Beyond that, she faces a dilemma unique in the memory of most living Americans, beneficiaries of a country isolated until the twentieth century by oceans and a fortunate history from the worst consequences of its citizens' apathy and ignorance. Yet she persists, because she cares about preserving the America she grew up in: a land where honest citizens could get a fair shake and miscreants were held to account. In other words, she aims to keep America great.
This quotation give some idea of what that costs her.
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. The truth you tell is what the world does not want to hear. People are afraid, and fear makes them furious. You become the object of their wrath because the real threat feels unstoppable. When they're angry, they send you graphic threats and tell you that will be your fate if you keep talking about investigations or indictment or impeachment. When they feel good, they offer you their delusions born of fear and nostalgia and groupthink, a category they like to call "hope." When they are desperate, they rhapsodize about secret saviors and their impenetrable agendas to fix it all, insisting that things cannot be this bad, that there must be sealed indictments and steady hands. They sing you a liturgy of "trust the plan" and you want to cover your ears and scream but you know in a few months, when the plan falls apart and the saviors are revealed to be empty vessels, they are going to need someone to listen to about that too. You know what's coming but you don't know how to stop it. There's no logic to this orchestration, there's just raw power, and you, with your stripped-down city and low-down life, seem to have the exact wrong amount: enough to make the wrong people angry, not enough to make the right people act. When you write, you imagine the censorship of your material as you go, wondering how many times the word "allegedly" will get slapped on these cold, hard facts. You realize that this is how your writer friends in autocratic states tell you they write their works too, and you try to shake the mind-set off, but it's impossible. Despite your sanctimonious struggle, it still got you, it's inside you: you've arrived. *
* * You wish you lived in a time when more people were haunted by the past than by the future. – Pages 177-178 |
I question some of the conclusions in this book, and it has a few grammatical & index errors.4 None of that matters: it is well written and thoroughly documented; the end-notes are good and the index is decent. I give it my top rating and judge it a must-read.
| 17 | A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya | Anna Politkovskaya | Alexander Burry & Tatiana Tulchinsky (Translators) | Georgi M. Derluguian (Introduction) | University of Chicago Press | April 15, 2007 | PB: 223pp. | 978-0226674339 |
| 73 | Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump | Harry Hurt III | N/A | N/A | Echo Point Books & Media | July 15, 2016 | PB: 436pp. | 978-1626543942 |
| 97 | Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America | Robert I. Friedman | N/A | N/A | Berkley Books | October 1, 2002 | PB: 288pp. | 978-0425186879 |
| 141 | The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates | Daniel Golden | N/A | N/A | Broadway Books (reprint edition) | September 25, 2007 | PB: 400pp. | 978-1400097975 |
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