Last night I finished Sarah Kendzior's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. This is the third book of hers that I've read in the last couple months and I still have one left. I'll probably wait a bit, mainly because it angries up my blood. If you don't know about Kendzior you need to find her work, both in print and also online. She's been right about so many things over the last decade, including being one of the few people who predicted that Trump would win in 2016. You can tell she takes no great pleasure about always being right about Trump and his class of kleptocrats, and would prefer an America closer to what America was supposed to be. Besides bringing the good with extensive research, she's also a very good writer. Here's the beginning of her thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction:
The story of Donald Trump's rise to power is the story of a buried American history - buried because powerful people liked it that way. It was visible without being seen, influential without being named, ubiquitous without being overt.
The Trump administration is like a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past forty years - Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial collapse - in recurring roles and revivals, despite the widespread desire of the public for the show to be canceled. From Roger Stone to Paul Manafort to William Barr, it is a Celebrity Apprentice of federal felons and disgraced operatives dragged out of the shadows and thrust back into the spotlight - with Donald Trump, yet again, at the helm.
The crises of political corruption, organized crime, and endemic racism are all connected, and they shape everyday American life. But in addition to these structural problems, we contend with specific powerful individuals who have acted against the public good for their entire careers. We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like "treason" and "trauma" and "tragedy." They are buffered by backers who prefer to operate in silence, free from the consequences of scrutiny. There is a reason they call it a criminal underground: you walk over it every day, unaware it exists until the earth shakes below your feet.
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, main 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 out gratitude and supplication. The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imaging the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration.
This book tells the story of how they cornered the market.
And the book is extraordinary, and damning and frustrating, but also incredibly necessary. One of the things that jumped out at me was gaining a clearer picture of Jared Kushner. I knew he was an idiot and a child of privilege (terrible grades and SAT scores, but, of course, got into Harvard), but I didn't know how corrupt he was/is; I mean, I knew he was corrupt, but he's off the charts corrupt. unbelievably corrupt. One of the strengths of Kendzior's work is that it shows us the holistic, generational nature of the corruption - it's not just Trump, who will eventually pass away, but the system will continue to fester. Obviously, Hiding in Plain Sight is highly recommended.
