Hiding in plain sight, p.1
Hiding in Plain Sight, page 1
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Emily, Alex, and Pete
Author’s Note
I finished writing this book in the summer of 2019. More information has since emerged and will continue to emerge, but nothing will change the events that have occurred, are recorded in these pages, and will forever be a blight on America’s history.
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, many 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 our gratitude and supplication. The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imagining the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration.
This book tells the story of how they cornered that market.
* * *
It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession—a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect? To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe. But there is a price to be paid in persuasiveness, too. I used to think that the worst feeling in the world would be to tell a terrible truth and have no one believe it. I have learned it is worse when that truth falls not on deaf ears but on receptive ones. It is one thing to listen, it is another to care—and yet another to act in time.
In fall 2015, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and that once installed, he would decimate American democracy. It was the latest in a career of issuing unheeded warnings. For years, I had warned of the widespread erosion of American institutions and social trust. I wrote a series of essays documenting my nation’s demise, many of which were later published in my first book, The View from Flyover Country. The essays were shaped in part by the harsh conditions of Missouri, the state I call home, a state that had long been the bellwether of American politics and now served as the bellwether of American decline.
But the crisis I documented was nationwide: rising political paranoia, opportunity-hoarding by wealthy elites, a “post-employment economy” of side hustles and unpaid labor, the weaponization of digital media by dictators and extremists, and the catastrophic consequences of unchecked corruption. These were not abstract concerns. The cumulative effect was a collective agony intensified by the all-American shame of seeing systemic breakdowns as personal failings. It had been a long time since I or anyone I knew had dreams instead of circumstances.
I had seen these conditions before in countries often presented as antitheses of my own. Prior to covering the United States, I was an academic researcher studying dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, focusing mainly on the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan. Until 2016, Uzbekistan was ruled by Islam Karimov, a former communist official who became Uzbekistan’s first president in 1991 and remained its dictator until his death, constitutional term limits be damned. Like all Central Asian presidents, Karimov was a kleptocrat: a leader who abuses executive power to enhance their personal wealth. (Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves.”) Kleptocracy usually goes hand in hand with autocracy—a system of government in which one ruler holds absolute control—and Karimov was no exception. He began his tenure proclaiming that he would make Uzbekistan great again and plastered his catchphrase, “Uzbekistan—a future great state!,” on ubiquitous signs.1 He called independent media “the enemy of the people” and hid information about national crises from the public.2 He persecuted political opponents, LGBT citizens, pious Muslims, and other marginalized groups.3 He had an intense yet strange relationship with Russia. And he had a glamorous fashionista daughter who kept inserting herself into political affairs despite her utter lack of qualifications …4
You may see where I’m going here.
When I realized in 2015 that Donald Trump was likely to become the president of the United States, I began warning everyone I knew to prepare for what was long thought impossible: an American autocracy, wrapped in a tabloid veneer. This should not have been seen as far-fetched. In eras of economic decline and political chaos—like America in 2015—demagogues and dictators tend to arise. Trump was the former and seemed determined to become the latter. He ran his campaign like an autocrat-in-waiting: scapegoating immigrants and minorities, threatening journalists who refused to coddle him, vowing to repeal rights and protections, and expressing a preference for dictators over democratic allies. The media whom Trump called his enemy acted like his best friend, airing his rallies in full, letting his lies linger, and treating the prospect of his win as a joke or a ratings boon. Throughout 2016, hate crimes rose as Trump rebranded racism as populism and recruited white supremacists from the dregs of the GOP (like Jeff Sessions) and the extreme right (like Steve Bannon) to join his campaign.
All anyone needed to see Trump as a potential American autocrat were their own eyes. His desire to dismantle democracy was out in the open. He did not bother to hide his goals because he knew few believed he could achieve them. That sort of thing does not happen here, commentators scoffed, citing checks and balances and centuries of democratic stability. American exceptionalism—the widespread belief that America is unique among nations and impervious to autocracy—is the delusion that paved Trump’s path to victory. The only honest line of Trump’s campaign was that America was broken. Trump would know: he helped break it, and now he and his backers sought to capitalize off the wreckage. Trump did not strike me as stupid, like pundits kept proclaiming, but as a master manipulator who preyed on pain like a vulture.
In America, there was more pain than people in power were willing to admit, and more pain than people on the ground could bear. Trump did not feel like a novelty. He felt like a culmination.
* * *
My initial fear that Trump sought to rule like post-Soviet dictators was soon supplanted by the realization he was directly connected to said dictators through his own staff. In March 2016, Trump hired Paul Manafort as his campaign adviser. Manafort was a Republican political operative who had known Trump for over three decades, taking up residence in Trump Tower in 2006. In the 1980s and 1990s, Manafort and Roger Stone—another old Trump friend and presidential campaign adviser—partnered in a D.C. firm nicknamed “the torturers’ lobby” because their clients included the most brutal dictators in the world.5 By the mid-2000s, Manafort had left the firm to pursue his own specialty: serving oligarchs from the former Soviet Union.
Oligarchs are extraordinar
Trump spent the early months of his campaign praising Putin. While appalling, this made sense: the two shared an affinity for corruption, extravagance, and white supremacy. What I did not know was that they also shared a history. When Manafort joined the Trump team, I began researching Trump’s ties to Russia, and discovered that the connections I assumed to be aspirational were real, stretched back decades, and had been acknowledged by Trump himself. “Putin contacted me and was so nice,” Trump bragged to Fox News in 2014, referencing his 2013 visit to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant. Trump added that the United States should stop “knocking Russia” because Russia was going to help ensure a future “win,” the details of which Trump did not specify.7
Russian state media outlet RT cheered Trump’s Fox appearance, part of their regular promotion of Trump as a credible American political leader.8 In August 2015, a team of Western scholars of Russia wondered why the Kremlin was so focused on a long-shot candidate best known as the host of The Apprentice, but their observation flew under the radar.9 It was not until Trump asked Russia for Hillary Clinton’s emails at a July 2016 press conference that Trump’s illicit ties to the Kremlin became a mainstream media topic—but even then, most of the story remained untold. Trump’s reverence for Russia was framed as mere improper behavior instead of what it was: an ominous twist on a long dark-money trail. For decades, Trump had relied on oligarchs and mobsters from the former USSR for support after Wall Street blacklisted him following his bankruptcies in the 1990s.10 The one bank that agreed to take him on—Deutsche Bank—is notorious for facilitating Russian money-laundering.11 But Trump’s illicit dealings went as far back as the mid-1980s—when the first Russian mobsters moved into Trump Tower—and his network of criminal associates has expanded ever since. By spring 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had spent most of his adult life connected to a transnational mafia with ties to the Kremlin.
Trump’s illicit foreign ties constituted a profound national security threat, but few US officials would acknowledge it during the campaign season. One exception was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who wrote an open letter to FBI Director James Comey in August 2016, warning him that the election was under attack. Citing evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, Reid wrote that Russian operatives sought to falsify election results and begged Comey to give the American people the full story before they went to the polls.12 Comey refused, and refused again after Reid wrote a follow-up letter in October. As the evidence mounted, I grew deeply concerned that US institutions were compromised and that the election would be as well.
The summer and fall of 2016 felt like screaming into a void, as Trump played his most reliable trick—covering up crime with scandal—on a gullible punditry convinced Hillary Clinton was both “the real criminal” and a lock to win the presidency. I warned that the polls were not reliable and that demography was not destiny: the increased diversity of America was offset by repressive new voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise nonwhite voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.13 I covered the rise of the white supremacist mob violence stoked by the Trump campaign, explaining that his conspiracy theories were an effective form of propaganda.14 I speculated that Trump, a real estate tycoon, had essentially bought the Fourth Estate, threatening critical journalists and witnesses into silence and exploiting the click-hungry desperation of the media economy.15 The fringes had been pulled to the center, the extreme had become mainstreamed, and no outcome should have been ruled out.
In the end I was right. Trump won. And being right felt terrible.
* * *
Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage. That is why it is important to act early, particularly when that autocrat is backed by a crime syndicate that transcends state borders in its pursuit of power and wealth.
Most of the coverage of Trump’s apparent criminal activity, particularly with regard to the 2016 election, centers around Russia. This makes sense: the Kremlin is the main actor in the hijacking of the 2016 election, and Trump’s reverence toward Russia is one of his few consistent foreign policy stances. But what we are dealing with is far more insidious than an attack on the United States by a single government. Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more—some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country. Their loyalty is to themselves and their money. Many are criminals without borders who have moved from hijacking businesses to hijacking nations. Some call them fascists; I avoid this term because being a fascist requires an allegiance to the state. To these operatives, the state is just something to sell.
This elite criminal network has been building for decades. It is linked to other groups: right-wing Republican extremists, apocalyptic religious movements of varied faiths, social media corporations, advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, and parts of the mainstream media. It is pervasive but not all-encompassing. I am not arguing that every entity has been corrupted by it, but I would argue that total domination is the outcome they seek. Now that members of this network hold the reins of power in multiple nations, the goal is to strip each nation down and sell it for parts. The network is not uniform in its desires—some are in it for the money, some for territorial ambitions, some to satisfy their religious or white supremacist fanaticism. But over the course of decades, disparate parties have joined together to destroy democracy. They permeate the very institutions tasked to stop them. How that transpired—and what it means for ordinary Americans—is the subject of this book.
Nations have faced autocracy before and recovered. It is not easy, but it is possible: witness the peaceful revolutions that preceded the collapse of the USSR, the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, and the fall of tyrants throughout history, from Hitler to Milosevic to Mubarak. But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example—means it lacks true historic precedent. Climate change is another factor that makes our current crisis distinct from any other. It is doubtful that this group of roving criminals and kleptocrats are the climate skeptics they purport to be. It is far more likely that they are, as Naomi Klein phrases it, “disaster capitalists” who see opportunity in a dying planet, and who will spare no expense in pursuit of their own preservation.16
Throughout this book, I describe how digital media has transformed state repression and citizen protest, and how globalization allowed organized crime to proliferate on an unparalleled scale. I explain that mafia networks have long been accomplices of dictatorships (and sometimes democracies). But now the state has become a proxy for the mafia, an arrangement overt in Russia but present to various degrees in countries worldwide. Trump is a node in a sadistic network whose ambitions extend beyond borders, and whose ties go back decades. This book explains how America went from a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy, and how the refusal to render consequences for elite criminality allowed us to get there.
