Sarah Kendzior is our Cassandra, an important voice who warned us Donald Trump would win (more on that later), and, after he won, told us exactly how he was going to govern. Most people didn’t believe her on that either. Hiding in Plain Sight is her second book, and it is a slightly-flawed look at how the “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” came to Washington.
The book is best as a first-person narrative of the betrayal of her generation, beset with student loans and with what little wealth they could accumulate wiped out in the 2008 financial crash, for which no one was punished. (Indeed, many of the malefactors were able to enrich themselves further, and the Trump plans for the current crash likewise envision a further transfer of wealth upward.) As in her first, pre-Trump, book, Tales from Flyover Country, she shows how outside the coasts and a few urban enclaves, hope is scarce and the Republican vote share is climbing. The myth of the American Dream is belied when a mediocrity like First Failson-in-law Jared Kushner can buy his way into Harvard ($2.5 million), into graduate school, and then operate with “conflict of interest as his business model.”
The book is also an excellent reminder of her call from November 2016 to remember what we then knew as true, because we would otherwise find it hard to believe where we would be after a few years living under autocracy. And the catalog of crimes that were once inconceivable (and which the punditocracy could not conceive of, but has since normalized) is large: self-dealing and violations of the Emoluments Clause are everywhere. The crime syndicate is also a manufacturing and real estate empire.
Regular readers of Daily Kos are likely to know most of the appalling facts laid out, but it's still bracing to remember that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein got his first job, teaching (and harassing) high school girls, courtesy of Attorney General Bill Barr’s father, even though he had literally dropped out of college. The suggestion that Epstein was an intelligence asset (for us? for Israel? for both? starting when?) certainly does explain his special treatment in his Miami trial. But the downside of the fact that the details were in plain sight is that the book can’t offer much more than conjecture about how the pieces fit together.
Another strength is Kendzior’s discussion of “savior syndrome”. As she predicted, our institutions proved quite hollow and crumbled under a determined assault. Various tall white men who perhaps could have done something about it—especially Robert Mueller—failed to rise to the occasion. Mueller could have exceeded his remit to tell us just what crimes were being covered up, but (doubtless pressured by Barr) he didn’t, and his Congressional testimony sputtered into nothingness. I’m sure Mueller, like James Comey, sees himself as having discharged his office honorably. Unfortunately, they completely missed the forest.
So what are the book’s weaknesses? First, it can be repetitive. The sordid story of Kushner’s father setting a honey trap for his brother-in-law as part of a family financial dispute is told twice. So is the implication that Rudy Giuliani cracked down on the Italian mob to facilitate operations of the Russian (and Russian-Israeli) mob with its bigger reach and more diverse operations. Many of the supporting henchmen (like Felix Sater) are introduced repeatedly.
And Kendzior’s self-congratulation for having predicted Trump’s victory becomes tiresome. Trump won by 77,000 well-located votes, and could easily have lost. What would have happened if Huma Abedin hadn't let her creepy husband back up her laptop, or if James Comey had stonewalled two more weeks on further “email” investigations? Clinton might even have won if she had not developed pneumonia, which enabled her opponents to portray her as near death and as dishonestly covering it up. That couldn’t have been anticipated. It’s one thing to catalog the formidable Putin-Assange-Stone-Trump axis’s interference in the election, and very much another to view its 2016 triumph as inevitable.
The most serious shortcoming, however, is that the rise of Donald Trump is better-explained than the erosion of America. The country would have been much better off with Clinton as president, but the rage and fury of the Trump voter would have continued unabated. Its next manifestation (e.g., Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas) might have been Trump without the senility. The long-term conservative assault on government, which did not need a Russian-mob criminal syndicate, began as far back as the Reagan Administration. Race is covered in this book—Kendzior is close to the Ferguson protestors—but perhaps not to the extent it deserves. George Packer has just written a review of how we became a failed state, unable to maintain public health, which although shorter seems somehow more comprehensive. It also has the acute observation that Sarah Palin “was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.” Palin, for all her faults, is not part of the Russian mob, even if she can see it from her porch.
Kendzior is an important voice, active on social media, finally noticed by the traditional press, and with an important podcast. Her work is well-worth supporting, but if we make it to the far side of the Autocracy, we will need a more thorough understanding of how we got here than this book, or perhaps any book that can be written today, offers.