Sarah Kendzior Predicted the Rise of Trump Years Ago—Here’s What She Thinks Now

If you’re not following Sarah Kendzior on Twitter—well, you should be. The journalist, author, and scholar of authoritarian regimes has been delivering hard truths about Donald Trump and his increasingly authoritarian regime since well before his 2016 election, and unfortunately, her track record is excellent. Posts, warnings, and predictions that may have once seemed speculative, doomsaying, or worst-case-scenario are now part of our accepted reality. Her 2016 e-book, The View From Flyover Country, garnered so much praise and attention that it was republished in 2018 and became an unlikely New York Times best seller; it also earned her a barrage of death threats. (In addition, Kendzior hosts, with Andrea Chalupa, the riveting podcast Gaslit Nation.)

Vogue called Kendzior at her St. Louis home for a chat about her just-out new book, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America.

There’s been a booming cottage industry of #resistancetwitter, and many handfuls of books published about the increasing threat posed by the Trump administration—but you’re one of the few people I’ve seen who, long before most everybody else, warned us very specifically of the political landscape that we now find ourselves in.

I was saying things before the election that people didn’t want to hear: that Trump had a very good chance of winning; that he was connected to organized crime, and to Russia; that he worked with white supremacists. These were obvious things—I don’t think it took great insight. But people didn’t want to hear this then.

There seems to be a sizable percentage of Americans—30-something percent, at last check—who still don’t want to hear this, or who seem incapable of accepting it. Are you trying to convert them?

No. I don’t care what people who aren’t going to look at the facts, or who’ve made up their mind in advance, will say. I write for whoever is willing to listen. Before I was writing about the United States, I was writing about dictatorships in former Soviet Central Asia, and I began to notice a lot of parallels between what happened to the U.S. after the 2008 economic collapse and the kleptocracies in the former Soviet Union. And then people working with dictatorships started sending me death threats. But freedom of speech is something to cherish, as is a free media. We’re lucky that we still have that left, and so I don’t want to squander the opportunity to tell the truth—even if the truth makes them uncomfortable or makes them slander or attack me. My concern is democracy in the United States, our freedom, our safety, and the protection of the most vulnerable. All of those concerns trump any concerns I have about reputation or career or prestige.

Your new book is a kind of counter-narrative to what so many of us assume about Trump—that he’s some kind of comic book villain who came out of nowhere, and boom! By this one weird trick or something, he became president. Hiding in Plain Sight lays out the rise of Trump as something that’s been in the works for decades and involves a rather large cast of criminals and enablers.

He’s a culmination of long-term personal ambitions for himself—despite common belief, 2016 was actually the fifth time he had run or almost ran for president. He didn’t come out of nowhere. But more to the point, he has backers, and those backers have their own agenda, ranging from the transnational and kleptocratic Russian mafia to the Kremlin itself, which wants to get rid of sanctions, to various American plutocrats like Mitch McConnell, who use Trump to their advantage—to stack the federal courts with right-wing judges, among other things—to white supremacists like Stephen Miller. But all of this information about Trump’s lifelong criminal activity has been documented, for years—it just wasn’t brought to the forefront when voters needed to know about it.

And our governmental institutions contributed to this: If Trump was really a dangerous criminal, wouldn’t someone say something about this? Wouldn’t the FBI, or the Obama administration, or anyone try to prevent this from happening? And the answer is no: Everyone waited for someone else to save the day; everyone expected that if we had an actual traitor trying to inhabit the executive branch that someone would put a stop to it—and now we’re all self-isolating in our homes from a plague that he seems content to let ravage our country.

Do you see something about his administration’s response to this global pandemic that’s beyond mere incompetence or cynicism?

I don’t think this is incompetence. As I write in my book, Trump covers up crime with scandal and covers up malice with incompetence. His administration would like you to think that they’re inept, that they’re just stumbling into these situations. That’s not the case. And the key thing to remember is that it’s not Trump as some geopolitical mastermind; it’s an inner circle of Republican backers and ideological extremists, many of whom have massive financial interests and certainly their own agenda.

As for the current situation: There were measures they could have taken years in advance—just allowing the CDC to be fully funded, and allowing us to have the emergency equipment necessary to combat what was a predictable pandemic. And, of course, when we started to see these videos from Wuhan and Iran and Italy, of course they should have had a defensive reaction—they shouldn’t have had a mask shortage or a ventilator shortage. This seems very deliberate. And we’re also seeing Trump using classic mafia tactics. People like Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer for years, discussed these tactics under oath: He’s shaking down different governors, trying to weaponize this pandemic by making people from different cities and states resent each other and battle over resources like we’re on one of his TV game shows. He’s flaunting his power and bullying people. He doesn’t care if Americans live or die. And that might sound harsh and blunt, but that’s the truth of the matter.

At the risk of asking an idiotic question: How did we get to this place? How did it come to this?

Republicans used to be wary of angering too many people because it would cost them the next election. And since 2016 they’ve felt very confident that it didn’t matter anymore what the will of the people was or how we voted or even if Democrats took the House back—they were confident that they’d still be able to carry out their objectives. And now we’re a weakened population: We’re facing a dire illness; unemployment is at record rates; people can’t get out in protest, and can’t get together to organize. Everyone is very frightened. This is an ideal time to be an aspiring autocrat. This is the kind of situation where autocrats consolidate their power. You might think this could wake people up, if anything could. But this notion of Trump as someone who’s capable of looking out for our welfare and our well-being—that’s never going to happen.

There’s a great line in your book about Trump’s oft-repeated “common man” line. You write that “Trump says that he speaks for the forgotten Americans—but he doesn’t like it when they speak back.”

I don’t think he even cares whether his base lives or dies—they’re just pawns to him, background players in the reality show of the Donald Trump presidency. What Trump is very good at, though, is tapping into a broader feeling of abandonment, which almost everybody who lives in the part of the country where I do shares. He’s able to tap into that anger and that worry for the future—and some people still fall for it.

At the risk of sounding desperate, what can we do, particularly at a time as dire as our current moment?

Right now is an exceptional situation—people are struggling for basic survival, and if you’re staying at home and doing your part to not spread the pandemic, you’re doing a good thing. People shouldn’t be putting a lot of pressure on themselves at a time this emotionally devastating. But there’s always value in the search for the truth. You can’t solve a problem until you acknowledge its severity. And I hope that my book contributes to that. I’ve tried to elucidate a lot of problems that haven’t been connected in context; I’ve tried to paint a big picture.

Your book ends on a note of hope. You write about the time you’ve spent traveling around the country to various historical landmarks and noted sites in American history with your children.

Yes. I want my children to really understand our history, and to understand that Americans have always had a lot of fight in us—we do fight back. We just need to be more innovative in that fight. For the most part, people don’t protest the way they used to because they’ve already done that, and it wasn’t effective. Their sense of leverage is gone: The media barely covered it; the Trump administration couldn’t care less that millions of Americans hate them. But to find a meaningful existence in this kind of society—that’s the challenge. But for starters, get to know your local community, and act locally. If everybody does that at the same time, that covers a lot of ground—especially now, when so many people need help.

Hiding in Plain Sight is out now. Kendzior is hosting a virtual event with Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., tonight at 6 p.m. ET.

Originally Appeared on Vogue