Institutional Failure and Autocracy in Waiting
Missouri-based journalist Sarah Kendzior discusses her new book ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America’ and the threat of authoritarianism in the United States.
June 7, 2020
Heffner: You’ve written extensively and precociously about the threat of authoritarianism at home. How acute is your concern at this juncture as we anticipate the fall campaign and the November election?
Kendzior: I’m very worried. I’ve been worried from the moment Trump launched his campaign because I believed he would win and that once he won, he would rule in a manner reminiscent of a Central Asian or a former Soviet autocrat, a kleptocrat, principally, that’s what he’s done. He’s packed his cabinet with people whose explicit goal is to, as Bannon put it, dismantle the administrative state. He’s put our country in danger. He has purged agencies, he has packed courts, he has eliminated oversight and ethics from government.
That extends into the election. You know, its integrity was always in question. We have domestic voter suppression, foreign interference, insecure machines, and a new fear, which is that, assuming the election is held, and assuming the Democrat wins, Trump will simply refuse to leave.
Heffner: Your thesis in part all along has been the kleptocracy, the authoritarianism, the autocracy has been plain to view, and we have gradually become desensitized to this decline because it’s been the American status quo. This is the culmination of that decades long drought of moral leadership. So the immediate question amid the pandemic and these circumstances is what is the roadmap to recovering our democratic ethos in our core?
Kendzior: It’s going to be very difficult. I don’t even necessarily assume I’ll see it remedy in my lifetime. But I do think that the starting point is true. It’s brutal honesty about how we got to this point about events in American history that led us here, especially you know, corruption over the last 40 years, the erosion of the social safety net, broad assaults on democracy, whether the illicit war in Iraq or the financial crisis after which, no one was really punished. That lack of accountability greatly hurt us.
On top of that, you have everything that the Trump administration has done, which a lot of times people view as so outrageous or just chaotic, or he just wandered his way in there. They don’t see it as deliberate, and they don’t notice the continuity that it’s often the very same bad political actors of the last 40 years, whether Bill Barr or Roger Stone or Paul Manafort or Trump himself that are involved in this.
So we need to have a very frank open discussion and there needs to be actual legal consequences because those are the only kind of consequences that this group of criminals recognize. And then I do think in a way that we can move forward.
Heffner: Is that roadmap, legal accountability, and if so, in the current environment in which our Supreme Court just recently ruled in favor of [former New Jersey] Governor Christie’s political aides who said in an email they wanted to threaten the health of a neighboring community because it was under the administration of a Democratic opposing mayor. Our United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously liberal, conservative, Democratic and Republican appointees that because there was no quid pro quo with respect to land, or dollars, that corruption isn’t corruption. And that’s a reality that any new administration can either accept or abandon.
But we have an entire body of a Supreme Court that unanimously said corruption is okay as long as there is not illegal transfer, illegal transfer of dollars and cents, every other kind of corruption, to deprive ventilators to communities because they have Democratic mayors to deprive state funding because there’s a Democratic governor that isn’t corruption. That’s the America we’re living in today.
He has no intention of leaving. It’s not hard to understand what Trump wants. He wants money, power, and immunity from prosecution.
Kendzior: I wrote about that same phenomenon in Missouri where I live. I wrote about Missouri as the bellwether of American decline. One of the things I brought up were legal studies from about a decade ago saying that even quid pro quo corruption has no meaning here. That we essentially live in a lawless land in the wild Midwest. And now that kind of corruption, that kind of entrenched criminality within the system in which those with power and money can get away with almost anything. That is the way of the land, you see it in so many states, it’s not universal. It’s not completely consolidated, but it is the ideal situation for people involved in white collar crime, organized crime, money laundering, or for political parties like the GOP who embrace dark money and who seek not democracy but a one-party state. They’ll use whatever means to get there.
So yes, I’m very worried about the court system, but I think some of the problem is that there’s been a reluctance among officials to admit that this is happening. We heard over and over again: Mueller’s got it, Comey’s got it. Congress and Pelosi and the House have got it. Then it’s the 2020 election will save us, whereas we really have a systematic breakdown and we need to admit that that has happened and that they’re just not [going to save us].
I think it’s because they’re so humiliated by this institutional failure and maybe not being on the ball. When all of these trends started by thinking everything was okay, that unfortunately is what allowed it to happen—and often these are not malicious actors.
These are people who did not want this outcome, but they underestimated the threat and we are all suffering for it. So I wish everyone would just kind of come clean and call them out and name names.
Heffner: Do you think the emboldening of his corruption over these many months is going to lead him to reelection under any circumstance because of what you’ve documented about his autocratic tendencies that no president has really professed since Andrew Johnson. Maybe Andrew Jackson?
Kendzior: It’s certainly possible and I would call it more of a reinstallation than a reelection because I’ve never thought we were going to have a free and fair election. That’s why we should have been looking at things like voter suppression, foreign interference, insecure machines all along. It’s why we should be pushing for voting by mail now so that they can’t exploit the coronavirus crisis to do that.
But yeah, he has no intention of leaving. It’s not hard to understand what Trump wants. He wants money, power, and immunity from prosecution. And right now he uses his executive privileges to say that he can’t be prosecuted. And people like Mueller, accept that they say, Oh, it’s, you know, I’m just following present precedent. Like even though this person is obviously tremendously damaging to our country, he is purging, you know, the FBI at which Mueller worked. He is blatantly committing crimes.
I mean, the list of impeachable offenses is just, it’s endless. It’s emolument. It’s obstruction of justice, it’s lying to the FBI, it’s all sorts of things. And they haven’t pursued it. So yeah, every time he gets away with the crime, he becomes more emboldened. And every time someone in his circle does or they walk free, he becomes emboldened as well. And you know, why wouldn’t you? It’s logical. I mean, it’s reprehensible, but it makes sense from his perspective.
