It can happen here. It is
A conversation with Sarah Kendzior, scholar of authoritarianism and vindicated alarmist
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A May Day parade near Union Square, New York, in the early 1930s. Marchers hold up placards with satirical portraits of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Getty/Heritage Images
When your time comes to speak out against the threat of authoritarianism, do not be overdue for a haircut.
On November 29, 2016, I went on “Morning Joe” to talk about the recent victory of Donald Trump. Thanksgiving had just passed, and I shared that, for the first time since my parents immigrated to America in the 1970s, our family felt profound fear simply to exist in the country as brown Americans. What unfolded was a pointed and memorable back-and-forth, mostly between Joe Scarborough and me, about whether I was being “irrational” to be afraid before Donald Trump had even been sworn in.
Had I known the segment would go viral, I would have first arranged a much-needed haircut, with or without a tax deduction. But here we are. A prominent moment on television, and I look like the Heat Miser.
But it was the discussion that mattered, right? Right? That’s what I try to tell myself. And the discussion, at its heart, was about vigilance in a democracy — in this case, in the context of a threat by Trump to strip the citizenship of Americans convicted of flag burning. What Joe and I were really debating was: When do you sound the alarm? How much do you trust the existing institutions? Do you jump at the first threat of demagoguery and authoritarian tendencies or wait for things to bloom?
JOE: Hitler is not coming back.
SCARBOROUGH: Okay be careful. And be careful not to spread fear if it’s not rationally based.
I was, I say proudly now, an early alarmist about the coming of Trumpism. In my case, it might have had something to do with the new freedom I had gained two months earlier to say whatever I wanted, however I wanted, without worrying about consequences for colleagues, after an involuntary separation from The New York Times. And of course a lot of people were early alarmists alongside of me. Many were women; many were not white. Being on the wrong end of certain power equations perhaps trains you to be an early-warning system for tyranny. We didn’t need to wait for the hysterectomy concentration camps and the separated children and the Muslim ban and the plague deaths to call out Trump as a singular authoritarian menace.
And a dean of our early alarmist ranks was Sarah Kendzior, who stood out from Trumpism’s dawn for the force, bravery, detail, and prescience of her warnings.
A journalist and scholar of authoritarianism, Sarah quickly established herself as one of the few voices who could situate Trumpism in two distinct longer arcs: that of American institutional decay, and that of foreign experiences of the onset of autocracy.
Now, with the election just around the corner and Trump’s authoritarian, criminal, fascistic, kleptocratic, and buffoonish tendencies on fleek, I was eager to talk to Sarah, who is the author of, most recently, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America” and co-host of the weekly podcast “Gaslit Nation.” I wanted to know how she sees this moment and what she thinks we can do to escape it.
Read our interview below.
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It IS happening here: An interview with Sarah Kendzior
ANAND: To start at the end, you've been warning about the authoritarian threat of Donald Trump for years now. Given the president's comments in recent days, where do you think we stand?
SARAH: We've been living through what I've called a "deja news" cycle where the same stories appear again and again, but they are stripped of the context that reveals their full horror or impact. The latest iteration of this is Trump saying that he may not accept the election results and stoke violence if he doesn't win. This is literally the same thing that Trump — and Roger Stone — threatened in 2016, but the media is calling it "unprecedented" and making no reference to Trump's 2016 statements, despite that one of them was said at a debate and was widely covered at the time.
This bizarre selective amnesia is tremendously damaging. The American people need chronology and context to understand the threat. Also, the fact that he threatened this in 2016 should have made officials prepared with a response should he threaten it again in 2020. They should have assumed he'd do it, this time with the backing of the state, and should have come up with a plan to combat it. Instead, they feign shock to avoid accountability. So we stand at a dangerous precipice, but it's made far more dangerous by the refusal of so many people to admit how we got here.
ANAND: The new disclosures about Trump’s tax evasion and faux success are, on one level, same old, same old. And on another level, potentially a big deal. How do you understand them in the context of this moment? And do you worry that the more likely criminal prosecution gets in his post-presidency, the more desperate we can expect to see him, the more willing he will be to steal the election or incite violence, to avoid jail?
SARAH: We knew Trump hadn’t paid taxes. Hillary Clinton said this during one of the debates, but there was little follow-up to her claim. There was also little follow-up on a series of documents from the Czechoslovakian security services revealed in 2016 which stated that in 1977 Trump had entered a bizarre agreement with the federal government to not pay taxes until 2007. We do not know the terms of this arrangement, but the documents are indeed real. U.K. journalist Luke Harding investigated them, and I wrote about them and their ramifications in “Hiding in Plain Sight.” It’s a big untold part of this story, especially when you connect Trump to his four decades of dealing with transnational organized crime and corrupt U.S. government officials, which is what I did in my book.
As for the debt and other information revealed in the NYT piece, none of this is surprising, but people need to learn how to interpret it. People should review his mentor Roy Cohn — Trump’s tax-dodging, mobbed-up, media-savvy lawyer who was the biggest influence in his life. Cohn dreamed of dying owing the US government enormous amount of money, and in 1986, he did. Acquisition of wealth is not the goal for either Trump or Cohn; debt is not a problem for them. A luxurious lifestyle, powered by fraud and threat and untouchable by law, is the goal. People need to examine not only Cohn and Trump’s crimes but the complicit actors that enabled them, which in this case includes the I.R.S., the Department of the Treasury and other broken U.S. institutions. Trump and Cohn are symptoms of a broader disease.
Trump will continue to try to steal the election. That was always the goal, and the tax stories don’t change that. The revelations about his taxes also won’t affect his base in the way some pundits claim. Trump doesn’t care if they know that he doesn’t pay taxes because he thinks taxes are for suckers. His base will also see it this way. What I do wish his base (and everyone else) would understand is that the reason Trump doesn’t pay taxes is because he is a key part of the so-called “deep state” and “DC swamp” and “NYC elites” that his base claims to despise.
But in terms of the election, the focus should be on the mechanisms of rigging — domestic voter suppression, foreign interference, insecure machines, the destruction of the U.S. Postal Service, and so on — and what to do if he cheats and is caught or refuses to concede, both of which are likely. No one should ever compromise in holding him and his crime cult accountable.
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