I live in Missouri, a state in the center of America, a state that sits halfway down the Mississippi River and whose northern border parallels the Mason-Dixon line. In the twentieth century, Missouri was proclaimed “the bellwether state” due to the uncanny ability of its residents to vote for the winner of presidential elections. From 1904 to 2008, Missouri voted for the winning presidential candidate in every year except 1956. For over a century, Missouri was where you looked to discover what direction America would go. It’s now where to look if you want to know how the country went to hell.
To understand the rise of Trump, you need to understand the history of America. To understand the history of America, you need to understand Missouri. You may blanch at this, given Missouri’s presumed Midwestern irrelevance as well as the simplistic descriptions of “red states” churned out since the 2016 election. Prior to Trump taking office, the Midwest tended to be ignored by the national press unless there was a tornado, a riot, or another camera-ready disaster. But Trump’s win made the heartland intriguing to coastal reporters, who dropped into a diverse and complex region with their prewritten narratives, needing only a white man or two to embody the clichés. Midwesterners were transformed into MAGA-hat-wearing retired manufacturing workers who sit in diners reciting platitudes about their unshaking loyalty to a New York City tycoon.
A media makeover is a peculiar wound. It is a terrible feeling to be in pain and to be ignored—as a place, as a person. It is worse to be given a mask and told it’s your face.
I am telling you the story of Missouri because what happened to people here matters in its own right—a radical notion in a media era defined by coastal domination—but also because Missouri is a national litmus test for corruption and injustice. We show how low America can go, and while some of our wounds may be self-inflicted, they are also contagious. We live under the tyranny of the minority on a state level, which is subject to the tyranny of the minority on a national level, which is subject to the tyranny of the elite on an international level.
After the 2016 election, a journalist wrote a profile of me called “A Cassandra in Trumpland.” Cassandra was a Greek goddess cursed to see the future but never be believed.1 That article was about my book The View from Flyover Country, a collection of essays written between 2012 and 2014 that was once viewed as pessimistic but is now heralded as prescient. I wrote about all of America, but I saw America through Missouri’s eyes, which means I saw hell and I saw it in advance. I have concluded that the surreal quality of Missouri life has prompted people to doubt my assertions even when I am simply listing the facts. The facts no longer add up, the facts make you wish they were fiction, but that is all the more reason we need to hear them.
Missouri has two nicknames. The first is “the Show Me State,” which allegedly came from a congressman named Willard Duncan Vandiver, who, in 1899, displeased with a blowhard politician’s response, proclaimed: “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me!”2
In twenty-first-century Missouri the cornfields are contaminated with floodwater and the Blue Dog Democrats have turned into radical Republicans, but the dissatisfaction and demand for proof from Vandiver’s era remains. Missourians are locked in a battle against their representatives for accountability in government. In 2018, voters across the political spectrum overwhelmingly passed Clean Missouri, a ballot initiative aimed at ending partisan redistricting, limiting lobbying, and forcing officials to reveal financial records. Today the very legislators that Clean Missouri targeted are attempting to overturn the initiative in defiance of public will, leaving the Show Me State cloaked in secrecy.3
The other nickname of Missouri is “the Cave State.” This is my preferred nickname. It’s a motto for the Trump era, where to survive you need to see in the dark.
Missouri is known as flatland, but a system of over five thousand caves, filled with million-year-old geological wonders, lurks underground. You can’t drive through Missouri without a billboard or barn roof beckoning you to one of the caverns: a Route 66 throwback site featuring red, white, and blue laser beams bouncing off stalactites as “God Bless America” blares, or a drive-through Jeep tour of an underground Civil War sanctuary, or caves renowned for their bizarre formations alone. Nearly all caverns proclaim to be the long-lost hideout of Jesse James, because I live in a state that venerates a murderous bank robber.
Questionable advertising aside, there is a sanctity to Missouri caves that’s incomparable to anything else I’ve seen. The caverns are a visual distillation of time—a constancy that keeps me steady when everything else seems to be crashing down. This took millions of years to form, I’d think; this will stay the same no matter what hell we create on earth. They are the underground heart of a dismissed heartland, a monument to beauty and intricacy that reveals itself only to those willing to plunge into the void.
I have a map of the Missouri cave system on my wall. When Trump won, I began visiting the caverns and crossing them off, treating each like a reprieve, a reward. I like that their twisted beauty exists in the dark, indifferent to whether it is appreciated. I like that their depth blocks out the internet along with the sun. I like that Missouri has the home-court advantage in knockout fallout shelters.
Missouri was born in sin, the centerpiece of America’s bad bargain with itself. Its entry into statehood in 1821—the notorious “Missouri Compromise”—was predicated on a national agreement to keep black Missourians enslaved so that Maine could call itself free. At the time, black Americans in slaveholding states were labeled three-fifths of a person. The chroniclers of this time unironically referred to it as “the Era of Good Feelings.”
Six years after Missouri became a state, a journalist named Elijah Lovejoy moved from Maine to St. Louis, Missouri. A preacher and an abolitionist, Lovejoy printed article after article railing against Andrew Jackson, the favorite president of Donald Trump, and calling for slaves to be freed. His editorials made him the target of racist white mobs and in 1836, he crossed the Mississippi River into Alton, Illinois, to continue his journalism in a free state. This made no difference to the mobs, who followed him into Alton, ransacked his office, and threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.
By 1837, Lovejoy knew he would be killed. “If the laws of my country fail to protect me,” he wrote shortly before he was murdered, “I appeal to God, and with him I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at my post, but I cannot desert it.”
On November 7, 1837, Elijah Lovejoy received his fourth press and hid it in a warehouse, but the mob figured out his location and set the building ablaze. He was shot to death as he attempted to escape, and the white mob bypassed his bullet-ridden corpse to seize his printing press, which they smashed and threw into the river for the final time.
Today a monument to Elijah Lovejoy sits on the top of a hill in Alton, near the cemetery where his grave lies. In the weeks before the 2016 election, I would drive across the Mississippi and visit it, my own death threats saved on a phone I could put in my pocket.
One day in October 2016 I stood beside the monument and looked out at the town—Alton, where Abraham Lincoln, influenced by Lovejoy, debated slavery; Alton, where James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King Jr., was born; Alton, where the Underground Railroad thrived, symbolic of a region divided not only between whites and blacks, but between whites who would fight for black rights and whites who opposed them. Lovejoy’s headstone said he was born on November 9, 1802, and died on November 7, 1837. In between his murder and birth was November 8—that year’s Election Day.
I thought about my children and my country as I drove out of Alton, skirting East St. Louis, Illinois, where in 1917 white mob violence against black laborers was so catastrophic that terrified locals mistook the trampling hordes for a natural disaster; across the river to the downtown St. Louis courthouse where in 1847 the slave Dred Scott unsuccessfully made a case for his freedom; then on to the faded grandeur of St. Louis’s Page Boulevard, whose long-abandoned homes local black activists had covered with paintings of notable black St. Louisans, in a gesture some deemed inspiring and some deemed depressing; past the inhabited neighborhoods with signs that plead WE MUST STOP KILLING EACH OTHER planted on the lawns; and then to my home, a century-old house in a neighborhood located between a Dollar General store and an abandoned lot—a ruin of my own.
I checked Twitter and saw more white supremacists had endorsed Donald Trump, and he did not reject their approval. I turned on the TV and watched cable news reporters marvel over one of Trump’s hotels before declaring the inevitable win of the scandalous Hillary Clinton. I checked my email, I sorted my death threats, I waited for November and its foregone conclusions.
I have lived in St. Louis for almost my entire adult life. But in my early twenties, I briefly lived in two former imperial capitals: Vienna, Austria, where the Hapsburgs held sway over Europe and where Hitler was rejected from art school; and Istanbul, Turkey, where countless empires rose and fell. Those are cities where history feels palpable, in palaces and plague columns, museums and mosques. The triumph and tragedy of the imperial past is their calling card, dealt into a new hand, one that beckons tourists to contemplate their own time and the way the world comes undone.
St. Louis is not dissimilar, though few recognize it. Imperial grandeur lurks in every building left behind by the 1904 World’s Fair, held when St. Louis was the place to be, the fourth-largest city in America. It also haunts the city in less sought-out relics. If visitors follow the standard recommendations, they see the Arch and the zoo and the Cardinals. If they turn off the tourist trail, they stumble into what looks like an urban war zone of gutted nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings. They wonder what happened to make our city look this way, failing to grasp that what happened in St. Louis was nothing. Our war wasn’t lost, but loss. There was no attack, just abandonment and apathy. Here the world ended, as St. Louis–raised poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”4
St. Louis’s history, and Missouri’s history, is not well known outside the state. Perhaps that’s how gatekeepers want it: an empire, even a fallen one, should have some glamour, some command, not be rooted in the region disparagingly called flyover country. But it was in St. Charles, Missouri, where explorers Lewis and Clark set off on their quest of westward imperialism; Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain’s trenchant tales of racism were conceived and set; Marceline, Missouri, where a young Walt Disney envisioned his fantasy empire in a backyard farmhouse; and St. Louis, Missouri, where black musicians like Scott Joplin and Chuck Berry pioneered quintessentially American genres like ragtime and blues and rock.
There is no such thing as a “real” or “fake” America, but it is hard to ignore the significance of Missouri in shaping national culture, national dialects, national expectations, and real and fictional national icons—and the significance of its significance being ignored. You have to reconcile with an awful lot if you dare to reconcile with Missouri: Missouri, with its “Little Dixie” slavery relics sprawling across the upper half; Missouri, where Native Americans trod the Trail of Tears across the lower half; Missouri, which is so conflicted about whether it is northern or southern that residents cannot agree on whether to pronounce the state “Missouri” or “Missourah,” prompting state politicians to engage in the quintessential Missouri act: the compromise that satisfies no one.
Today, Missouri lives the legacy of that compromise. The state remains divided by race, class, and a rural versus urban landscape. But what most folks agree on, regardless of their background, is the pervasiveness of pain. We are held together by the recognition that we are being torn apart.
This feeling is particularly acute in St. Louis. You see the residue of decades of white flight—first from the city to the suburbs, then from the suburbs to the exurbs—and the attempts of activists to undo the poverty and unrest left in its wake. You see teddy bears and balloons tied to trees on street corners and know it’s not an invitation to a birthday party but the marking of a murder. You are no longer shocked by the violence but you always feel the grief, and the perverse way it forms bonds: a region of three million can feel like a small town when you’re all six degrees of separation from a shooting victim. You live near a silver arch towering over a river of mud, the waters of which have long hidden bodies along with printing presses.
You are surrounded by the sense that everything can come undone at any time and no one will fix it when it falls. It’s baked into the geology, the history, the culture. At the southernmost point of Missouri, there is a city called New Madrid. In 1811, New Madrid had a 7.9 earthquake: the worst one east of the Rocky Mountains in recorded history. The New Madrid quake caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards and church bells to ring in Washington, D.C., and Americans all over the Midwest to declare that the apocalypse had arrived. “The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro, not knowing where to go, or what to do,” settler Eliza Bryan wrote in 1812, “the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species—the cracking of trees falling, and the roaring of the Mississippi … formed a scene truly horrible.”5
Today the New Madrid Fault lies in wait. Seismologists say we are overdue for a sequel. When the earthquake happens, they say—and it’s a when, not an if—America will be torn asunder in Missouri, causing death and destruction so severe that the National Guard has preemptively declared there is nothing that they will be able to do to help us.6
People often ask how I ended up in Missouri. The answer, as usual, has to do with lack of money. In 2006, Washington University in St. Louis offered me a generous scholarship to get a Ph.D. in anthropology, and I accepted. I knew St. Louis well because my in-laws lived there, and we visited them often. By the time I arrived, the city had climbed out of its 1980s and 1990s wreckage and even had moments of pop culture glory, with St. Louis rappers like Nelly topping the charts and the Rams winning the Super Bowl. St. Louis was run-down, but affordable and full of free amenities. It seemed like a good place to have children, which I proceeded to do. I haven’t moved since.
In many ways, St. Louis felt like a larger, more functional version of where I grew up—Meriden, Connecticut, a postindustrial midsized city whose glory days my grandparents would tell me about with a kind of reverent disbelief. Meriden had deteriorated before I was born, but I could not mourn what I didn’t remember. I embraced what was left: strip malls and fast food and the low-key hustle of a New England gang hub. As a kid I would walk past the gun store and the porn shop to get to the pharmacy, which had a magazine rack where I could read undisturbed for hours while people from the projects nearby came and went. I loved that pharmacy, and the palatial Burger King arcade, and the mall that had replaced what used to be called “downtown.” I did not notice that Meriden lacked museums or cafés or cultural institutions. I did not realize that the street violence I witnessed was unusual, unless I was reading kids’ books that took place in Connecticut, which depicted a world of white suburban prosperity alien to everything around me.
I grew up in a struggling city and saw beauty in ordinary things. People only corrected me later in life, but by then it was too late: I had become hardwired to appreciate the heart of the hellholes I call home. The similarities between my original and adopted hometowns made me skeptical of the perceived divide between the coasts and the center. The real divide is between a few exorbitant cities and everywhere else, a few exorbitant individuals and everyone else—a fracture that widened into a chasm during my lifetime.
In the late 1970s, when I was born, people in St. Louis and New York made roughly the same salaries and had a similar cost of living7—which meant life in both cities was cheap and low-down. When John Carpenter filmed his 1981 postapocalyptic thriller Escape from New York—a commentary on Manhattan’s shattered state—he chose to do it in St. Louis because he did not need to build a set. St. Louis’s natural end-times look filled in just fine.
New York and St. Louis were brothers in blight—until they weren’t. The rapacious greed of the Reagan 1980s marked the rise of New York corporate raiders like Carl Icahn, who bought out St. Louis companies like Trans World Airlines (TWA), draining St. Louis of its money and resources and pride. TWA was “a broken-winged bird helpless before the pounce of the ultimate corporate predator,” wrote St. Louis magazine, describing the shock of Missourians that an out-of-state tycoon had bought something as essential as an airline purely to destroy it and pocket the profits.8 By the late 1980s, New York and St. Louis were no longer carrying a shared American burden of lost opportunity. Wall Street predators had devised a zero-sum game and deemed the Midwest expendable. In 2017, Icahn, a long-time friend of Donald Trump who had helped Trump recover from his financial disasters in the casino industry, constructed a cabinet of corrupt Wall Street multimillionaires including himself, Steven Mnuchin, and Wilbur Ross9—while Trump flew to Missouri and assured down-and-out Missourians he was making their lives great again. In the 1980s, Missouri was the background of a fictional New York–born nightmare. Now its people are props in a real one.
This is not to say that all corruption was imported. Missouri has its own long history of high-end dirty dealers. Some, like early twentieth-century Kansas City political fixer Tom Pendergast, constructed such elaborate nexuses of politics and business and crime that they gained national notoriety. What changed in the 1980s was that income inequality became coupled with geographical inequality in a way that would transform the American economy, culture, and media for decades to come. The once thriving cities of the Midwest became known as “the Rust Belt,” Midwest family farms went bankrupt, and coastal elites—both liberal and conservative—came to view the region as an object of pity or prey.
That is, when they thought about the Midwest at all. Starting in the 2000s, Midwesterners largely disappeared from American pop culture. This may sound trivial, but it’s not: compare it to the 1980s and 1990s, with Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Axl Rose, and John Mellencamp all hailing from the Midwest, while popular family sitcoms like Family Ties and Roseanne were set in states like Ohio and Illinois. There was no uniform representation of the Midwest and one did not need an excuse to set a movie or a show there—it was simply considered as relevant a region of America as any other. Back then, the Midwest had representation beyond red swaths carved out on an electoral map. When a region loses both cultural representation and economic clout, it becomes easy for politicians to exploit the resentment of its residents, especially when that resentment stems not from envy but grief.
The story of the Midwest in the twenty-first century is the story of a narrative hijacking. This narrative began with the 2000 election, which introduced the concept of “red” and “blue” Americas—a concept partisans were eager to employ. The idea of a bifurcated America reduces a complex set of differences to an innate divide. The assumption that a state has a fixed identity gives cover to the gerrymandering, influence peddling, and general corruption of the political process that arose over the past twenty years.
As the bellwether, Missouri was the ultimate purple state, swinging with the times. In the 2000s, that began to change with the increased influence of GOP donors—both national actors, like the conservative-megadonor Koch brothers, and Missourians like Rex Sinquefield, a wealthy conservative ideologue who has been accused of trying to buy the state government.10 In a damning study for the Missouri Law Review, scholar Dan Schnurbusch dubbed Missouri “the Wild Midwest” and described how dark money and loose laws had drained the state of representative democracy. Missouri’s rot ran so deep, he noted, that “ethical and campaign finance laws are ill equipped to protect against even the most basic form of corruption—that which the Supreme Court of the United States has identified as ‘quid pro quo corruption.’”11
In 2006, Missouri governor Matt Blunt signed into law a bill that eliminated all limits on direct campaign contributions. It was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court, only to be resurrected in 2008.12 As usual, Missouri was a preview to a national crisis. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, which redefined campaign cash as free speech and allowed it to flow without restriction from corporations to candidates. Among the side effects of Citizens United was an exponential rise in dark money—money spent by organizations who are not required to disclose the identities of their donors. Between 2006 and 2012, the amount of dark money in national campaigns increased from $5.2 million to over $300 million.13 The influence of domestic dark money was compounded by an increase in foreign money given through lobbying groups and organizations like the NRA or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
For Missouri, the Citizens United ruling exacerbated an already out of control situation. “Missouri finds itself in a bubbling mire of unlimited direct campaign contributions and lobbyist gifts, unimpeded independent electioneering expenditures, and unstoppable tycoons of monetary political persuasion,” wrote Schnurbusch. He recommended that the Missouri electorate become more informed about corruption so they can catch bad actors—solid advice, but hard to implement when the local media economy is dying, which it has been since the millennium. The demise of local media not only made corruption less likely to be documented, it left Missourians scrambling for alternative sources of information. They found it in national outlets like Fox News, which provided a narrative to mask the new graft. Fox News presented the Midwest as the home of “real Americans,” by which they meant white conservatives, who were portrayed as victims of evil liberal machinations. The network offered a sense of belonging that exploited the sense of abandonment brewing for decades while dodging GOP complicity in that exploitation. It offered scapegoats—immigrants, Muslims, and in 2008, a presidential candidate.
In 2008, the political mood in St. Louis, especially in my majority black neighborhood, was unusually upbeat thanks to candidate Barack Obama and his promises of hope and change—which included a vow to unite “red” and “blue” America. By this time, Missouri resembled a miniature version of the United States. Two large, racially diverse, and liberal metro areas, St. Louis and Kansas City, sat at the eastern and western state lines, together comprising roughly half the population. More sparsely inhabited regions made up much of the rest of the state, populated almost entirely by white people, with the south more conservative than the north. Mixed suburbs and college towns dotted the landscape in between. Missouri seemed a reliable bellwether for the nation per usual. As it turned out, we were, for all the wrong reasons.
On Election Day, my husband and I voted for Obama alongside ecstatic black voters in St. Louis, then drove out to get dinner in the rural countryside, where we sat in a bar and listened to a group of white men say they could not believe that a n—— was going to become the president.
For the first time since 1956, Missouri did not vote for the winner. Obama lost by 3,900 votes, and he likely lost those votes because he’s black. Centuries of Missouri racism could not be eradicated by a charismatic black candidate; instead, the Obama effect meant that white Missouri officials began saying the unspeakable aloud. In 2009, Roy Blunt, the father of governor Matt Blunt and a Republican congressman who would go on to become Missouri’s US senator in 2011, compared Obama to a monkey at a D.C. conference.14
Obama was so perplexed by his narrow loss that he visited Missouri repeatedly during his first two years in office, taking the lay of the land and attempting to win over its residents. He could not comprehend why he was the president who had broken the bellwether. “I think the complexity of the state intrigues him, too, as a microcosm of the country,” Governor Jay Nixon explained in 2010.15 Both Obama and Nixon were confident it was a blip and that Obama would win back Missouri in 2012. Both underestimated the state’s economic pain, anti-black racism, and the ability of conservative propagandists to exploit both. Missouri was indeed a microcosm of a new America—one marked by paranoia and fear, one that pundits and politicos, with their “postracial” fantasies, were desperate to deny existed.
On Election Day 2008, Missouri began to turn a little redder. And then Missouri began to bleed.
Missouri bled cash and it bled bodies. The economic crash of 2008 shattered St. Louis’s tenuous comeback, obliterating retail and office jobs while decimating the agricultural and manufacturing sectors across the rest of the state. The abandoned lots and hollowed-out houses from earlier decades of hardship were joined by foreclosed homes and empty offices. Workers were laid off in droves, long-standing malls closed, and payday-loan outlets multiplied. Some outlets combined pawn shops with gun shops, allowing Missourians to trade in their jewels for weapons. People wanted weapons because they felt afraid.
I watched as St. Louis’s storefronts shuttered while Manhattan’s bankers walked free. I watched as people on television, none of them from around here, assured Americans that the economy was cyclical, a line that smacked of spin. The combination of a massive recession and the first black president unleashed anger that had lurked under the surface since Obama’s candidacy started gaining steam. Right-wing power brokers were ready to exploit it. In February 2009, about a thousand right-wing protesters gathered under the Gateway Arch to air their grievances, which included a sudden obsession with the national debt. They called themselves the Tea Party. Today the St. Louis Tea Party’s early participants continue to flourish in extreme right-wing politics—for example, local activist Dana Loesch became a national NRA advocate, trotted out to defend the organization’s dirty money scandals in the 2016 race.
That some of the Tea Party’s biggest national influencers came out of Missouri is not surprising. The state’s perennial swing state status was rooted in ideological diversity, indicating to both parties that Missouri voters can always be swayed. Though heavily Democratic, St. Louis had long been home to influential right-wing ideologues like antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly. The Tea Party capitalized on that preexisting conservative base and pushed it into populism, both manufactured and genuine, as wealthy backers like the Koch brothers stayed quiet while homegrown stars, like Loesch, rose to the fore.16 The Tea Party’s rhetoric became more racist over time, with black Missouri lawmakers among the targets of their wrath.17
The St. Louis white mob—the mob that chased Elijah Lovejoy, the mob that fled the city following the desegregation of schools—was not back, exactly. It had never really gone away, never even gone underground. What was new was the structure of the national media, now dominated by cable news anchors who used heartlanders to parade bigoted ideologies they did not want to overtly claim themselves.
In 2012, Missouri’s official bellwether status—the one defined by citizens voting for the presidential winner—was finally eliminated, as Mitt Romney beat Obama 54 percent to 44 percent, a stark departure from Obama’s narrow loss four years earlier. It was the first time since 1900 that the loser of the election won the state by a margin larger than 1 percent.18 It was also the first race held after the Citizens United ruling changed the rules about corporate money in politics, resulting in a dark money spending spree on ads whose conspiratorial sentiments were amplified by outlets like Fox. Within two years, Missouri had become the only state that allowed unlimited donations from unnamed sources, and the result was a Republican sweep and an emergence of Missouri as the dark money capital of America.19
But the GOP sweep had a notable exception, showing there were some things dirty money could not buy—at least, not yet. 2012 was the year Democrat Claire McCaskill ran a Senate campaign against Republican Todd Akin and became the target of a dark money campaign then unrivaled in US history.20 McCaskill was losing in the polls until one August day when Akin, asked on TV whether abortion is justified in cases of rape, proclaimed: “It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”21
At the time I never imagined I would have nostalgia for this moment in Missouri history, but I do. Akin’s comments sparked statewide bipartisan condemnation and inspired rape survivors to speak out. Some Missouri Republican women were so offended they did ads for McCaskill, explaining that while they disliked her, they found Akin’s remarks so offensive they could not abide him on moral grounds. Several of them were survivors of sexual assault themselves.22 At the polls, women outnumbered men 55 percent to 45 percent. McCaskill won Missouri 54 percent to 39 percent, with 64 percent of voters saying Akin’s remarks were either the deciding factor or one of the deciding factors of their vote.23
Missouri had taken a unified position: rape victims were not to be slandered, and a man making such brutal and baseless claims was to be rejected, regardless of party affiliation. It was a heartfelt moral stance, one of the last we shared. Nowadays, Akin’s words would barely stoke controversy. The news cycle would last a few hours, with pundits “both-sidesing” whether his comment was offensive and debating whether the female body does, indeed “try to shut the whole thing down.” We know this—we saw it happen with Trump and allegations of sexual assault, we saw it with Brett Kavanaugh and allegations of attempted rape.
Today, the ability of Akin’s comments to stoke months of controversy seems almost quaint, an indication of how far both Missouri and the United States have fallen. But the pain of rape survivors did not disappear—only public standards of how to treat them did. When McCaskill won in 2012, I felt relief, as a woman and a voter. It was the last time I would feel that after a Missouri election. Misogyny once limited to rhetoric is now codified in law: in May 2019, the Missouri legislature passed a law banning abortion after eight weeks even in the case of rape or incest. The day this was passed, I woke up to learn that my husband now had more rights than me—and that any man who chose to rape me in Missouri did too.
In August 2014, I was with my friend and sometimes cowriter Umar Lee—probably the only person in America to cash a check from Politico at a corner store—in a restaurant in Ferguson, Missouri. Down the block, the staff of a major cable network had barricaded itself in a giant steel cage from black protesters, among them St. Louisans who were close friends of mine and Umar’s. The brutal killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson had happened two weeks before, and the nightly gassing of protesters by the police had begun. The world that had once ignored St. Louis—media, NGOs, public officials—had converged on it in droves.
I started covering Ferguson the day Brown was killed, and I never stopped, because it is impossible to live in St. Louis and cover politics—both local and national—without Ferguson shaping your perception. The story never stopped for us because it never had a beginning and it can never have an end. It is a continuum of pain, punctuated by reminders both brutal—like the ongoing deaths of activists—and banal—like the bureaucratic morass that still plagues St. Louis regional government. In chapter 6, I describe Ferguson and its aftermath in greater detail; for now, I mention it because the 2014 uprising and its chaotic aftermath is key to understanding Trump’s 2016 Missouri win.
My friend Umar is a St. Louis native, with family going back many generations. Born in the mid-1970s, he has witnessed the St. Louis region’s slow-motion collapse with his own eyes, and he came from a multiracial family whose members had long dealt with St. Louis’s racism, violence, and police brutality. He had also been involved with the Ferguson protests from the start, both participating in and covering them, ending up in jail on several occasions. I remember expressing tenuous hope in August 2014 that some of St. Louis’s structural problems might be remedied, because the sheer force of attention might prompt accountability.
“You know what’s going to happen?” Umar said. “Write this down, to remember I said this, because no one is going to believe me. People don’t know how this shit works. I guarantee you that in 2016, you are going to see the return of Richard Nixon. Not just in Missouri, but on a national level. You are going to see a hard move to the right, and a Nixon-style presidential candidate come out, only slicker, more of a demagogue, someone who can work the media, and we will be living in a new kind of hell. The people who vote for whoever it is, they’ll be living in hell too, only they won’t even know it. The rest of us? We’ll know it. We’ll know it every fucking day.”
In March 2016, Umar and I drove to the Peabody Opera House to cover the campaign rally of presidential candidate Donald Trump. This was Trump’s first visit to St. Louis, and it would be his last, because St. Louis was the first city to kick him out. As is usual with St. Louis, this claim to fame was forgotten, with Chicago taking credit, having booted Trump later that evening to greater fanfare. But St. Louis, which had been holding protests centered around race for nearly two years straight by the time Trump arrived, was ready for battle, and as usual in St. Louis, the battle was bloody. Pro- and anti-Trump factions brawled on the opera house steps in what would be the most violent protest until after his election.
I did not go to the rally as an official journalist, to be credentialed and put in Trump’s press pen. Instead I got a ticket and stood in line with the Trump supporters. While I never lied to anyone about who I was, I never told anyone that I was a writer or that I found Trump repugnant. I did not share my views at all, and so I was assumed to be a supporter too, and I talked for hours with the Trump voters about their views.
Since I live in a state that Trump won, I am often asked to describe what “the Trump voter” is thinking, but this is an inane question. The Trump voters are no more a monolith than any other group of voters. There is also a difference between the voters—who were at times reluctant or one-issue voters focused on topics like abortion or guns—and the base, for whom Trump’s most hateful and destructive qualities are the core appeal. Rally-goers tend to be the base, but in March 2016, they were simply the curious.
Some people were there to see the host of The Apprentice in person. Some thought he would create jobs and ease their economic misery. Some were open racists and xenophobes thrilled that a candidate would speak hateful rhetoric so freely. Almost everyone in line was white, the main quality they shared along with an intense, almost conspiratorial feeling of betrayal. Some people looked well-off, but many spoke of a struggle to find full-time jobs and affordable health care. One of the reasons the line to see Trump was so long is that Missouri had enough unemployed people to make an overbooked rally, at noon on a weekday, feasible.
The violence of the rally did not scare me, nor did the feelings of betrayal I heard expressed—I was used to the former, and shared the latter, albeit with different solutions in mind. That day, it was not cruelty but kindness that left me shaken. In line, the Trump fans at the St. Louis rally were polite and respectful. They went out of their way to help children, the sick, and the elderly. They made cheerful small talk and had thoughtful conversations with me and Umar, rarely expressing hateful sentiment outright.
This changed once we arrived at the actual rally. As Trump bellowed conspiracy theories and insults, I watched a crowd become a mob. I watched a process I had studied my whole life in history books play out in real time. As a demagogue screamed “Build the wall” in an opera house, the rally-goers who had greeted me with kindness hailed his calls for violence. I saw mothers and fathers put their children and elderly parents aside to engage in fistfights with protesters. I saw preppy white men jeeringly announce they were going to Tactical Shit, a notorious gun store in the exurbs, to load up on weapons for future rallies. I saw activists forced one by one down the opera house steps like characters in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”—the lone target moving toward a vicious crowd tensed to pounce. The obedience of the line had become the compliance of the mob.
I took a picture of an anti-Trump protester holding a sign that said THE BANALITY OF EVIL—a reference to Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who said of life under the Nazi regime: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”24 The Trump rally was a study in how people capable of compassion can turn cruel in response to the rhetoric of their chosen leader or in retaliation to those who dare oppose him.
By March 2016, I was pretty sure Trump would win the primary and the general, and that when he won, he would attempt to govern in a way similar to the Central Asian autocrats I had been studying for decades. But there is a difference between studying or even visiting an authoritarian state and seeing an aspiring autocrat in practice—hearing the promises yet to be broken, watching the faux-populism pitched and sold. I remember turning to Umar and saying, “You were right two years ago, but this isn’t going to be Nixon. This is American authoritarianism, and they are going to tell us ‘That’s not possible’ until nothing else is.”
Trump’s ascendance wasn’t the only alarming political phenomenon gripping Missouri in 2016. Over and over, out-of-towners asked me, “Did you see that ad for your election? The crazy one with the candidate holding a machine gun?” To which my response was “Which one? There’s one running for senator and one running for governor, you know!”
The Senate candidate was Jason Kander, a Democrat, Missouri secretary of state, and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who in his ad assembled an AR-15 while blindfolded and challenged his opponent, Roy Blunt, to do the same. The gubernatorial candidate was Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL who in his ad fired a machine gun into an empty field while a narrator proclaimed him to be “a conservative warrior.” Kander was pushing for sensible gun control and demonstrating he was speaking from a place of experience; Greitens was playacting as a vigilante. Neither approach seemed remarkable in Missouri: violence and turmoil had overwhelmed the election long before the gun-toting candidates arrived.
In 2015, the presumed gubernatorial front-runner, state auditor and Republican Tom Schweich, known for his harsh critiques of state corruption and megadonors like Rex Sinquefield, shot himself to death after being the subject of a nasty political whisper campaign with anti-Semitic undertones.25 Shortly after Schweich’s suicide, Schweich’s spokesman, Spence Jackson, shot himself to death, leaving a note saying that he could not take being unemployed again.26 The combined incidents were both tragic on a personal level and an indictment of the hardships, particularly unemployment and suicide by gun, that so many Missouri families experience.
With the race now wide open, Greitens, a former Democrat, decided to run as a Republican—going “full Missourah” and taking on a contrived redneck persona, despite being a Rhodes Scholar living in a mansion. Greitens’s opponent, former Missouri attorney general Chris Koster, had switched in 2007 from Republican to Democrat, meaning that both candidates were now running in each other’s former party. This party-switching is one reason why the “red” and “blue” fallacy falls so short in Missouri—party lines become fluid when disillusionment and opportunism both run so high.
And in 2016, it had become easier than ever to manipulate an election. “The problem is that so little is against the law,” remarked Sean Nicholson, executive director of the advocacy organization Progress Missouri, in 2015. “Things that are standard in other states don’t exist here.”27 Lobbying had ballooned, with $1.85 million spent on gifts to state officials between 2012 and 2014.28 Despite campaign finance law being so loose that almost nothing counted as illegal, Greitens still managed to break the law. He illegally used a donor list from The Mission Continues, his nonprofit for veterans, to fundraise for his campaign.
More concerningly, Greitens was connected to a shadowy nonprofit group called A New Missouri, which was created by Greitens’s campaign treasurer and his campaign attorney, and run by Austin Chambers, his senior political adviser.29 Most of its donors were anonymous, and under Missouri law, A New Missouri was not required to disclose who was behind it or how much money was flowing in and out, even though local reporters kept asking. The group had been accused of using shell companies to funnel money into Greitens’s campaign and then diverting that money into fighting progressive causes, like labor rights.30 Ironically, Greitens had campaigned on a platform of transparency: “I’ve been very proud to tell people, ‘I’m stepping forward and you can see every single one of our donors, because we are proud of our donors and we are proud of the campaign we are running,’” he said, and proceeded to do none of that.31
In 2016, Missouri regained its bellwether status, voting for the winner, Trump, as part of a GOP sweep. In stark contrast to any other point in Missouri history, all but one statewide elected official was a Republican. The election remains controversial. Greitens won in a campaign that remains suspicious due not only to the aforementioned scandals32 but also to ethical violations he committed in office, including using apps that delete government records. Kander suffered a surprising loss to Republican Roy Blunt and went on to start Let America Vote, an organization committed to transparency and election integrity, before taking time off to get treatment for PTSD. Purged of progressives and cloaked in dark money, the GOP Missouri legislature went on to implement a radical right-wing agenda in defiance of the voters’ will.
Some of the most extreme positions promoted by the new Republican legislature relate to guns. In Missouri, gun permits or background checks are no longer required if you’re over nineteen years old, and the “stand your ground” law has essentially made it legal to shoot someone to death if you can prove you felt threatened at the time. New laws proposed by the GOP legislature include a measure to make it illegal for schools, hospitals, and other public facilities to prevent a person from carrying a gun inside. Another proposed law requires that every Missourian between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five own an AR-15 assault rifle.33 Our state government is not only failing to protect us from gun violence but is trying to rewrite the law to force us to participate in it.
Many Missourians like guns, but to conflate a desire to hunt or protect oneself with abidance for the violence that results from lax laws is an absurd propaganda trick. As restrictions on regulations have loosened, the casualties have soared: gun homicides rose 43 percent between 2014 and 2016, the most recent statistic available.34 When I wake up to stories of slaughter, it is with increased alarm—because the gun deaths speak to a more frightening problem, a lack of oversight that is literally murderous. It is mirrored in the opioid epidemic, which has also grabbed disproportionate hold of Missouri and has devastated communities.35 It’s the sense of having a government that seems to welcome death; a government that has abdicated even the pretense of working for its citizens or caring if they live or die.
I live in Missouri, a state plunged into darkness: dark money, dead bodies, disappearing information, and disputed votes.
We are the state with the loosest restrictions on both money and guns. Those with fantasies of a lawless world need look no further than Missouri to have a sudden longing for regulation. Missouri is not a state of free spirits reveling in anarchic dissolution of the power structure. We are citizens held captive by politicians beholden to corrupt donors whose names we do not know, and we are people who leave our homes every day assuming we might not make it back alive.
In Missouri, multiple top officials—among them Greitens and St. Louis County executive Steve Stenger, a Democrat who was arrested in April 2019 on corruption charges accusing him of trading political favors for campaign donations—are implicated in political crimes, and the integrity of state elections has fallen into question.36 Missouri has become a petri dish for the end of the American experiment, combining the worst qualities of the states that border it: the indicted officials of Illinois and the notorious dysfunction of Kansas.
In April 2018, I went on a book tour for my essay collection The View from Flyover Country, and found myself constantly having to insist to people outside my state that the conditions I describe are real.
“What’s it like where you live?” interviewers would ask, and I would reply:
“I live in St. Louis, Missouri, near an underground fire that has been making its way toward buried nuclear waste at a site called the West Lake Landfill.37 This has been going on for several decades and has spawned nothing except documentaries and cancer clusters.
“In 2017, St. Louis—recently named number one in the country for both STDs and murder—became the first city in the United States to lower the minimum wage from $10 an hour down to $7.70, with Missouri Republicans in Jefferson City overriding a hard-fought victory by labor activists that was passed two years ago by St. Louis voters and officials …
“Racism is so rampant in Missouri that in 2017, three years after the Ferguson uprising, the NAACP issued a travel warning for the state, telling black people not to come here because they’ll be profiled and threatened.38 It’s so misogynist that in 2017, the Republicans also attempted to make it legal for women who use birth control to be fired,39 which didn’t work. Meanwhile, our state’s legislature was one of very few to give personal voting information to the Trump administration when the latter requested it after making a fatuous claim of a voter fraud crisis. To this day no one knows what happened to our data…”40
At this point the listener couldn’t take it any more and would interrupt, asking, “Who is in charge of this place?!”
“Great question—we don’t know! In January 2018, we found out that the governor, Eric Greitens, who campaigned closely with Mike Pence on a ‘family values’ platform, allegedly tied a half-naked and blindfolded woman to a piece of exercise equipment in his basement and took her picture, threatening to release the photos if she told anyone they had had an affair. He was indicted on felony invasion of privacy, but that’s not why the Republicans want him to resign.41
“Greitens was then indicted for a second felony—tampering with a computer and taking donor lists from his own veterans’ charity for fundraising purposes. That’s the one the GOP cares about because an investigation opens the door into dark money in Missouri,42 and Greitens was already in trouble for using an illegal app that made his texts and emails disappear. Even the Missouri Republicans want him to step down, but he won’t leave…”
I remember telling these stories on the radio and TV in the spring of 2018, and the host would laugh, and I would laugh back, like these were simply low-key absurdities and not conditions that structured my life and filled me with dread for my children and my country. Corruption is like a weight that you never shed because no one will recognize you are carrying it. You are battling ghosts, following trails of disappearing cash and deleted data, hoping that local media (which has been gutted) will do the job of officials (who long ago surrendered their duties to their donors).
In May 2018, when the Missouri House subpoenaed Greitens for New Missouri documents, he chose to resign as governor rather than comply: even the prospect of revealing his true backers made the Greitens team panic.43 Greitens had been indicted in February, and his three-month tenure as governor postindictment became a referendum on power versus law. Law eventually won, but only in the sense that we no longer had an indicted official governing us, not in the sense of justice being served. When Greitens resigned, the remaining charges against him were dropped. Rumors spread that he had agreed to leave office if he was guaranteed to avoid prison time, and that a desire to protect his secretive backers was key to the decision. Whereas once mere publicity about his scandals would have prompted resignation, Greitens proved that hanging on to executive power to dodge or manipulate prosecution remains a viable option in an era of unfettered corruption—a lesson the Trump administration knows well. One of the most awful things about the Greitens case is that Missourians felt lucky he left, like peasants relieved at the passing of an evil king. There was never accountability, there was never transparency—there was just luck, otherwise known as dead expectations.
In St. Louis there is a notorious jail nicknamed “the Workhouse,” a mold-infested pit where citizens who often haven’t been formally charged with a crime live in horrific conditions, suffering through extreme heat and cold, denied adequate food and water. People end up in the Workhouse after being suspected of offenses like possessing marijuana or failing to pay child support. The Workhouse keeps its captives for months on end, threatening to hold them indefinitely if they cannot pay $10,000 bond. Sometimes the guards make the prisoners fight each other for their own amusement.44 The Workhouse sits a few miles from the mansion where Eric Greitens, the governor who was charged with two felonies and served not a day of time, is rumored to be planning his comeback.
In November 2018, Missouri had an election that put to bed the “red state” and “blue state” fallacy once and for all. Citizens were asked to vote on a series of progressive ballot initiatives, including medical marijuana and raising the minimum wage. The initiatives passed overwhelmingly, continuing a trend that had begun with the approval of a pro–labor union law that had passed in an August special election. Among the amendments that passed in November was Clean Missouri, which was seen as the road to cleaning up election corruption once and for all. But voters faced an unlikely roadblock: themselves.
When asked to vote on a specific issue, Missourians chose the most progressive options. But when asked to vote for a politician, over half of Missourians chose Republicans who sought to strike down the very ballot initiatives for which they had voted. There are many factors that may explain this discrepancy, and if we had a thriving local news infrastructure, we might have a clearer idea of the answers, but local media were gutted along with the rest of our economy.
In 2018, Claire McCaskill, the conservative Democrat who handily beat Todd Akin after his “legitimate rape” comments six years before, lost her Senate race to Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley after Hawley was endorsed by Donald Trump, who is, among other things, a self-proclaimed sexual assaulter who in 2016 paid off a porn star he slept with a decade before while his wife was caring for their baby son. McCaskill, a conservative Democrat, had been the target of a dark money propaganda campaign that labeled her a dangerous left-wing radical.45 A 2019 investigation indicated that many of the 2018 ads for Hawley had been illegally coordinated by the NRA.46
Within months of being elected, Hawley was being investigated for violating many of the same laws he had cited as reasons for Greitens to resign during his time as attorney general, including using apps to make documents disappear and hiding state information from the public.47 He has also been accused of engaging in “an elaborate scheme designed to evade detection” of campaign finance violations involving the NRA.48 (The NRA gave more to Hawley than to any other Senate candidate, and the organization has been accused of funneling money from Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs to the GOP.)49 Calls have begun for Hawley’s resignation. In response, the Missouri GOP is striking down the voter-backed Clean Missouri, which would have forced political misdeeds involving finances into the open, in an attempt to ensure the longevity of their own corrupt rule.
Missouri is not a red state, but it is becoming a one-party state—a party ruled by mysterious megadonors, a party that openly disregards the will of its electorate. In the most damning of ways, we are the bellwether for the United States. We are losing not only our freedom but our sovereignty to forces we do not fully understand, but which understand our own vulnerabilities all too well.
Why don’t you move? people ask. They ask me both about Missouri, and about America—and in many ways, it’s the same question, for they share the same sins. I always answer: Where is there to go? Missouri is a symptom of the American disease, and America a symptom of an international disease.
There is nowhere left to go, but I also do not want to leave. All that differentiates Missouri from other states is the scale of our corruption, and the layers of tragedy, and that citizens have been fighting these battles so long we tend to see things clearly, even if we do not see a way out.
There’s a park I drive to when I just can’t take it anymore, a state park that, like all parks in Missouri, charges no admission. When I go there I am almost always alone, a luxury of living in a state few want to visit. The park was created by Don Robinson, a St. Louis businessman who made a fortune selling stain removal products on late-night TV infomercials. For decades, Robinson bought up parcels of rocky land—sandstone caves and dolomite glades, land about which a farmer warned “all you can raise up there is hell.”50 The trees there look like their vines will reach out and strangle you; at random intervals, billion-year-old boulders jut out of the earth. Robinson lived on the land in a wooden shack and would let children explore his 843 acres undisturbed.
When Robinson died, he left his land to the Missouri state park system. His grave sits on a small hill at the park entrance, a slab surrounded by a swirl of pebbles. Don Robinson had bought the exact number of acres as New York City’s Central Park, and he never said why he did it, but we know why he did it. You can feel why as you climb deep into wild and unkempt terrain marked only by two narrow dirt trails. The entire site is a rebuke to consumerism and conformity, a rejection of everything manicured and slick and tame. It is Missouri in the best way—defiant, eccentric, unexpectedly generous. He left the greatest gift of all: the audacity of alternatives, a Missouri that refused to compromise.