At twenty-one years old, armed with a liberal arts BA, freelance clips, and experience creating online content—a novel attribute at the time—I landed a job at America’s fifth-largest newspaper, the New York Daily News. It was August 2000, and I’d just endured a summer of being so broke I was eating one bowl of rice per day while pretending I was on Survivor to feel adventurous instead of afraid. I had graduated in May into a fading boom economy that at the time felt daunting but now seems like a bastion of riches and ease. I didn’t know it then, but I had begun my adult life at the tail end of a dream, one that rapidly transformed into a nightmare of dashed expectations and diminished returns. It was the beginning of a millennium rife with collapse.
I am of the last generation to begin work in a creative profession as a member of the middle class. When I tell young people how I got this job, they respond as if I’m telling them a fairy tale. I was hired after sending my résumé through the mail to strangers. I had no connections, no graduate degree, and no summer internships. I had spent my summers working to save money for college, which meant my résumé included positions like “Record Town cashier” and “Dannon water inventory specialist,” a job that consisted of stocking bottled water at supermarkets and did not require the ability to read.
But no one cared back then; the era of elite credentialism was still years ahead. The Daily News liked my clips and my skills and especially my willingness to work from 7 P.M. to 3 A.M. The hours were awful, but I didn’t mind. I had landed a job that paid $40,000 per year and included health insurance, benefits, and three weeks paid vacation. My apartment, in Astoria, Queens, was a spacious one-bedroom for which I paid $900 per month. I could afford to live alone in New York City as a journalist in my early twenties. In 2000, no one thought that was remarkable, including me. Only in retrospect is it recognizable for what it was: a fluke. A fleeting taste of the American Dream, sweet enough that it still lingers.
By 2010, only one of my former coworkers at the Daily News was still working in journalism. I had quit the paper in 2003, but the rest were laid off—casualties of a media recession that began in early 2001 and accelerated with the 2008 financial collapse. The Great Recession that followed led to a massive restructuring in the industry. With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way. Told that advanced degrees would help them keep their jobs, my former coworkers shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for journalism school, where they were taught skills they already knew or that technology would soon render obsolete. In the end, it did not matter—the layoffs came anyway.
By 2010, my old Daily News job had been converted into an unpaid internship. My old Astoria apartment rented for over $2,000 per month. The cost of living in New York had skyrocketed, while wages remained stagnant or even decreased as desperate writers took pay cuts to stay in the profession. Outlets that had paid $1,000 per article while I was a college student in the late 1990s had dropped their rates to $200 per article by 2002, and in 2010 were offering zero dollars, otherwise known as “exposure.”
Journalism was ahead of the curve in terms of the twenty-first-century opportunity collapse, but the downturn was in every field, though the employment crisis was not widely recognized until the 2010s. (This is what happens when you fire the journalists first.) It made no difference whether a worker had a GED or a Ph.D., whether they toiled in a prestigious field like law or a blue-collar field like retail or a public sector field like teaching. Across all fields, management had realized they could stop paying people a living wage and get away with it.
Younger generations had been trained to work for a future that never arrived. By the time they realized the truth, they were too deep in debt to escape. The past came calling every month in the form of a creditor, dead dreams with soaring interest rates. Everyday necessities—housing, health care, child care—became luxuries, and survival became an aspiration. The 2000s ushered in an era of credentialism that prevented ordinary people from rising through the ranks. Jobs that once required a high school degree now required a BA, jobs that required a BA now required an MA, and the choice was pay to play or get locked out. Sometimes you paid and got locked out anyway, as wealthy elites purchased careers for their untalented offspring. But I discuss Jared and Ivanka in the next chapter.
The three years I worked at the Daily News—from 2000 to 2003—were possibly the most transformative in US journalism, and by association, the most transformative in terms of how Americans access and process information. Much of what Americans took for granted was lost within that brief window of time. We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race. We lost our sense of safety from foreign threats through the September 11, 2001, attacks. We lost our sense of prosperity through a recession followed by skyrocketing income inequality. We lost what was left of our shame when we went to war in Iraq based on a lie.
I grieved those losses while working in the industry that tells people what is worth grieving, that defines not only the terms of the debate but the participants. I watched the public shed old illusions only to embrace new ones manufactured in my line of work—fantasies spun out of fear and favor. I watched the media industry scramble to turn chaos into a palatable narrative, one the public could follow, one advertisers could sell.
The country had been upended, and along with it the news industry. When I started at the Daily News in 2000, the print newspaper was so popular that they had launched an evening supplement. The website, however, was barely off the ground, and merely an online replication of the print edition. Part of the rationale for this approach was speed: each print article needed to be manually coded in HTML and uploaded into a rigid template, taking five to ten minutes each time. All online articles were published at once in the dead of night, the only time when the website updated.
The laborious nature of running the website made posting breaking news nearly impossible. More significant than the difficulty, though, was a reticence to elevate the paper’s online component. The editorial staff of the New York Daily News viewed the paper as a holy scripture, one whose screeching, pun-ridden covers—IVANA BETTER DEAL, read the front-page story about Trump’s first divorce—lined the hallways like icons in a tabloid church. The internet, where anyone could write anything, was seen as a threat to the business model and an insult to the industry.
The newspaper had the power to freeze time. When we spent November through December 2000 wondering if the president would be Bush or Gore, our precise point of uncertainty would be captured when the paper closed at 3 A.M. The website would remain unchanged until the next day at 3 A.M., no matter what happened in the intervening hours. I remember going to breakfast with coworkers after an all-nighter on election night and hearing them rejoice that the Daily News got the print edition right while the rival New York Post had jumped the gun and printed that Bush won—an irony that our nation would have to live with for the next eight years, and not just in terms of preemptive newspaper stories. The print edition was considered gospel, not only to the staff but to the readers.
Reporters had twenty-four hours to figure out and fact-check a story, and in the year 2000, facts were not yet viewed as optional. This is not to say that the Daily News was a paragon of journalistic integrity, but that the news still followed the old Mark Twain adage: “Get your facts straight first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” We were not yet in a factual free-for-all: readers had the time to notice if we made mistakes, and we had the time to fix them. I did some reporting for the print side. My first article, in what now seems like ludicrous foreshadowing, was about Robert Hanssen—the FBI agent who was arrested in 2001 after spying for Russia for twenty-two years—writing pornographic stories on the internet, but my primary role was to keep the website operational. My small team was the least important part of the paper, until, one day, we weren’t.
I was out of town when the towers fell. I had left New York on September 8, 2001, with my boyfriend to drive to rural Wisconsin to stay at his friend’s cabin in the woods. The trip was a birthday treat; I had just turned twenty-three. On September 11, we woke up late and went out to get breakfast. This was the era before smartphones and we hadn’t turned on the TV, so we spent the early morning oblivious to the outside world. We were driving on a country road when we turned on the radio and heard Dan Rather saying that the World Trade Center had collapsed. Our first thought was that this was a delayed Y2K joke that had gotten on the air by mistake.
Within minutes we knew the news report was no lapsed parody. We could hear the anguish in Rather’s voice as he announced the estimated casualty count to be in the tens of thousands. I remember screaming, “It’s real, it’s real, turn around!” and crying as we raced back to the house, where we spent all day watching the one channel the TV could pick up while calling our friends to see if they were alive. My boyfriend—who later became my husband—worked at the Daily News with me; that was where we had met. We knew some of our coworkers would be downtown covering the attacks. We knew the wife of one of our mutual friends worked on the eightieth floor of the South Tower. We couldn’t get through to most people because cell phone lines were jammed: millions of Americans were running their own panicked checks.
Twelve hours later we realized we hadn’t eaten all day and went to get dinner in a small-town bar, the kind of Wisconsin bar that East Coast reporters now scour to find Trump voters. I remember the unanimity of the grief, and it isn’t anything I view with nostalgia. There’s no comfort in the ubiquity of the helpless witness, and that’s all we were, a packed room of Americans staring at a television with red and swollen eyes. I don’t remember returning to the house; I don’t remember sleeping, though I suppose I must have at some point. I remember the silence of the plane-free sky, and how we had come to Wisconsin to get away from the stress of the city, to come to a place quiet and still. Now that stillness encompassed the entire country—a purgatory stillness, unwanted and unwarranted.
I remember how badly we wanted to go back to New York. We wanted to get to work, to do something useful, to be home—though the New York we would return to was entirely different than the one we’d left. We hit the highway the next day, driving through Wisconsin and Illinois and Ohio and Pennsylvania, where we must have stopped somewhere to sleep for a few hours before driving on, because I remember it being dawn when we passed under a bridge with a gigantic American flag attached, and saw the smoke rising in the distance.
The next month was something I endured rather than lived. I remember the smell of dust and death when I would get too close to downtown, the exhausted construction workers telling me to turn back, the streets lined with candles and flyers of the “missing” who we knew—but could not say—were the dead. I remember a mother briefly mistaking me for her daughter and both of us sobbing when she was wrong. I remember the silence of the subway, the dazed pain mistaken for stoicism. I remember waking one October night to a booming sound, probably a car backfiring, and my neighbors running out onto the street screaming that the terrorists were back, it was happening again, it was happening again. I remember reading op-eds praising the resilience of New Yorkers, and thinking all resilience meant was bearing the big-city burden of living in public, your existence symbolic of something other than the sadness you carried inside.
I remember knowing the rest of my life would be different. We had passed into a darker era when I was barely an adult, and I felt a flicker of resentment quickly quashed by guilt. I was lucky, I told myself: I had been out of town, and no one close to me had died. My friend’s wife was late for work in the South Tower and arrived to see the attacks unfold from the ground. Several Daily News employees were injured by falling debris, and several people I knew lost friends or family members. My main purpose, as I saw it, was to be useful at work, where we were telling the stories of those who were lost. If that meant sorting through photos of body parts or captioning funeral photos or organizing obituaries for months on end, then I would do it. I would not complain, because every day I was reminded that it could all come undone like it did for the people whose senseless murders I now cataloged. I got engaged to my boyfriend a few months after 9/11. We were grabbing at milestones before they were stolen.
Work also changed—not just my job, but the media industry. In the midst of the terrorist attacks, a decision had to be made—should the Daily News update the website? My coworker told me of his anguished, sarcastic remark to the print editors: It would be okay to deviate from the paper and let the world know that the towers had collapsed—maybe, just maybe, the public had figured it out, and the website could be used to tell our readers something new. From then on, the website led the paper, gradually improving its technology to mirror the 24/7 news crawl that—once a rarity—now never left the TV screen. All news was BREAKING all the time, breathless coverage often elucidating nothing. This is one of the longest-lasting artifacts of 9/11.
Time was no longer frozen online. Cable news and the internet now determined the pace, filling a psychic void of trepidation. The public would never again be able to say that nobody warned them something terrible was coming, though the veracity of the terrible thing was often debatable. Every hour heralded a fresh false alarm, a change in the color-coded terror alert system, a foiled but deadly threat. Like every other media outlet, the Daily News spent the fall of 2001 on alert for anthrax attacks. At one point spilled Sweet’N Low resulted in a building evacuation and a visit from a hazmat team. New York tabloid media, once known for its jaded toughness, became jittery and hypervigilant. We jumped to update breaking news, we jumped at sudden noises, we jumped to conclusions when the government—the mayor, the police, the president—gave them to us. Conclusions were so enticing—they implied a reason and an end.
The attacks on September 11 hit two of the country’s biggest media hubs—New York and Washington, D.C. Proximity to these sites of mass murder left journalists raw, and trauma made them malleable. There was nothing abstract about the devastation, and there was nothing concrete about the cause. Rage and regret were ceaseless and personal, and it was our jobs to streamline our internal and external cacophony into a coherent narrative for public consumption.
That meant creating new heroes and villains. Rudy Giuliani, a washed-up scandal magnet who in August 2001 was making headlines for his illicit affairs and past shady dealings—which include, notably, protecting his longtime friend Trump from being investigated for criminal activity1—became recast by the national media as America’s Mayor. Reporters who once hated Giuliani were now willing to do anything he said, including vote for Republican billionaire Michael Bloomberg in the mayoral election, and they were reluctant to do things they needed to do, like demand real answers about why Giuliani had not taken greater precautions to protect the World Trade Center from terrorism after it had been attacked in 1993. Too many illusions had been shattered, so we built new ones, illusions that shone like the lights beaming out from the cavernous hole where the towers once stood.
The initial post-9/11 obedience of the media was forged in grief. I blame the media for a lot of things, but I don’t blame them for their coverage of the last months of 2001, which was rife with exhaustion and exploited by manipulative authorities. There’s an adage that journalism is meant to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. In late 2001, New Yorkers were the afflicted, and simplistic narrative arcs were a comfort. The complex horror of what occurred could be distilled into black and white, and for a while it felt right to do that—to salute the fallen, to vow revenge, to pretend “with us or against us” was a reasonable belief system. We couldn’t get any distance.
When the United States went to war in Afghanistan—the first US war of my adult life—I thought it was probably the right move, unaware that this war would still be going nearly two decades later. My eight-year-old son once asked me, “Has America ever not been at war?” and I told him that for about half my life, it was not, but for all of his life, it had been. He asked if America would be at war for the rest of his life. I thought of wars that break out within national borders, and wars that come from computers and aren’t called wars, and undeclared wars born of unprecedented treason. I said I didn’t know, but that I would try, in my way, to keep him safe. I didn’t tell him what he needed to be kept safe from, how deeply the lines between protector and assailant in US government had blurred. I didn’t tell him that it was the president, not foreign adversaries, who had called journalists like me “enemies of the people.”2
I told my son how some of my friends enlisted after 9/11 out of a sense of obligation to country, but that they kept having to fight the same wars over and over, and that this left them hurting inside. My son asked if the government could give them a special reward, like not having to work ever again because they had already tried so hard to protect people, and I held his face to my chest so he wouldn’t see me cry.
By 2019, 9/11 had become reduced to slogans and memes of varying severity. Politicians weaponized the tragedy and used it to cast aspersions on their enemies. In April 2019, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar received death threats after Trump tweeted a video falsely implying she approved of the 9/11 attacks. But while the trivialization of 9/11 was a gradual cultural phenomenon, Trump’s callousness about 9/11 dates back to the day it happened, when he responded to the death of thousands of New Yorkers by bragging about his buildings. “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest,” he told New York’s Channel 9 News hours after the attacks. “And now it’s the tallest.”3
This narcissism is typical of how Trump reacts to American suffering. When the foreclosure crisis and the recession destroyed the American economy, he thought only of how he would profit, saying, “People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is. I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”4 His predatory mind-set is evident in his obsession with nuclear weapons, which he believes can be used to create profitable catastrophes, and also evident in his interest in causing civilian deaths abroad. When told in 2018 that the CIA had delayed a drone attack until a target left his family, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?”5 Even as commander in chief, he cannot contain his apathy toward the deaths of others: from US citizens to foreign civilians to US troops whose names he can’t remember and whose families he insults.6
In 2011, Trump bragged he predicted 9/11 in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, a claim that, surprisingly, bears out somewhat.7 In the book, cowritten with freelance author Dave Shiflett, Trump wrote of the danger posed by Osama bin Laden and predicted that a mass terrorist attack on American soil was imminent. Though he mentioned the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, he did not specify the buildings as the new target.8 In 2015, Shiflett said he wrote the book because he needed the money and referred to it sarcastically as his first work of fiction.9 But he noted that Trump, in 2000, was obsessed with terrorism.10
Despite their disturbing nature, Trump’s 9/11 comments were not highlighted much by the press during the 2016 campaign. Throughout his run, he added new insults to his litany, including mocking the disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who had corrected Trump’s lie that thousands of Muslim Arabs in New Jersey cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers.11 The muted reaction to Trump’s alarming remarks about 9/11 speaks of a reluctance from the press to take him seriously. But there is also a greater theme at play. The tragedy was cheapened in national memory by a cynical frustration with the lack of accountability surrounding both 9/11 and the wars that followed. By 2016, Americans had gotten so used to mass corruption and the commodification of pain that, to some extent, the ability to discern threats had been lost.
The ability to discern threats is related to the ability to discern facts, and preserving that ability was a struggle well before Trump took office. Much has been made of the Trump administration’s embrace of “alternative facts,” but the confusion dates back to the 2000s: the era of “truthiness” and the rise of reality TV. The Bush years were marked not only by unpunished white-collar and war crimes but blatant confessions of mass manipulation from powerful elites. In 2002, Ron Suskind, a journalist for The New York Times, interviewed a Bush administration official later identified as adviser Karl Rove. Suskind recalls:
[Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”12
Rove made these remarks privately during the 2002 run-up to the Iraq War, when news outlets like the one I worked at ran op-eds claiming war in Iraq to be necessary and protesters to be traitors, worthy of being pelted with freedom fries. There was no question about the Bush administration’s agenda that could not be struck down with an outraged “But 9/11!” In retrospect, it is easy to see how the administration exploited not only the fears of the broader American public but the fear of New York and D.C. journalists, who had just spent months covering a mass murder in their backyard. Of course, we will be attacked again, the conventional wisdom went, and of course our authorities must be trusted even if their claims of weapons of mass destruction seem questionable—after all, undermining faith in authority was what the terrorists wanted to do!
This uncritical embrace of authority for its own sake is similar to the excuses given for the refusal of officials to address the attacks on the 2016 election in depth. (The Russians want us to distrust the integrity of the US election process, the pundit explains, therefore we must never, ever question what the Russians did to the election process!) The trustworthiness of a process or person was to be dictated from above by “history’s actors,” not decreed from below by the empirical observations of the masses. What Rove did in that interview—and what Trump does now—was take the ruse one step further, and admit to manipulation openly, not even giving the public the illusion of an honest broker.
When Rove’s comments were revealed in 2004, they shocked Americans with their arrogance. When Trump reveled in similar callousness during his campaign, it was decreed plainspoken authenticity by a press so used to seeing the powerful cover up ugly truths with pretty lies that they could not imagine that the ugliness was covering up something even worse.
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13 “He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”
Trump lives his life like the confirmation of a Hannah Arendt hypothesis—a bad trait in a person and a terrifying one in a president. Arendt, who died in 1975, did not live to see technology evolve to enable new kinds of liars: in particular, the invention of scripted reality as a mass medium. Trump had spent the 1980s and 1990s constructing his own reality through the press, employing methods ranging from telling tabloid tales of himself to reporters, to using vicious lawyers to shut down unflattering coverage, to enlisting the services of well-connected New York PR operatives to fill in whatever blanks remained.
Throughout it all, Trump continued to market himself as a risk-taker. On one hand, this is a euphemistic way to frame a lifetime of bankruptcies. But more to the point, it is untrue. Trump lived his entire adult life in a criminal cocoon, emerging in public to play the greatest version of himself while his backers behind the scenes, as Arendt puts it, “confront the unexpected”—things like laws and lawsuits and loudmouthed women.
This is not boldness: crime ceases to be risky when you know you will get away with it. In the twenty-first century, the corporate loopholes that enable white-collar crime double as nooses around the neck of Western democracy. In the Reagan era, Trump’s Republican backers helped devise the dissolution of corporate regulations. In the Bush era, they chipped away at political checks and balances, with the near elimination of accountability as a result. The Republican party provided the structure for an American autocracy enabled by corporate corruption. But it was television producers who gave the future autocrat his most important script.
The impact of The Apprentice is possibly the most underappreciated aspect of Trump’s presidential rise. For a large percentage of Americans—pretty much anyone born after 1984 and outside the New York area—The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004, was their introduction to Donald Trump, one of many rehabbed D-listers to land his own reality show during this decade. While early twenty-first-century reality TV shows like Survivor propelled average Americans and little-known hosts to stardom, slightly later series like The Osbournes inaugurated a trend of looking into the “real life” of fallen superstars. The most successful reality shows of the 2000s blended the desire for unfettered celebrity access—a desire stoked by gossip magazines like Us Weekly that proclaim “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”—with tales of ordinary contestants who battle for a celebrity’s approval. This was the format of American Idol, America’s Top Model, and The Apprentice—shows that all extended the lifespan of the winner into a “real-life career,” albeit one of varying longevity. These ventures lent legitimacy to the industries and, especially, to the host, whose supposed clout jumpstarted the lucky someone’s professional endeavors. The Apprentice trust-washed Trump’s criminal enterprises to an unsuspecting public.
When The Apprentice debuted, I was living in Istanbul with my husband. We had quit the Daily News in 2003 and decided to teach English abroad, winding up in Turkey, where we lived until 2004. This interlude is another part of my biography that startles people younger than me: “You went to Turkey to get away from high-level political corruption, media propaganda, and economic decline?” Common policy worries among my Turkish students included wondering when Turkey would join the EU—it never did—and how soon the Iraq War would end—it stretched on until 2011, destabilizing the entire Middle East. While we lived in Turkey, my husband and I would travel to southern cities like Adana or Mardin as tourists. These border regions now hold camps of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who in 2003 was a new democratic president greeted with hope, is now a dictator. In 2013, my Turkish friends fell out of touch after Erdoğan’s crackdown on free speech made them wary of communicating with political journalists. It has been horrifying to watch the hardship Turkey has endured, and it is surreal to look back and see aspects of its current corruption tangentially linked to an American reality show that debuted while we lived there.
I first heard about The Apprentice from my mother, who, nearly two decades after our tasteless christening of Trump Tower, was coming around to the guy. “Sarah, you need to come back home,” she told me in winter 2004. “You are missing too much TV. Donald Trump has a show where he pretends to be a businessman and he is so obnoxious. He’s like, ‘You’re fired!’ I love it; he’s terrible. The contestants are all trying to impress him. At first, I was like ‘I can’t believe this asshole has his own show’ but it’s perfect. This is exactly at his level, this is what he should have been doing the whole time. They’ve got him contained!”
For Americans like my mom, who had spent the 1980s and early 1990s gleefully loathing Donald Trump, The Apprentice was a hate-watch nostalgia trip: here was everything amusing about The Donald with none of the danger. He was now a scripted NBC product, unable to do harm beyond “firing” game show contestants. For Americans less familiar with Trump’s background—which includes most people I’ve met since moving to the Midwest in 2004—Trump came off as either a ridiculous blowhard (which is to say, an unremarkable reality TV presence) or a charismatic tycoon on a comeback. No one envisioned Trump as the future president of the United States, and few paid attention to what his family was doing behind the scenes—and how he used the show to gloss over his criminal ventures.
On a 2006 Apprentice episode, Trump announced the debut of a new property: Trump SoHo. “When it’s completed in 2008,” Trump declared, “this brilliant $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”14 Ivanka Trump joined the show that year to promote the property, playing the role of Trump’s “adviser”—the same amorphous role she now plays in the White House. She pledged to work with that season’s winner, Sean Yazbeck, to manage it.15 But as noted in chapter 2, Trump SoHo appears in significant respects to have been a money-laundering scheme posing as a real estate property. Trump had contrived Trump SoHo with mob-connected felon Felix Sater and his partner Tevfik Arif, both from the development company Bayrock Group. Another partner at Bayrock was Tamir Sapir, whose son Alex later joined Trump’s 2013 meetings in Moscow, and who is close with Lev Leviev, an oligarch and Putin confidant.16 The elder Sapir died in 2014 after a lengthy illness.17 Managing this crew was a rather ignominious prize offering for a TV game show contestant, and Yazbeck left Trump SoHo after only one year, before the property opened.18 The exact circumstances of his departure are not known because, as is common for reality television and associates of Donald Trump, everyone on The Apprentice had to sign an extensive NDA.19
In 2010, the Trump Organization was sued for fraud over Trump SoHo. The lawsuit describes their business practices as “a consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies.”20 In 2012, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were on their way to being charged with felony fraud until the district attorney backed off and received a large campaign contribution from Trump’s lawyer.21 Today Trump claims to have little familiarity with Bayrock and said in 2013 that he “didn’t even know what [Sater] looked like,”22 despite the fact that Sater had worked closely with Trump for years on Trump SoHo and had personally escorted the two oldest Trump children to the Kremlin in 2006, where Ivanka Trump spun around in Putin’s chair.23 Court documents show Trump is lying, but Sater is a genuine source of confusion for those chronicling the Trump/Russia saga. He is another career criminal who, like Trump, Epstein, and other wealthy New Yorkers, spent decades immersed in a criminal network without repercussions.
Sater was born in Russia in 1966, moved to Israel in 1973, and from there moved with his family to Brighton Beach in New York City, where, according to the FBI, his father, Mikhail Sheferovsky, worked as an underboss for Semion Mogilevich and was later arrested for extortion.24 A childhood friend of Michael Cohen, Sater was born into the world of organized crime, but he navigated it in a novel way.25 After a brief career on Wall Street, he was arrested in 1993 for slashing a man’s face in a bar fight and served fifteen months in prison. He was arrested again in 1998 in connection to a $40 million penny stock pump-and-dump scheme described by investigative economist James S. Henry as “an innovative joint venture among four New York crime families and the Russian mob aimed at bringing state-of-the-art financial fraud to Wall Street.”26
This point is crucial to grasp: by the mid-1990s, the influence of the Italian mafia in New York City had severely waned. This decline was first spurred by Giuliani’s prosecutions, but was furthered by an influx of criminals from the former USSR due to the loosening of their immigration laws and the abuse of the Israeli “right to return” policy by mobsters who then moved from Israel to the United States. The Russian mafia operated differently than the Italian mafia, focusing less on small-time, local operations. Instead, they infiltrated themselves into Wall Street, corporations, and other avenues of transnational white-collar crime. The loosening of financial regulations in the late Clinton era and throughout the Bush era allowed elite criminal networks to flourish, contributing to the soaring income inequality and corporate corruption that decimated the fortunes of average Americans—a point Mueller himself raised in his 2011 speech about this new incarnation of organized crime.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed was the Russian mafia and its international associates. US and international law enforcement had been cracking down on the Russian mafia as it grew in the 1990s, but in the aftermath of 9/11, those resources were reallocated. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies shifted their focus to combatting terrorism, and the American public came to see al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations as the greatest danger they faced—a grave miscalculation. Since 9/11, 103 people have been killed in the United States by Islamic terrorists, acting either alone or in groups.27 The death toll from transnational mafia activities including the drug trade, human trafficking, and murder for hire is unclear—due in part to the threat being ignored, and in part to the shadowy nature of their activity—but is larger than the death toll from Islamic terrorism due to the sheer scope of the crimes. Add to that financial crimes resulting in mass economic instability and all its attendant consequences—loss of homes, jobs, health insurance—and you will arrive at an even higher death toll.
Much as Trump and his defenders try to water down the definition of crime by parading their corrupted properties on national television, those fighting for a free and just society must broaden it in response to this new nexus of wealthy, criminal elites. White-collar crime is violent crime: it’s called blood money for a reason. Over the last forty years, white-collar crime, state crime, and organized crime have merged to the point that criminal networks now control governments, which allows them to redefine what they are doing as legal, exonerate themselves, and persecute those who seek to uphold the rule of law. The mafia manages the military, the crooks control the courts. In other countries, this would be called “an authoritarian coup.” In America, mealy-mouthed officials call our transition into a mafia state “deeply troubling” and do little to curb the damage.
Which brings us to the eternal question: why did the FBI and other law enforcement agencies not stop such an obvious threat to national security as Trump running for president? Felix Sater brings a disturbing twist to that tale. Following his arrest in 1998, Sater turned FBI informant, allegedly providing information on mafia activity until 2001.28 As part of his cooperation deal, his court records were sealed for ten years by Loretta Lynch, who was then serving as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and who later served as attorney general from 2015 to 2017 in the Obama administration. Sater became involved with the Trump Organization through Bayrock after 9/11, when the FBI was preoccupied with Islamic terrorism.
In 2006—the same year Trump SoHo was showcased on The Apprentice, the same year Sater took the Trump children to the Kremlin, and the same year Manafort moved into Trump Tower—Michael Cohen became Trump’s personal lawyer. In 2015, Sater and Cohen exchanged a series of emails saying they were conspiring to gain Vladimir Putin’s support in bringing Trump to power.29 “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in an email to Cohen. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
By 2010, Sater was handing out business cards presenting himself as a senior adviser to Trump, complete with a Trump Organization email address.30 He had moved into circles of respectability, named the “Man of the Year” in both 2010 and 2014 by the Port Washington, New York, Jewish religious organization Chabad, whose members also included Cohen, and of which Arif, who is not Jewish, is a benefactor. (Mueller investigated this branch of Chabad in 2017 but never revealed his findings.)31 Sater told the Los Angeles Times that he freelanced as an informant to the US government during the 2000s and spent the decade “building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night”32—an interesting claim given the rumored connection between al-Qaeda and the Russian mafia operation run by Sater family associate Mogilevich.33 Former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was murdered by Kremlin agents in 2006, claimed in 2005 that Mogilevich has had a good relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin since 1994 or 1993 and that Mogilevich is in contact with al-Qaeda and sells them weapons.
Given that Sater had worked as an FBI informant during the crucial years of 1998 to 2001, that the FBI had named Mogilevich their top priority in 2011, and that Sater had worked with the Trump family in a project that appears to have involved significant money-laundering, it is disconcerting at best that the FBI did not raise any concerns when Trump ran for office and won the nomination. Ascending to that level of candidacy not only gave Trump access to classified intelligence, but allowed his campaign team—by that time led by Manafort—access as well. While many of Trump’s mafia and illicit Russia ties were already in the public domain, and should have been enough to prompt an investigation as the Kremlin began to show its influence over the Trump campaign, the Sater link makes plausible deniability near impossible. There is no way the FBI could claim that they did not know who Sater was, or that they were unaware he had engaged in illicit dealings with Trump.
But the FBI seemed impassive to this threat—and continued to be so even after Trump won and began firing any federal official likely to investigate him. In his memoir, former FBI official Andrew McCabe—one of several experts on the Russian mafia purged by Trump—wrote that meeting Trump was like meeting a mob boss: “In this moment, I felt the way I’d felt in 1998, in a case involving the Russian mafia, when I sent a man I’ll call Big Felix in to meet with a Mafia boss named Dimitri Gufield. The same kind of thing was happening here in the Oval Office.”34 This passage reads like a twisted in-joke about Sater, a man who has been both connected to the mob and informant to the FBI as well as a Trump colleague, and who has spent the Trump presidency hobnobbing with celebrities while blowing off subpoenas, seemingly immune from consequence. Combined with the removal of Mogilevich from the Ten Most Wanted list in 2015 and the FBI’s unexplained reexamination of Clinton’s emails immediately before the election, this evidence calls into question both Sater’s and the FBI’s agendas.
Trump tends to flaunt his criminal associations along with his dictatorial ties. He bragged about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and hit the town with scumbag aficionado Roy Cohn. As president, he pardoned notorious criminals like Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby and cultivated friendships with authoritarian leaders like Kim Jong Un, Erdoğan, and Putin. It is rare for Trump to hide even the sleaziest of contacts, but he has taken pains to conceal his well-documented relationship with Sater. The reasons behind his reticence remain unclear, but may have to do with Sater being a nexus between US law enforcement and foreign oligarchs, and probably a revealing resource into the intricacies of dealings that Trump strives to keep hidden. The unpredictable Sater lives in the unscripted reality in which Trump feels such discomfort.
But that is why the script exists. Trump marketed Trump SoHo as an Apprentice prize, covering up a crime scene with the glitz that flourished during the Bush years—an ethos further cultivated by the cutthroat and aspirational ethos of reality TV. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but the 2000s were full of them if you had money and lacked shame. The war on terror had made old-school American villains seem quaint and harmless by comparison. In the 2000s, even the Gotti mafia family had its own reality show, while Ivanka made her own reality TV debut on a short-lived 2001 show called Born Rich. The Apprentice allowed the Trumps to combine glamour and crime into a new family narrative, knowing they could always claim “It’s not real; it’s just reality TV” if things fell apart.
“Take him literally, but not seriously,” faux-sages recommended of Trump after the election.35 This is the worst advice possible to understand a media-savvy con man skilled at repackaging crimes as ventures and accomplices as advisers and costars. The Apprentice is a show built on a lie and the willingness of ordinary Americans to buy into that lie—that Trump is a respected businessman running legitimate enterprises. It is the same lie upon which the Trump presidency is based.
Dictatorship is a branding operation. The ubiquity of the dictator’s name and image, the repetition of slogans and symbols, the hollow rituals (like “elections” with preordained winners, like “firings” with preordained losers) all contribute to the building of the spectacular state and its captive audience. This pageantry is something authoritarians and reality TV producers understand in equal measure, and Trump inhabits the worlds of both. His brand of celebrity lent itself to the presidential race and his eventual win, and the dismissal of him as a serious candidate by national security officials was deeply naive. It would be bad enough had Trump merely emerged as a bigoted demagogue, but add long-standing ties to a transnational crime syndicate affiliated with the Kremlin and one ends up with a human road map to an American kleptocracy.
The Apprentice conditioned Americans to accept fraud as entertainment, to expect the reputational rehab of ruined celebrities, and to not consider that behind the fakeness of the show lay something very dark and real. In 2015, after Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, NBC canceled The Apprentice on moral grounds. Freed from his contract, Trump continued his reality show through cable news, which lacked the fleeting fortitude of NBC. In the end, The Apprentice canceled America.
And so, the grift continued. Between 2007 and 2018, buyers tied to the former Soviet Union made eighty-six cash purchases at Trump properties. In 2018, Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed that the purchases indicated evidence of money-laundering.36 The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) also noted that the Trump sales fit the prototype: “Criminals can use all-cash purchases to make payments in full for properties and evade scrutiny—on themselves and the origin of their wealth—that is regularly performed by financial institutions in transactions involving mortgages.”37
Despite this statement, the Treasury did not pursue the legality of Trump’s enterprises when he became the nominee. This is perhaps due to the fact that by the 2016 election, the Treasury had been infiltrated by Russia, an event that occurred in 2015 but was not reported on until December 2018 in an explosive expose in BuzzFeed.38 When Trump ascended to the White House and showed no anxiety over divestment of his business empire, it was likely not only due to his typical lack of shame, but because his backers had stocked the system with lackeys whose loyalty to Trump and foreign oligarchs overrode their loyalty to America.
To this day, nothing has been done about the infiltration of the Treasury, save the indictment of the whistle-blower, Natalie Mayflower Edwards, who exposed that Treasury officials had been communicating with Russia for years via back-channel Gmail and Hotmail accounts. The magnitude of the Treasury breach has also never been explained by the Obama administration, to which the breach was reported in 2016. According to a senior FinCEN intelligence analyst, illicit coordination with Russia was disguised as an investigation into ISIS. “Russia’s subsequent actions suggest that was just a cover,” the official said. “What we were seeing with Russia was the fruition of a long-term strategy to try and compromise Treasury by cultivating civil servants. That’s why we sounded the alarm and reported it.”39 This internal threat to national security has only grown since 2015. The Treasury is now run by Steven Mnuchin, a lackey of Trump and fellow protégé of Trump’s old adviser Carl Icahn. Mnuchin has gone out of his way to ease sanctions on Russian oligarchs—in particular, Manafort’s former employer Oleg Deripaska—despite protest from Congress.40
Again, basic vetting by state officials—particularly during Trump’s “I have nothing to do with Russia” campaign phase—would have highlighted shady connections between the Trumps and Russia that were already in the public domain. Prior to the 2016 election, the guileless nature of the Trump sons made their foreign cash influx easy to trace. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. announced at a New York real estate conference: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”41
Donald Jr.’s comment is the kind of remark Trump defenders like to insist is innocent. After all, there is nothing illegal about doing business in Russia, which in the Bush era was a US partner in the “war on terror.” (While claiming to be a partner to the West, Putin was committing his own acts of terrorism abroad, such as poisoning dissidents like the London-based Litvinenko in 2006; much like the United States, the United Kingdom underplayed the Russian threat for decades.) But to rationalize Trump’s disproportionate dependence on Russia one has to ignore the broader context every time, viewing each instance as disparate and therefore unimportant.
It is understandable why some find this cop-out appealing: the overall pattern is ominous. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States has been gutted in every sense: economically, psychologically, and under Trump, militarily, with even the secretary of defense position remaining unfilled for eight months. Post-9/11 America inaugurated an era of panic over fabricated catastrophes and false reassurances about real ones. The Trump era has only exacerbated those tendencies, leaving everyday Americans struggling to process horrific new revelations about which officials rarely provide clear answers. It can therefore be comforting to dismiss disturbing details rather than focus on the big picture. To reconcile with an attack on America as a continuum—instead of the result of an aberrant atrocity like 9/11—is to contend with the prospect of permanent dysfunction.
In the post-9/11 era, proof lost its value along with the people who produced it. The digital revolution that was supposed to liberate journalists—allowing breaking news to flow in real time and provide clarity into ongoing crises—instead led to mass layoffs. Older and experienced reporters were replaced by younger and wealthier content producers who could pay to play in the country’s most expensive cities. People who can pay to play are less likely to report on corruption, inequality, or injustice, because they are less likely to recognize it exists. By the end of the decade, the reality of Rove’s “reality-based community” had changed. Elites wrote about fellow elites, while the rest of us inhabited an America we rarely saw represented, a ghost world of permanent precarity and dead dreams.
When born-rich Jared Kushner, at age twenty-six, bought The New York Observer in 2006, it seemed of a piece with the era. I remember listing it as an example of why I had quit journalism and left New York, where the cost of living had soared under new mayor Michael Bloomberg and where panicked conformity ran rampant in creative fields. Journalism had become an industry designed for the Kushners of the world, not for those who would deign to expose them. The most influential industries—policy, law, academia, entertainment—were restructured to hire and service the wealthy by the end of the 2000s, often using the recession as a pretext to do so.
But the extent of the ramifications for America were not yet clear. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity. I wrote that in 2013, bemoaning the loss of economic opportunity. I did not realize I was writing about national security as well.