On Halloween 2016, I took my kids trick-or-treating in my neighborhood, came back, and found my Twitter timeline looking like a John le Carré novel.
What I had been suggesting for months had been confirmed: Trump was a Kremlin asset. To say that Trump is an asset is not to say he directly follows Kremlin orders, but that the Kremlin had exploited or compromised him in order to carry out their goals. This had seemed probable for years given his relationship with Russian oligarchs and his unwavering reverence for Putin. In fact, his admiration of Putin was his most consistent foreign policy stance. His relationship is only further exacerbated by the many Trump campaign staffers with ties to the Kremlin or subsidiaries like WikiLeaks, and by summer 2016 it seemed obvious that the Kremlin saw the Trump campaign as a useful vehicle for its anti-American objectives—at the least—and that Trump had no objection to being used.
The best argument that Trump was not a Kremlin asset was the belief that, if a Kremlin asset were running for president, surely someone would step in and stop it. Every day of inaction by state officials therefore validated the Trump camp’s insistence that the Russia story was a hoax, or at the least, not a serious threat to US security and sovereignty. Every time Trump’s lies were normalized, every insistence that Clinton was destined to win, every day someone proclaimed that even if he won, checks and balances would constrain his agenda, served to soothe the consciences of reluctant Trump voters and cynical nonvoters alike.
As evidence mounted, however, accepting Trump’s assertion that he had “nothing to do with Russia”1 became an act of willful denial. Trump asked Putin to get him Clinton’s emails at a July 27 press conference; the RNC platform was altered by Paul Manafort in August to appease his Kremlin-friendly oligarch benefactors by reducing aid to Ukraine.2 That same month, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid warned that the threat from Russia “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results”—a damning assertion that received little attention.3 In October, Hillary Clinton proclaimed from the debate stage that Trump was a puppet of Putin—an evidence-based claim that was framed by much of the media as a subjective smear. The Obama administration largely remained silent, but finally admitted on October 7 that “the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.”4 But that admission—an admission of a foreign attack—was drowned out by the release of the Access Hollywood video the same day.
On October 28, James Comey reignited suspicion against Clinton by declaring that an FBI investigation of her emails had been reopened. The FBI targeting of Clinton, who turned out to be innocent, and simultaneous silence on Trump prompted a second letter from Reid, who stated: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”5 Reid accused Comey of violating the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits partisan activity by federal employees.6 On November 7, Comey backtracked on Clinton, stating that there was no longer a new investigation, but refused to comment on the FBI’s inquiry into Trump. During that ten-day period, roughly eight million Americans voted early, with Comey’s insinuation of Clinton’s guilt the final word they heard on the issue.
But the truth, or at least a rough cut of it, was working its way out. On October 31, 2016, journalist David Corn at Mother Jones published the first summary of what would become known as the Steele dossier.7
Corn reported that an intelligence source, who in January 2017 was revealed by BuzzFeed to be veteran British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, had, during the course of an investigation for a private intelligence firm, discovered that Trump had been working with the Kremlin since at least 2011. Corn said Steele maintained that “Trump and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.”8 Steele told Corn that he was shaken by what he had found, and that he had gone to the FBI with evidence, only to see those members of the FBI turn around and give the information to members of Trump’s inner circle. Later, the founder of the private intelligence firm who hired Steele to compile the dossier, Fusion GPS, stated that the publication of the dossier had led to the sudden death of one dossier source, implying that Steele’s life might also be at risk.9
Steele was horrified when The New York Times ran a story on November 1—the day after Corn’s bombshell—titled INVESTIGATING TRUMP, FBI SEES NO CLEAR LINK TO RUSSIA. The article, which was frequently cited over the next year to validate Trump’s claim that his illicit ties to Russia were an elaborate hoax, contradicted what both Steele and other interviewees had said. The editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, had ordered the article to be rewritten so that it reflected an alternate and inaccurate narrative—one contradicted by his writers’ own interviews with FBI officials.10 One of the authors of the article, Eric Lichtblau, later quit the Times in part because of the way Baquet had handled that article. The New York Times public editor, Liz Spayd, wrote about how the newspaper had chosen to ignore or play down Trump’s Russia ties and illicit attempts to influence the election in a November column.11 She was harshly criticized by upper management,12 and in May 2017 The New York Times fired Spayd and then eliminated the public editor position entirely.13
Corn’s exposé shook loose the hesitation many journalists felt about revealing what they had heard about Trump’s decades of illicit activity, a hesitancy based not only on fear of retaliation, but fear of sounding hysterical. After all, the story sounded far-fetched. Obviously, the host of Celebrity Apprentice could not be a foreign asset, even though all evidence indicated that he was? Disparate political observers began revealing the details they had heard about the Steele dossier, which I had first encountered through the 2016 rumor mill, as well. The main rumor was that the Russian government had obtained recordings of Trump engaged in illegal or compromising sexual activity abroad.
As I scrolled through Twitter, I noticed that an independent journalist, Andrea Chalupa, had tweeted: “In intel circles, the story goes FSB filmed Trump in an orgy while in Russia. Yes, this all ends in a Trump sex tape.” I added my own tweet to hers—“OK, I guess since it’s out there now, I’ve heard this multiple times as well … with some very nasty details. No confirmation though.” The next day, the two of us ended up side by side in a New York magazine piece detailing the numerous Trump sexual kompromat theories.14 We refer to this article now as our “wedding photo.” It was the perverse beginning of an enduring friendship.
Andrea and I began to text each other about what we had heard. What she told me went beyond even my worst suspicions. Her sister, Alexandra Chalupa, had been working as a part-time researcher for the Democratic National Committee when she heard that Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. The Chalupa sisters, Ukrainian-Americans from California, were alarmed since they had tracked Manafort’s dangerous intervention into Ukraine’s politics in 2014, as well as his long history as an operative working for blood money.
In spring of 2016, Alexandra informed the Democratic Party of her suspicion that Manafort was going to intervene in the race on behalf of Russia. She also alerted the FBI. She told them that her email had been hacked and that she was afraid Russia had penetrated the DNC and would use their private emails to blackmail or humiliate them. Her claim was soon validated by the summer 2016 release of over twenty thousand stolen emails by WikiLeaks, and was further validated by the Mueller Report and the multiple indictments Manafort faced in 2017. Manafort’s criminal history was so expansive he was initially set to potentially face over three hundred years in prison15—until the judge in his case, T. S. Ellis, was threatened to the point that he had to be protected by US Marshals.16 Ellis said that the jury was also receiving threats. He refused to make their names public, saying he feared for their safety.17 Despite the threats, Manafort’s trial led to a conviction, which Manafort then attempted to circumvent through a plea deal with Mueller—a deal that he broke. At Manafort’s sentencing months later, Ellis shocked the country by proclaiming Manafort—now well known by Americans as a crime machine—a man who had led an “otherwise blameless life.” He reduced his sentence to below the recommended guidelines, prompting a series of ethics inquiries that were later dismissed.18 No one followed up on the threats to Ellis—a frightening pattern that played out with many who attempted to hold the Trump team accountable.
Alexandra Chalupa was one of the first Americans to face threats for investigating illicit activity between the Trump campaign and Kremlin operatives. Throughout 2016, she endured break-ins into her home and car, menacing voicemails, stalkers who followed her while she was out with her children, and other acts of intimidation intended to silence her.19 In fall 2017, when the Manafort indictment had made it impossible for Trump’s team to deny their relationship with Russia, they tried to flip the script and say the real danger was Alexandra Chalupa asking Ukrainians about Manafort during her independent research—an inquiry she had made out of concern for the national security of the United States. Among those who have targeted her include Rudy Giuliani, the Kremlin, Sean Hannity and other Fox News hosts, and Matthew Whitaker (later interim attorney general), whom Manafort told to target Chalupa well into 2017, when Manafort himself was under FBI investigation.20 Alexandra Chalupa contends today that Manafort was targeting her even from prison, a plausible claim given he was indicted for additional criminal activity behind bars, which he was able to commit after inexplicably being given internet access.
Along with her sister Alexandra, Andrea Chalupa became the subject of hit pieces meant to inspire people to discredit their findings and incite people to commit violence against them through inflammatory allegations. As Andrea’s friend and later her partner on a podcast we cohost, Gaslit Nation, as well as an outspoken public figure myself, I was similarly targeted. Death threats are now part of my life. Over the years, the threats have varied in their intensity, and I have had to have a private security team at several speaking events. As a writer, I lack the ability to afford that level of security at home. But as someone who has studied authoritarian states my whole life, I know how this tends to end. I try to take the attitude my fellow St. Louisan writer Elijah Lovejoy held over a century ago and speak out while I have the chance.
One of the most horrific realizations when your government is hijacked from the inside is that there is no official to whom you can turn—because it is rare to find an official who cannot be turned by a corrupt operator. Living for legacy, living for security, living for money—it makes no difference, they are not living for you. There had been a coup, and we were on our own.
By November 2016, the FBI had begun to exhibit bizarre behavior, including tweeting out files praising Fred Trump as a philanthropist from its little-used Twitter vault account, while simultaneously releasing negative files about the Clintons. Combined with Comey’s actions, this contributed to one of Trump’s most successful methods of attack: ceaseless insinuations of wrongdoing that provide little new information about their target but create confusion and suspicion.
On November 1, a former State Department official, Steve Pieczenik, announced in a video that the Trump campaign had pulled off a coup with FBI assistance and that Obama was standing down.21 Most people ignored this because Pieczenik is regarded as a kook, but this dismissal displays a gross miscalculation of how authoritarian states operate in the digital age. In authoritarian states, conspiracy narratives function both as a method of intimidation and as a way to rally followers. To dismiss those who propagate such narratives as “only conspiracists” is to ignore that Trump is a conspiracist who is surrounded by other conspiracists—and that the narratives of seasoned intelligence officials like Steele and alleged lunatics like Pieczenik were lining up in horrific ways.
There is no “normal” narrative anymore. The paranoia of American politics is nothing new, but in the twenty-first century, it was newly exploitable. “In a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible,” wrote Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics.22 That minority buried itself in institutions for decades, infiltrating, debasing, and over time merging with the organizations they sought to destroy. They hid in plain sight, pulling the fringes to the center, and thereby ensured that the center could not hold—and that exposure of this corruption would be dismissed as conspiracy-mongering. What Americans rejected in 2016 was not trust but discernment. A criminal can bury the truth in a conspiracy because no one will believe it except those accustomed to parsing absurdities, who are then mocked as insane.
By midnight on November 8, my worst fears came true. Trump had won the election, and the GOP had won the Senate by margins that went wildly against polling expectations, including in my state of Missouri. I thought it was plausible that Trump had legitimately won Missouri, but the results of the governor and Senate races were unexpected. I was not surprised when the loser of the Senate race, Jason Kander, started an election integrity advocacy group after his loss, though Kander never linked this effort to his own defeat. I was also not surprised when, over the course of the next few years, officials gradually revealed that Russian hackers had targeted election systems in 2016 in all fifty states.23 The most damning evidence of this was brought forward by NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force veteran who anonymously sent proof of the attacks to the website The Intercept. The Intercept then published the leaked information in a way that made Winner easy for officials to identify and then arrest.24 The Intercept is home to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist famous for aiding Kremlin abettor Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who gained asylum in Russia after fleeing the United States with classified documents.
In 2018, Winner was jailed under the Espionage Act and was given the longest sentence in US history for her particular offense, totaling sixty-three months.25 She is banned from speaking to the press. No government official has bothered to interview Winner about her explosive findings, not even Robert Mueller.26 There remains to this day a publicly available NSA document showing that US voting infrastructure was attacked. It floats around cyberspace like an unheeded warning, attracting no hearings beyond the one that sent Winner to prison. Winner was soon joined by other federal whistle-blowers: Natalie Mayflower Edwards, indicted for exposing that Russia had infiltrated the Treasury in 2015; and Tricia Newbold, a White House employee suspended for exposing that security clearances had been knowingly given to staffers who violated national security protocol.27 Among those staffers were Jared and Ivanka. The Trump administration whistle-blowers have all been women whose findings are marginalized by officials and the press. This is not surprising. To take the evidence seriously means to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of Trump’s election, and all of the decisions—appointments, laws, arrests—that came after. Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.
At 3 A.M. on November 9, after Trump had been announced as president-elect, I called Andrea Chalupa. We had never spoken on the phone, but I did not know who else to turn to. She was among the few people unsurprised and determined to face this grim new reality head on. We spent hours reviewing the results and examining the possibilities of what had happened. By the morning, we had come to the conclusion that Trump, working with an international criminal syndicate connected to the Kremlin, had illegally influenced the 2016 election, possibly altered vote results, and would build a kleptocracy while curtailing civil rights, starting with immigrants and anyone who is not white. This turned out to be what happened, but at the time our serious concerns were dismissed as hysteria. The level of denial in the media, especially among New York and D.C. establishment reporters, was staggering. I spent weeks privately begging high-profile reporters with more connections and resources than me to follow the Trump team money trail. I urged them to start with Manafort, only to be told by them that Manafort was not a problem. Manafort had been on the Sunday shows, they assured me, and networks don’t put criminals on the Sunday shows.
Despite these obstacles, Andrea and I kept going. Autocracy moves fast, and once an autocrat gets in, it is very hard to get them out. We figured we had two and a half months to educate the country about what to expect when your country is expecting a dictator. We were joined in our efforts by many other journalists, scholars, activists, and concerned citizens. We launched a movement demanding a vote audit in the three states with the closest victory margins—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. On November 4, Manafort had abruptly reemerged on Twitter to declare that “battleground states” were “moving to Trump en masse.”28 The Mueller report later revealed that Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were the states Manafort had designated as “battleground states” during his illicit meetings with alleged Kremlin operative Konstantin Kilimnik.29 But the vote audit movement failed. Not only was there no audit, but the call to action was hijacked by Putin gala guest and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who used some of the money panicked citizens had donated to pay her own legal fees.30
I barely slept from Election Day until the inauguration. I reached out to everyone I saw expressing the same concerns I did in an attempt to build a coalition. I did multiple interviews nearly every day, trying to warn the public. I wrote a series of articles explaining how American authoritarianism would happen. This is the same work I had done throughout 2016, writing mostly for Canadian and Dutch outlets because they were more willing to print stark criticisms of Trump than American outlets. They were also more willing to abide my most controversial Trump thesis, which was that he would win. Meanwhile, my book The View from Flyover Country, a collection of essays discussing the collapse of institutional stability and social trust in the United States, suddenly became a bestseller. People asked me if I was happy about that and I told them if they thought I could possibly be happy right now, then they had missed the point of the book.
Over the course of 2016, I never played down what I saw coming except on a few occasions when I thought voicing my worst fears would do more harm than good, and those instances haunt me still. An acquaintance in St. Louis told me with nervous excitement that his mother, from Pakistan, had become a US citizen, and was voting for the first time. He asked me to assure them that Trump would not win, because his mother was terrified of being persecuted as a Muslim immigrant who wears a hijab. I told him I thought Clinton had a good shot, which was the best I could offer without lying outright, and he texted me a picture of his mother in line for the voting booth that I still keep on my phone. I am the last person who needs to be reminded of the human toll of this administration, but I cannot bring myself to delete this photo, a reminder of what we once had, and how in a single day so much more than an election was lost.
From Election Day onward, I took every public speaking invitation I was offered, most unpaid, in order to try to reach people more powerful than me and convince them that our country was in grave danger. This effort included debating Matthew Boyle, a staff writer at Breitbart, at an international conference on media in Denmark in late November 2017. I had been asked to speak at this conference before the election, with the organizers assuming that Clinton would win and we would be discussing Trump’s next media moves. But with Trump the president-elect, Brexit architect Nigel Farage a featured conference speaker, and a series of threats indicating that I was not safe abroad, I was assigned a round-the-clock undercover bodyguard. This was kept secret throughout the conference and I have never discussed it in public. My bodyguard watched silently from the sidelines as I answered a question about Breitbart hiring members of ethnic minorities to write bigoted articles about other ethnic minorities:
I do think it matters what your editorial makeup is, and I think that if our media wasn’t dominated by white men you might see different coverage and different concerns being emphasized. But I think the most important thing is: What is the result of this coverage? It doesn’t matter who is working there if you’re putting out anti-Semitic content, anti-Muslim content, anti-black content, conspiracy theories—things that lead to actual hate crimes, things that lead to physical assaults, things that lead to kids in schools getting bullied right now as a result of this rhetoric. That rhetoric matters. Whether you say that you’re just kidding, whether you say someone of this ethnicity or race works there—that doesn’t matter. What matters is who gets hurt. And the obligation of a journalist is to serve the public. The obligation of a politician is to serve the public. And the public is not getting served. The public is being served conspiracy theories and hate rhetoric, and it’s leading to actual repercussions that are terrible for our democracy, and have hurt people badly, and I don’t think that journalists are doing a good job standing up for the most vulnerable citizens which is absolutely what their priority should be.31
The audience, comprised of journalists from around the world, applauded hesitantly, most looking stunned, a few looking angry, and fewer still looking pleased. I do not think most of the white journalists understood why I spoke with such urgency, but maybe they do now. I hope so.
In January, I was invited to a conference of journalists and tech corporation employees in Palo Alto to discuss the problem of “fake news,” a hot topic after the election. This event was one of many post-Trump misadventures in which I was invited somewhere fancy as a token “red state journalist who had predicted Trump would win,” leading people who had apparently never read anything I had written to assume I also approved of that outcome. When I opened my mouth to speak, they seemed as startled by my warnings about Trump as they were that I had all my teeth. I learned over the next year that many in coastal media seemed to assume I led a Deliverance-style life surrounded by a squad of MAGA acolytes. At one point, NPR requested an interview with me about rural life, which I declined, explaining that I lived in St. Louis. They said that’s why they asked me, and I then had to explain to them that St. Louis was a metro area of three million people. Finally, I had to clarify, once and for all, that yes, I lived in Missouri, and no, I did not live on a farm. A variation of this theme has followed me for years, often recited by the same people who accuse the residents of my state of living in a bubble.
Almost no one I met at the Palo Alto conference seemed to grasp the severity of the Trump crisis, which was disappointing given the oversized role social media companies had played in fueling it. But there were encouraging developments happening elsewhere. That week, the Steele dossier was published on BuzzFeed. I remember sitting in my California hotel room, relief rushing through me. I was grateful that it had dropped before the inauguration, thinking that its publication had to bring repercussions or at least a straightforward inquiry. It is a bad moment in American life when you are praying that the president-elect allegedly hiring hookers to piss on a bed may be what forces state officials to stop a transnational crime syndicate. But there were no meaningful consequences. The salacious details stuck; the serious problems lived on. No one could see the forest for the treason.
The night before Trump’s inauguration, I was invited to speak about media and democracy at a panel held by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I went to Chicago planning to emphasize the work of Wayne Barrett, the New York journalist who had done more to shed light on Trump’s illegalities than any other reporter. Five minutes after I got onstage, I received a text telling me Barrett had died. (Given that this book is full of suspicious deaths, I will state that by all accounts, Barrett died of cancer.) I was saddened to hear of his passing, because he had done the work every journalist should do: speak truth to power and follow the money. In Chicago, I encouraged the audience to examine Barrett’s public archives chronicling Trump’s criminality, reciting what would become a mantra so frequent people have joked it will be emblazoned on my tombstone—“It’s in the public domain, it’s been there the whole time!”—and flew back to St. Louis the next day.
I had scheduled my flight so that I would be sure to miss the inauguration. But my plane landed a half hour early, meaning I arrived just as Trump’s speech was starting. I was at the opposite end of the terminal from the exit. This meant that in order to get out of the airport I had to walk down a long hallway lined with two dozen gates, and in each gate was a television blaring the same sick spectacle, with Trump’s voice booming over the otherwise silent terminal. As I walked down the corridor, I glanced at the faces of waiting travelers watching the speech. I tried to guess where they were from and how they were feeling, wanting to gauge the public mood as Trump bleated out his hostilities.
But after a dozen gates the hypnotic sway was too much for me. It reminded me of the Trump rally I had attended at the Peabody Opera House eight months earlier, the one where I had watched a crowd become a mob. Now that same dynamic, that familiar fascist script, was playing out on the Capitol steps. I ran down the corridor past the dystopian duplicate screens, out the airport doors into the freezing air, into a cab driven by an immigrant who also wanted the damn thing off, past the landmarks from the airport drive that mark the familiarity of home, the parade of Dollar Tree and Dollar General and Family Dollar, the strip mall with China King and the husk of an empty Firestone, the rotting remains of a century-old theater from St. Louis’s bygone boom days, and then onto my street, inside my house, where I felt like I should cry, but by then I didn’t have it in me.
Trump was part of a wider movement of white supremacists and international kleptocrats seeking to dismantle Western democracy. I was one of the few American journalists to warn of this crisis in advance, and this unwanted distinction resulted in my being in great demand to speak on the issue abroad. In January, I was flown to the United Kingdom for a conference on press freedom and disinformation, where some Brits told me horror stories of Brexit while others assured me that they would figure it out, they would keep calm and carry on, this idiotic crisis surely would not undo a millennium of British sovereignty. I was not so sure. Brexit was a direct precursor of the US election, featuring not only the same largely unexpected result, but the same players behind the scenes.
In early 2017, a tenacious UK journalist, Carole Cadwalladr, had started to investigate the role of social media in the Brexit referendum, especially the company Cambridge Analytica and the interlocking parties who benefited from it—Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner. Eventually, she got a whistle-blower from Cambridge Analytica to come forward about the extent of their data-mining and election-influencing operation, and both the whistle-blower and Cadwalladr received scorn and threats.32 She was not alone. A few other UK journalists were examining Russia’s influence over UK institutions that had been infiltrated by Russian mafia associates over decades, much in the same way our institutions in the United States had been. As in the US, laws were loosened; as in the US, the line between white-collar corruption and organized crime had blurred.
US and UK citizens who protested this criminal impunity read each other’s works from across the pond, while also watching the developments in our respective governments. Each side hoped the other would enforce accountability and thus prompt our own side to do so as well. A blatant crime would occur—Trump confessing to obstruction of justice on television in May 2017; the Kremlin poisoning a woman to death on UK soil in Salisbury in March 201833—that would make the danger so immediate and obvious that we would tell ourselves, “OK, now they have to act.” But no officials did—not with the courage and speed required, and not on behalf of the people they were supposed to serve.
From the United Kingdom I headed to the Netherlands, where I had been invited to give a public talk about authoritarianism in Amsterdam. When I arrived, Dutch citizens were watching the rise of their own Trump-like figure, the bigoted demagogue Geert Wilders, who was running for office. I envied the Dutch parliamentary system, which mitigated the damage Wilders could do even with his coalition. The Dutch audience asked whether a Trump phenomenon could happen there, and I said, “Yes, it can happen anywhere.” This is the same answer I give everywhere I go, because the surest route to a kleptocratic takeover is to deny it’s happening, and the surest way to solve it is to sever it before it blooms.
I gave the same answer again in Montreal a few weeks later, when I was on a panel about whether Canada would turn into a giant mess like its southern neighbor or its overseas cousin. I remember sitting in the audience reading about the new phenomena of “American exiles”—mostly black immigrants terrified of Trump’s persecutory policies—who had crossed the American-Canadian border into Manitoba.34 Canada was now the new America, taking in our huddled masses yearning to breathe free while the Trump administration condemned the Statue of Liberty.35 But the illusion of Canadian respite did not last. As I write this in mid-2019, white supremacist movements are moving into mainstream Canadian politics while the country wrestles with financial corruption similar to that which weakened the US and UK economies before our respective collapses.
When people ask me if they should leave the United States, my answer is always, “And where, exactly, is it safe to go?”
In May 2017, I flew to Estonia to give a conference talk on a panel to a host of foreign dignitaries, including the presidents of Estonia and Finland. I had flown to Tallinn right after Trump had fired FBI director James Comey, which at that time was the most flagrant act of obstruction Trump had committed. Much of the audience was still processing what had happened, especially when Trump capped off the Comey firing by celebrating it with Russian state officials Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office and giving them classified information about US intelligence operations in Israel—a brazen act of disloyalty for which he faced no consequences.36
I have great respect and sympathy for Estonia, which both suffered under and fended off Russian domination and which has some of the smartest cybersecurity measures of any state. I was placed on a panel with one conservative who disliked Trump, and two conservatives who glorified him, one of whom, Stephen Biegun, ended up becoming Trump’s special representative to North Korea in 2018. The two Trump boosters offered supplicative platitudes like “we should feel empathy for Trump, because he is just not prepared to be president.” A picture of me giving them an incredulous side-eye went viral after that comment.
An audience member asked the panel about what the election of Trump meant for American values. I couldn’t help the answer that came out from me:
There is a gulf between the president and the public. I love my country. But I am horrified that this man, this autocrat, who is struggling against a democratic framework of checks and balances that may or may not hold, has become my president. I want to point out that his victory was both narrow and flawed. Only about 25 percent of the country voted for him. The election was marred by Russian interference, baseline voter suppression, and flaws in our electoral system that go back to the founding of the United States. We have never been a perfect democracy. We have never been an equal country. But generally, at least through my lifetime, we have tried to progress toward that kind of change.
I live in the center of the United States. I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I live in a majority black city in a bright red state that voted for Donald Trump. What I saw when he came into St. Louis and campaigned was that he was preying on people’s pain, and he was preying on people’s prejudice. He was taking the economic devastation that is real in the heart of America—he was right about that—and exploiting it for the most awful and xenophobic instincts that you could bring out in Americans. He is hurting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our country, and as he stays in office, that’s going to get worse. I don’t think that this is distinct to his foreign policy. There is a linked quality in how he views other human beings. He views them as disposable. He views them as people who don’t deserve rights, or dignity, or respect. That kind of attitude will extend into other countries; we have already seen it in his treatment of Angela Merkel. We need to be wary. We are dealing with someone with autocratic leanings, who is not rational, who is destructive, who will break those American values.
I am proud of the American public for pushing back. I am proud of the representatives who are struggling to keep our constitution and respect our checks and balances. But I do not think that those are the aims of this president.37
After my remarks, the president of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid, countered me, saying she had been personally assured by Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and other officials that the relationship between Estonia and the United States was strong and the US would remain a reliable partner. I responded the only way I could: with brutal honesty. It is a terrible feeling to tell the president of a foreign country not to trust my own government for the sake of their national security. This is different than telling a foreign country that your own country is flawed—all countries are flawed. Self-criticism of your own government is healthy. It is a crucial aspect of being in a democracy. Given that so many people in repressive states are forbidden from such critiques, criticizing the government should be considered both an obligation and a privilege. But this was new terrain. I had to tell a foreign leader that my own government might hurt Estonia, our ally, in order to please Russia, a hostile state that had brutalized her own country.
I told Kaljulaid I hoped that she was right and I was wrong, but that the Trump administration was untrustworthy and duplicitous, and that she and other Estonian officials should “watch your back and hope for the best.” As it turned out, the Trump administration had indeed lied to her. A few months later Trump stunned the world by meeting secretly for an hour with Putin at the G20 summit and then suggesting that he and Putin become partners in cybersecurity. In early 2018, Trump threatened to withdraw US troops from the Baltics, a threat he has made repeatedly since.
The year went on with nonstop writing and nonstop travel. I went to Germany to give a series of talks to university students in Giessen. For the first time, I was receiving warnings rather than giving them. Germans knew the signs of dictatorship and warned me that the American media was blowing it in their inability to discern propaganda and strengthen institutions against autocratic abuse. I went to Hungary for a multiday conference on authoritarianism and global change and watched Hungarian officials whose dreams of democracy came true in the 1990s hold back tears as they detailed the brutal policies of their authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. Hungary was a key example of how fast a country can fall from fragile democracy into a burgeoning autocracy; Poland and Turkey are two other recent cautionary tales. All three are countries I have visited several times and to which I have an emotional attachment—my ancestors are from Poland, and I had lived in Turkey for a year—and seeing the loss of freedom firsthand broke my heart.
I went to Hungary for the first time in 1998, as a college student, and stayed in a five-dollar-a-night hostel with a group of Serbians who were fleeing political turmoil. In 2003, on my way to Belgrade to visit a Serbian friend with whom I’d stayed in touch, I stopped in Budapest for a day, and was shocked by the transformation. The struggling but fascinating city of five years ago was dynamic and much more expensive, and Hungary was set to join the EU. In fall 2017, I was back in Budapest again, but this time it felt heavy to walk around visiting the same landmarks I had first laid eyes on in my twenties. There were the centuries-old synagogues that stood as symbols of both Jewish resilience and a horrific reminder of the Holocaust’s toll. There was the Liberty Statue that had removed its Russian inscription in 1989 to serve as a genuine emblem of Hungarian freedom and independence. Now anti-Semitism was on the rise; universities and media outlets were closing under state pressure; and the spirit of promise was gone, struck down by over a decade of economic decline and the rise of dictatorship. I went back to my hotel room and watched Trump threaten to nuke North Korea again.
The year went on like that, frenetically, with more and more crimes of the Trump administration revealed each month. I warned that if criminals were not countered now, we would be stuck hashing out their crimes the next year, and that the backlog combined with agency purges and court packing would make the pursuit of justice nearly impossible. This all came to pass, and the Mueller probe, which served to placate the public and instill a passive reverence among lawmakers, made the situation worse. As institutions crumbled, I kept speaking out, in New York and New Haven and Austin and Oakland and Toronto and more places than I could count in Missouri and Illinois.
I discussed immigration and Islamophobia at the invitation of the Muslim Students’ Association at St. Louis University. I sat on a panel with former Black Panthers at an Afrofuturism conference at Harris-Stowe, a historically black college in St. Louis, and agreed that state-sanctioned autocracy had already happened to black Americans and that the notion that America is “exceptional” is not only an illusion but an insult. I gave a talk to a mixed audience of conservatives and liberals in the Missouri Ozarks who were receptive to my warnings—after all, they were Missourians, they knew corruption had no bounds. I wanted to talk to everyone I could and hear everyone’s story—in part because we are all in this together, in part because I hoped someone would know a way out. I felt like I had been elected to a position for which I never ran.
In June 2017, I spoke under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis at the “March for Truth,” a national demonstration demanding a justice system with integrity, an independent investigation of Trump’s relationship with Russia, and transparency about the 2016 election.
I closed with this statement:
We need not only investigators that we can trust to do their jobs honorably, but a justice system that can be trusted to act on the findings of the investigation, and if crimes are confirmed, to hold criminals accountable.
The administration likes to portray citizens, especially out here in the Midwest where we live, as passive, as compliant, as uninterested in justice and law. What they are really hoping for is that we will be complacent, that we not defend the honor of our country or the sanctity of our laws, that we’ll just stand by silently and let them get away with it.
But we are St. Louis! We have witnessed injustice so many times, and we do not always win, but Lord knows we let everyone know when justice has not been served. We correct the lies. We come for the liars, and the grifters, and the traitors. We come hard, and we will not quit.
Never let anyone tell you that you do not deserve the truth or that truth itself has no value. When they say that, what they’re really saying is that you, as a citizen, have no value, that you have no voice. You deserve so much better than this. You have value, and you have a voice, so use it.38
Two years later, as the Mueller probe wound down with a whimper, it is hard to remember this earlier era of mass protests. There were so many—the women’s marches, the march for science, the march against migrant abuse, the march against gun violence. Some of the marches were the largest in our nation’s history.
Americans like to romanticize protest. As a scholar of the Andijon massacre in Uzbekistan and a firsthand witness to the brutality of Ferguson, I tend to do the opposite and emphasize that demonstrations rarely achieve an instantaneous result and are often dangerous. But the way in which the mass protests of 2017 and 2018 have been dismissed is disturbing, particularly since most participants and organizers were women. Women also comprised the grassroots efforts behind the 2018 Democratic wins, organizing while dealing with the endless agonizing revelations of the #MeToo movement. In the years after Trump’s election, more women ran for and won office than ever before. This flurry of female activism should surprise no one, given that the policies of the Trump administration, whether economic or social, disproportionately hurt women. In Trump’s America, women run for their lives.
On July 29, 2016, two days after he had asked Russia to get him Hillary Clinton’s emails, Trump gave a speech that strikes me as his most revealing. “Look, we have the greatest business people in the world and we don’t use them,” he told the crowd at a rally in Denver, Colorado. “We use political hacks. Some of these business people are not nice people. Who cares? You care? I don’t think so. Some of these business people are vicious, horrible, miserable human beings. Who cares? Who cares?” he muttered.
Then Trump began to scream.
“Some of these people, they don’t sleep at night! They twist, and turn, and sweat!” he cried, twisting his hand furiously, “and their mattress is soaking wet! Because they’re thinking all night about victory the next day against some poor person that doesn’t have a chance.”
His eyes flashing with panic, Trump kept going.
“And these people—unfortunately, I know them all,” he laughed bitterly. “These people would love to represent us against China, against Japan, against all of these countries … These people. They feel crazy! They feel angry! They cannot believe the deals that are made. We will do things we have never done before.”39
When I heard the speech, I did not know if it was an autobiography, a confession of collaboration, or both. Trump loves to be caught and not be punished. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he recited the poem “The Snake,” a story of treachery that mocks the victims: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in.” It is not enough for Trump to commit a crime. He needs to let you know that he got away with it. Others in his camp, like Roger Stone, share the same predilection. The thrill is in the flaunting, the in-jokes, the admissions so blunt that, perversely, few take them seriously. That’s also where the tell is, if you are working for law enforcement, but these days, federal law enforcement works for Trump.
In June 2017, the Mueller probe was announced as a replacement for the investigation into the 2016 election that had been led by James Comey, who Trump admitted he had shut down because Comey had been nosing into his business with Russia. From the start, the media was bullish on Mueller taking down Trump. This was in part due to the Trump family confessing major campaign crimes in the public domain twice in a two-month period—Trump telling Lester Holt about obstruction of justice in May 2017, and Donald Trump Jr. tweeting out emails in July 2017 about an incriminating June 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by Manafort, Kushner, and Kremlin operatives. How hard could this be if the evidence was right in front of us, so obvious that ordinary people could hear straight from the perps that they had committed the crimes?
This confidence was compounded by the valorization of Mueller as a consummate G-man, a neutral arbiter whose fealty was to the law and not to the leader. Mueller’s reticence to speak to the press led many to assume he was the strong and silent type instead of what he was revealed to be at end of his probe—a weak-willed bureaucrat who either failed to understand the stakes or found them tolerable. Though I wanted the Mueller probe to succeed, I was wary of its odds from the start.
Autocratic consolidation is a matter of power, not protocol, and if you cannot tell the difference between the two, you have no business leading an investigation. You cannot go by the book while the book is burning. As an institutionalist, Mueller seemed only as strong as our institutions, and our institutions had been pushed to the brink of collapse. A forceful and transparent probe could have constrained criminality and saved American lives. The timid and plodding investigation Mueller carried out instead, abetted by the cowardice of a Congress that refused to act upon his findings, obfuscated the American past and fostered its fallen future.
Mueller had long been an enabler, intentional or not, of the corruption he was tasked to investigate. He headed the FBI from 2001 until 2013, doing little to stop the criminal behavior carried out by operatives from his own political party. When Paul Manafort was indicted by Mueller in October 2017, for example, it was for crimes he had committed in the early 2000s. Why did Mueller not arrest Manafort earlier? If Mueller was so aware of the danger of this transnational crime syndicate that he gave a speech warning it would destroy democracy in 2011, why did he do so little to stop it—and why did he not speak out when Trump began receiving classified information during his campaign? At best, Mueller was guilty of negligence—but in 2017, negligence seemed a forgivable sin given the stakes and the competition. Negligence was a step up from money-laundering or treason or rape. The country was willing to overlook negligence and naivete in return for someone willing to root out the rot.
By the end of 2017, “Mueller will save us” had become an internet mantra, chanted by legal experts and armies of trolls alike. “Mueller will save us” had replaced “Comey will save us,” and was later supplanted by “Pelosi will save us” and “the 2020 election will save us,” all while the damage of the Trump administration grew more irreparable. Rumors swirled throughout 2017 and 2018 about imminent indictments and secret plans, and Mueller disciples found a funhouse mirror in the “QAnon” cult surrounding Trump. The QAnon phenomenon—in which Trump acolytes believe an anonymous high-level official named “Q” leaves them coded tips about secret prosecutions as well as other enticing developments, like the underground revolution they claim is being led by a still-alive JFK Jr.—is a disturbing example of savior syndrome.
Savior syndrome is a mind-set that flourishes during the unstable period of autocratic consolidation, when frightened citizens seek to find meaning in the inexplicable actions of their failed leaders. To those under the sway of savior syndrome, once trusted officials are not incompetent or corrupt: they are merely “playing 3-D chess.” It doesn’t matter if officials are, in reality, resorting to the weakest moves (“When you don’t know what to do, push a pawn” could have been the motto of the Mueller probe), their motives must be presented as pure, their tactics impeccable and impenetrable. The abdication of the admired is too much for those seeking saviors to process, no matter their political predilection. And so, for two years, one group of political junkies lit Mueller-themed prayer candles while another parsed Trump tweets for coded clues. Both sides told the skeptics to shut up and “trust the plan.” Neither side got what they wanted.
The delusion was disheartening to watch. I felt sorry for those QAnon acolytes who were nonviolent and would occasionally would hit on something real, like the Epstein case, and be dismissed as conspiracists by onlookers while Trumpian manipulators drew them deeper into the QAnon cult. But I was also frustrated with the side proclaiming allegiance to logic and law: the legal scholars and political pundits who baselessly assured the public of Mueller’s forthcoming success as Mueller continued to blow the case.
Those who noted Mueller’s missteps were pummeled with insults from those clinging to the vestiges of institutionalism. Those who had studied or lived through autocratic consolidation screamed about these missteps like spectators on the sidelines of our own demise. To point out the failures of the Mueller probe—many of which were caused by the Trump administration’s purges and threats; but some of which were caused by the Mueller team’s poor judgment—was to become a heretic. But it’s better to be a heretic than a liar. A heretic these days is a temporary occupation: the sin lies in telling the truth too early. Much like Trump’s crimes, Mueller’s failures were hiding in plain sight. Establishment analysts were afraid to discuss them because of what these failures signified—that the system was broken and the good guys had lost. Or worse, that the good guys were never that great in the first place.
But regardless of the probe’s failures, one should still read the Mueller report, as it does document a multitude of crimes including at least ten instances of obstruction of justice. That the Mueller report could discuss Trump campaign criminality for over four hundred pages and only scratch the surface of what they’ve done is a denunciation of far more than Mueller. The problem lies less with his report than with the lack of consequences for the criminals he probed. Mueller’s main sin is omission. He failed to interview key players, including Trump, and refused to indict the most dangerous parties, like Jared Kushner. Despite these flaws, his report nonetheless gave a clear signal to Congress to launch an impeachment inquiry, but the House Democrats have thus far failed to do so successfully, cutting off another avenue to accountability.
Impeachment hearings should have begun after the report’s release, and the report inspired many elected officials to deem them necessary. But it’s critical to remember that Congress could have started in 2017, when the first articles of impeachment were filed by Representatives Brad Sherman and Al Green. The Mueller report was never necessary for impeachment, because Trump had committed impeachable offenses outside the purview of the probe—like emoluments violations, abuse of migrants, and abuse of the pardon power—every week for over two years. Impeaching the person responsible for these ongoing atrocities was deemed by Nancy Pelosi in March 2019 to be “not worth it.” The House, presented with a menu of incriminating offenses, took the pursuit of justice off the table.
Over the last two years, when people have asked me for advice on dealing with the Trump regime, I told them to learn to think like the enemy (but not act like them) and have infinite backup plans. Given that the enemy telegraphs its intentions, the first part of this strategy should be easy to achieve, yet officials often do not practice it. The failures of the judiciary, the strongest bulwark against authoritarianism, led to terrible political calculations. When officials saw the Mueller probe flailing, they should have sought other avenues to protect the American people. Instead, Mueller and his boss Bill Barr—notorious for being the Iran Contra cleanup guy40—were given the benefit of the doubt even after the probe was shown to be in trouble.
In October 2017, Mueller indicted Manafort for conspiracy against the United States, but followed that up in November with a loose bail deal that allowed Manafort to roam around without GPS tracking. My immediate thought was that Manafort would flee the country—wouldn’t you, if you were a career criminal with vast foreign ties and assets?—but it took Manafort plotting more crimes for Mueller to create a stricter arrangement based on adherence to law and not personal trust. Following his arrest, Manafort went on to pen propaganda and tamper with witnesses.41 While whistle-blowers like Reality Winner have been banned from speaking to the media, Manafort was given phone and internet access, which he used to ghostwrite articles for Ukrainian websites and chat with Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity.42
Throughout 2018, Mueller continued to fall for Manafort’s tricks. In August 2018, Manafort was convicted in federal court of tax and bank fraud. Days later, Mueller’s team announced that Manafort had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel. My heart sank. This career criminal’s sudden cooperation had arrived right after he had been convicted by a judge and jury—both of which had been threatened with violence but convicted him anyway. Meanwhile, another criminal implicated in the Mueller probe, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, had received a sentence of only two weeks—even after it was revealed he hadn’t cooperated with the Mueller probe at all, and had in fact impeded it. It seemed obvious that Manafort would do the exact same thing. Manafort’s choice was simple: take a chance on the judiciary system, which had not yet been consolidated by Trump, or strike a fake plea bargain and run out the clock.
I warned of Manafort’s plans for months on end, in articles and on national TV, hoping Mueller’s team knew what they were doing and that they had a backup plan for when Manafort screwed them over. In November 2018, it was revealed that Manafort had not cooperated and had impeded the probe. He ended up with two small sentences not commensurate with the monumental nature of his crimes. He may well get out within a few years and go back to targeting my colleague’s sister, among other citizens.
Those who treat this as a game seem to not grasp—or care—that ordinary Americans have been caught in the crossfire and that Manafort poses a public safety threat. At the time of Manafort’s sentencing, I was in disbelief that Mueller’s team could not see this outcome coming, and it has made me wonder whether, in fact, they did, and found it acceptable. I remember looking at a photo of Mueller heading to church in spring 2019, shortly after Barr had issued a misleading summary of his probe, and wondering what kind of god this man could believe in to allow his countrymen such preventable pain. We were living in Mueller’s America. One nation, under God, collateral damage.
There were other egregious errors. Manafort crony Rick Gates was also given loose travel restrictions and even had the destination of his future travel plans announced.43 This seemed asinine, given that Gates was both a flight risk and a potential assassination target. Eventually, the Mueller team realized this and gave him travel restrictions and tracking.44 The “Mueller is playing 3-D chess” analogies began to take off at this point among those desperate for a rationale for why Mueller’s team were making rookie errors. Some pundits liked to claim that Mueller was doing a classic mafia roll-up, where he would go easy, nab the low-level players first, and then arrest the key instigators all at once.45 That illusion was shattered when Mueller ensured that Michael Flynn walked free in fall 2018, at least so far.
Flynn was a central figure in the Mueller probe. A foreign agent for both Russia and Turkey who aspired to illicitly deal nuclear material and kidnap a Turkish cleric living in the United States, Flynn was the first national security adviser for Trump before resigning less than a month into his term after his Russian campaign ties were revealed. In December 2017, he struck his own deal with Mueller and pled guilty to lying to the FBI. In December 2018, Flynn was supposed to be sentenced, and it was expected he would get the maximum penalty. In an unusual rebuke, the judge, Emmet Sullivan, said to Flynn, “Arguably, you sold your country out,” adding, “I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense.”46 Sullivan was the rare official ready to make a Trump associate pay for his crimes—until Mueller stepped in and recommended that Flynn serve no time at all.47 There remains no logical explanation for this move. Mueller chose to coddle a plausible traitor. Flynn remains a national security threat who roams the country meeting with right-wing extremists.48
There are many questions here: Why did Mueller give cushy plea deals to Flynn and Gates when the information from those deals did not lead to indictments of the most dangerous perpetrators? Why were other key players, like Roger Stone, allowed to threaten people—including a judge—without consequence after their own indictments? Why was there no mention of Semion Mogilevich and his crime syndicate in the Mueller report, especially when they had been a key target during Mueller’s tenure in the FBI? Why was the broader context of the case—the mafia—omitted by the Mueller team? Why did the probe abruptly end on March 5, one day after the House Judiciary Committee sent out a list of eighty-one people they sought to interview about Trump administration corruption—the first sign that the House would flex its prosecutorial muscle?49 Did Mueller end the probe voluntarily, or did Barr shut it down?
We do not know the answers to these questions because Mueller refuses to answer them. Perhaps by the time you read this, the truth will have come out, but I cannot imagine who has the fortitude to force it. When Mueller testified to Congress in July 2019, it was under subpoena and after months of delay. Under oath, the Godot of prosecutors became the Bartleby of witnesses: Mueller spoke with extreme reluctance, deflecting or declining to answer questions 155 times. He refused to answer basic inquiries about key players in his own probe, like whether he had wanted to interview Donald Trump Jr. He never discussed the Russian mafia, and none of the members of Congress would raise the topic. It is unlikely that Mueller will ever give a straightforward account to the American people, because that would involve Mueller laying himself bare, explaining why he failed to stop a plot against America both during his tenure as FBI director and as special counsel. We would get closer to learning whether the answer lies in negligence or malice, but even that would not compensate for the harm his botched probe has already caused.
For as the Mueller probe plodded along, Trump purged agencies and packed courts, including the Supreme Court appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, who has implied that he will never allow Trump to be indicted.50 The only time Mueller broke his silence during the probe was to condemn a BuzzFeed article claiming that Trump had directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a report that generated widespread talk of impeachment.51 Mueller spoke out more strongly about that BuzzFeed article—which turned out to be accurate—than he did when Barr released a deceitful memo misrepresenting his two years of investigative work. The two BuzzFeed reporters who broke the Cohen story were the same who broke the story of Russian infiltration of the US Treasury less than a month before. An effort to discredit them seemed to be at play, but the Treasury story was never disproven, and Cohen later confirmed the central thesis of their report on him.
“They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government,” Mueller proclaimed in 2011. “Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.” By 2019, Mueller had become a point in his own triangle.
People keep looking for the smoking gun that will end Trump’s corrupt reign. But it has been there the whole time. The gun is in his hand, and it’s still smoking.
It’s smoking because he is shooting our country to death. It’s smoking because no one will take away the gun. It’s smoking because the very people tasked with protecting you reload it for him again and again. They will keep firing until all constraints are removed and there is no one left to gaze at the carnage and ask why nothing is being done.