It's the kind of book that won't let you sleep for a week. Glad someone's taking a look at the big picture of issues in the US and around the world. I wish everyone would take Kendzior seriously.

Sarah Kendzior has done it again with Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. This is 320 pages of hard truths, and may or may not feel like healthy quarantine reading. Especially considering how much scarier everything has gotten since she finished writing this book.

But I’d rather see the world through clear perspective and analysis. Rose-colored glasses aren’t my jam. Kendzior posits that the factors leading to the election of Donald Trump started years and years ago. She discusses his long-held connections to Russia, and their correlation to his various attempts to run for President.

But this story is so much more than just one man. It’s a confluence of events, including the Ferguson, Missouri killing of Michael Brown. And as a resident of St. Louis, that’s an event Kendzior has closer ties to than all the journalists who temporarily flew in from the coasts.

She clarifies how her city and state changed from wholesome Midwest to corrupt to the core. And that this wasn’t unique to Missouri, but a symptom of changes happening throughout the country. In the process, some of the usual suspects show up here: Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner. And although the latter hasn’t been charged, Kendzior lays out some suspicious dealings. And she delves a little deeper into the Jeffrey Epstein story as well.

My conclusions
You would expect this book to be dark, and it is. It is also written clearly and succinctly, without any bloat. I suppose Kendzior realized that her readers, like me, had probably already read a few books about this GOP administration. Like me, they didn’t need to hear about every single event again.
Instead, what she does is look at this from the eyes of an expert in autocracy. Kendzior is a Ph.D. anthropologist and researcher, in addition to being a journalist. She’s been studying autocratic regimes for more than a decade. To me, this was a fresh perspective more reminiscent of Timothy Snyder than Seth Abramson. (Who are both excellent, by the way.)

As the America we’ve known during our lives erodes, Kendzior suggests that we get out and experience it for ourselves. She takes trips around the country with her kids, so they can see the Rocky Mountains and more. So they can visit Presidential Libraries and other historic sites. Well, I suggest that we explore these sites from home, even while on quarantine. Find their Facebook and Twitter accounts. See what virtual tours you and your family can take. Learn the history now.

And, in the process, we will be reminded that America is so much more than the occupant of the White House. It is history and change, with many languages spoken, and kinds of climate. And it’s worth fighting against corruption so that our kids and grandkids have something in their lives resembling what we’ve had in ours. [end book-inspired rant]

I recommend this book if you’re a student of history, and want to see the living history of the last few decades playing out in the political situation of today. You may need to read it in small bites, but don’t let that stop you.

Pair with either On Tyranny or The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder. Alternately, try something inspiring as a pair, like We Are The Change We Seek: Speeches of Barack Obama.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, and the author for a digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Sarah Kendzoir introduces us to the people the climate that brought us Donald Trump.She shares with us her life the people environment that grew this movement this man,The authors books enlighten me introducing me me to people groups I had never met before.So well written so involving read this book.#netgalley#flatironbooks

Reading Sarah Kendzior's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America while self-isolating against the rising number of COVID-19 infections and deaths from the coronavirus outbreak is to see her prediction, from 2015, that Donald Trump would decimate American democracy and her central thesis that his administration is a nexus of "political corruption, organized crime, and endemic racism" play out in real-time. With each successive chapter, and each new segment of breaking news in our era of unending crises at the hands of this vulgar, orange-hued goblin, taking us from the outbreak first being a Democratic hoax, and then under control, and then, finally, having hospitals overwhelmed with patients and Trump's regime currently, daily, seizing medical supplies from a number of states in order to sell them off to the highest bidder that's sworn fealty to him personally, as well as Trump's concurrent plans to destroy the United States Postal Service in an attempt to thwart voter's ability to use mail-in ballots during November's election, you can witness kleptocratic autocracy in action, live as it happens, with this book acting as a primer on the decades of history that helped to build Donald Trump while simultaneously weakening American political institutions for further exploitation by the political elite and their well-connected cronies.

What this book is not is a collection of all of Trump's many, many, many crimes - such an accounting would no doubt be a multi-volume effort with each entry rivaling Stephen King's biggest doorstoppers. Kendzior takes a far more interesting approach, using her home of St. Louis, MO as a lens with which to view a larger, evolved, and no less messy, scope of political dysfunction that serves only to benefit and further enrich the already wealthy and the criminal organizations and Russian mafiaosos they lie in bed with. Her survey reaches back through 40 years of American history and the way our laws have been weakened in order to reshape what used to be crimes into a new normal of political theatrics, and the anything-goes mentality that currently exists in D.C., where the bar of acceptable behavior is lowered on a daily basis and we must perpetually contend with the simple fact that this is no bottom to how low Trump and his elite cronies will stoop in order to line their pockets. Kendzior contends that the Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a presidency, and she has all the receipts to support this claim, not least of which are Trump's own public admissions to such. And yet he remains, and revels in being, untouchable, a Teflon Don, thanks to our own institutions unwillingness to confront him and enforce the law.

Hiding in Plain Sight explains it all - how it happened, why we got to the point we're at today, and why it will keep on happening. The only thing it's lacking is insight into how to stop it. How do normal, everyday people like you, me, Kendzior, and the rest of the 99% put to a stop to this international mafia and the mob boss currently sitting in the Oval Office? Can we, even? Will voting be enough, for those of us who will still be allowed to vote in November, in our Russian-hacked polls at our gerrymandered precincts, while we're likely wearing gloves and facemasks and hoping we don't contract a virus that may kill us or our loved ones?

All we can do is try, because nobody else will save us. We have to stop pining for docile, weak-kneed, old men like Robert Mueller or anybody in Congress to give a single damn about us and our country, let alone save us. We have to save ourselves.

Hiding in Plain Sight, meanwhile, should be on everyone's must-read list. I've been following Kendzior's Twitter feed and podcast, Gaslit Nation, for a while now, and she's a prescient, informed, and intelligent reporter, and an authority on authoritarianism. Every prediction she's made about Trump from his campaign to now have been eerily, frighteningly, and yes, heart-breakingly, gut-wrenchingly, accurate. She's a national treasure, and this book should be made mandatory reading in high school and college in the hopes that future generations, if there are any by the time Trump's finished, can better understand how America reached this point and, hopefully, how to prevent it from ever happening again. This book is a vital and necessary warning shot for our children, if only because it's already too late for us.

[Note: I received an ARC of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.]

A great book! Sarah takes us on a tour of her life growing up and how it lead to studying Donald Trump when he won the election. I read a lot of political books but this is the best one I have read!