Craig Unger - American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

House of Trump, House of Putin

When Women Win by Ellen R. Malcolm with Craig Unger

Boss Rove

The Fall of the House of Bush

House of Bush, House of Saud

Blue Blood

November 2020

It had been the worst of timeslike in Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities, but without the hope and light. It was the age of foolishness, the season of darkness, the winter of despair. America had been on the road to authoritarianism, and the pace had been relentless. There was disorder, chaos, and uncertainty throughout the United States. Democracy had been hanging in the balance, and it was dangling by a thread. The entire country was on tenterhooks, still waiting for the final results.

The nation was polarized in a way that it had not been since the Civil War. A line had been drawn. You were on one side or the other. It was us versus them.

To most of the country, he was vulgar and vile, a misogynistic, racist firebrand, a buffoon who knew only his own pecuniary interests and prejudices and would stop at nothing to satiate them. He was clownish and repellent. But well before the election, it had become clear that he was far more dangerous than that suggested, that his buffoonery masked real demagoguery, that he was a tyrant who had mesmerized tens of millions of people, and that it didnt matter to them what he said or did. He spoke for them. To them, he was a great leader. Even though he had implemented anti-science-based policies that had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, he could do no wrongthanks to a cult of personality created and aroused by his Trumpian spectacles and amplified by a sycophantic right-wing media. He was Americas own autocrat.

Everyone was exhausted. There was widespread unemployment. He had put federal troops in the streetsAmerican soldiers fighting American citizens on American soil. He installed foxes in every bureaucratic henhouse in government. The Russians had undermined the US elections in 2016 and Trump had collaborated with them. Now, everyone was waiting to see what he would do next.

These were the signposts of a new era. Police killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed black men and women. White supremacists killed protestersand were celebrated for it in some quarters. Far-right militias bearing automatic weapons rode in caravans up the West Coast and planted their Confederate flags in front of protesters. In Portland, Oregon, the shooting had begunteenagers, assault weaponswith the promise of more to come. The Justice Department had designated New York, Portland, and Seattle as anarchist jurisdictions, as if it were a precursor to declaring martial law. Paranoid conspiracy theories were promoted by QAnon and other right-wing groups. Trump urged his followers to vote twiceonce by mail, once in person. He repeatedly refused to promise that he would cede the presidency if Joe Biden won. In the first presidential debate, Trump called on white supremaciststhe Proud Boysto go on standby. It was as if he knew in advance that he would lose the election and was doing everything he could to discredit the results and stay in office. Everything.

He even said as much at a White House press conference in September: Well want to haveget rid of the ballots and youll have a verywell have a very peacefulthere wont be a transfer, frankly. Therell be a continuation.

There wont be a transfer.

Fascism was in the air.

Now that the election had taken place, it was more evident than ever. All the votes had not yet been counted, and Joe Biden clearly appeared to be winning, but Donald Trump falsely claimed victory. With so much undecided and the nation in limbo, one thing had become horrifyingly clear: This really was America, and it wasnt pretty. One way or another, the nightmare we were living through would likely go on and on.

For months, much of the country had been self-isolated, quarantined, and/or curfewed during the COVID pandemic, the days blending together Groundhog Daystyle, a recurring horror show as Fintan OToole wrote in the Irish Times in April 2020, in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

Time had collapsed. It had no meaning to tens of millions of Americans who stayed home day after day, locked down in semi-isolation. And truth had collapsed as well. News cycles could be measured in nanoseconds, huge parts of them so tainted with disinformation that many viewers were unsure what to believe.

Born with the original sin of slavery, the United States, thanks to a virus, was pulling back the curtain to reveal its dark, dark secrets for all to seean impossibly decadent shadow world of kompromat (the Russian term for compromising material), treachery, sex trafficking, racism, and greed.

Even after the election, a malevolent narcissist was still at the helm, a man who had deliberately infected the nation with a murderous stupidity that was followed blindly by millions of supporters who lived in a cultlike world of paranoid fantasies and magical thinking, blithely spreading the dual virus of Trumpian hate and lethal disease. All this was promoted and amplified by Fox News, Breitbart News, and other right-wing outlets, weaponized by Russian intelligence via social media, and incorporated into paranoid conspiracies by QAnon and other extremist cults.