Ranbir Sidhu - Hacking Trump: or, How POTUS Sucker Punched America, Torpedoed Democracy & Left Us a Choice: Impeachment or Autocracy

The Unnamed Press

P.O. Box 411272

Los Angeles, CA 90041

Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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Copyright 2018 by Ranbir Sidhu

ISBN: 9781944700737

Library of Congress Control Number:

This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

Cover design by Robert Bieselin

Typeset by Jaya Nicely

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.

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Its very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.

Donald Trump in 2000

kleptocracy

noun | kleptocracy | \klep-t-kr -s\

plural kleptocracies

1. :government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed; also :

2. a particular government of this kind; also :

3. Rule by thieves, literally.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Message from a Wannabe Dystopia Near You

Full disclosure: Im writing this from Greece. There are reasons for this.

Over the last few years, Ive watched as the country of my parents, India, has spiraled into Hindu nationalist fervor and a rising tolerance for fascism while the one I was born in, the United Kingdom, has cut loose its ties to the rational and set out solo on an around-the-post-truth-world voyage on seas once again frothing with bigotry and violencethe kind I grew up with when I lived there in the 1970s. But watching my adopted home, the United States, where Ive lived for much of the past thirty-six years, slide into the huckster embrace of a bigoted reality TV star whose sole lifelong ambition has been to enrich himself and his family is the most heartbreakingits like watching a lover die.

Ive been following events in the United States mostly from afaron a Greek island in the Mediterranean, and in the fifth-oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe. The beaches arent bad either. An economic exile here, and a cultural one from the madness of New York City, where I lived for seventeen years, Ive had front-row seats to the downward spiral of another nation in crisis that was hijacked by populists promising the moon and delivering well a bucketload of steaming crap: a devastated economy, staggering levels of unemployment and poverty, a health care system in ruins where some hospitals cant even afford soap,

The lessons from Greece are clear. When its naked self-interest and political survival that shape policy, its not the country that benefits, and certainly not the average Joe or Joan or Yianni or Katerina. In looking back at those first factually dissolute months of the Trump administration, where a new outrage, idiocy, or genuine threat to shared values or democracy seemed to appear almost daily, this book hopes to capture something of the tenor of the timestoo much already is vanishing into a collective amnesia brought on by a continuous assault of idiocy, hypocrisy, corruption, and the crazywhile also offering a guide, and to some extent a survival manual, for the small-d democratic soul.

Or, an Old Man Burns in a Chair

Days before the November 8 election, while driving through rural New England, I was invited to, of all things, a Guy Fawkes Night celebrationthe annual British custom of commemorating the failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament by burning an effigy of the lead conspiratorheld at a farmhouse in northern Vermont. Champagne bottles were sabered open, a sorta Irish band jammed jigs, and a bearded guy dressed in a kilt wandered around playing the bagpipes. It was a liberal crowd, Hillary and Bernie supporters, with a local Democratic state politician glad-handing among them. The air was charged with a palpable sense of excitement. Everyone knew Hillary would ace it, the first woman president. The atmosphere was electric smug celebration. I was one of them, as sure as anyone that The Donald was facing a national kick in the teeth. Believing better of my fellow Americans, I couldnt imagine a majority in this adopted land of mine voting for a bigoted, woman-groping reality TV jackass.

The Guy was marched across the yard sitting in a chair and set on the bonfire, where the chair began to burn, and him along with it. He was a crude effigy of Trumphow could he be anyone else? While he burned, and as the crowd whooped and cheered, I found myself filled with rising dread. First the head, then the torso, fell forward.

Watching, I became sure Trump would win. Months of doubts, not only about Clintons campaign trail failures but about the genuine magnetism of a Trump presidency for much of the electorate, caught up with me and transformed into a bone-deep certaintyno, molecule deep. I mentally argued with myself, then pushed the fear aside. Id read the polls, gamed out endless electoral college paths to victory, and felt, after thirty-six years spent becoming an American, a visceral understanding of my fellow citizens. This would not happen. When his victory finally happened, I, like many others, felt Id been flattened by an eighteen-wheeler.

Ive thought a lot about that half hour watching the Guy burn. The absolute unquestioning certainty in the faces of my fellow well-meaning liberals, burnished in the firelight, along with their complacent overconfidence, destroyed my conviction in Hillarys coming victory. We couldnt all be so right. Trump did win, even while massively losing the popular voteand yes, likely pushed over the top by GOP voter suppression tactics and a Rust Belt-targeted Russian fake news campaign. But he shouldnt have come close, and those Rust Belt voters shouldnt have been so disillusioned with national politics to be so easily suckered by the conspiracy-theory sewage spewed out by the right-wing media machine.

My Inner Trumpette

While I believed Hillary Clinton had the potential to be a great president, I felt little love for her phlegmatic, risk-averse plod toward the White House, suspecting wed see four years of a soft consolidation of Barack Obamas legacy. Not a bad thing, but certainly not a vision. At least Donald offered razzle-dazzle alongside his racist dog whistles while his promise to shake up the establishment was one promise we were all sure he would keepthat hed shake it up by digging a few canals in that swamp draining directly into his familys pockets was also obvious. And as much as I really did not want to live in Trumps every-kleptocrats-dream America, I couldnt summon any great enthusiasm for Hillary Clintons corporate-sponsored wonderland, either.