Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
Sarah Kendzior
From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Kendzior comes the bitingly honest examination of the erosion of American liberty and the calculated rise to power of Donald Trump.
The rise of Donald Trump may have shocked Americans, but it should not have surprised them. His anti-democratic movement is the culmination of a decades-long breakdown of U.S. institutions. The same blindness to U.S. decline – particularly the loss of economic stability for the majority of the population and opportunity-hoarding by the few – is reflected in an unwillingness to accept that authoritarianism can indeed thrive in the so-called “home of the free”.
As Americans struggle to reconcile the gulf between a flagrant aspiring autocrat and the democratic precepts they had been told were sacred and immutable, the inherent fragility of American democracy has been revealed. Hiding in Plain Sight exposes this continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States that have been hiding in plain sight for decades. In Kendzior’s signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump’s meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers.
Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her personal life and her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied.
Hiding in Plain Sight is about confronting injustice – an often agonizing process, but an honest and necessary one – as the only way that offers the possibility of ending it.
About the author
Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior is the New York Times bestselling author of They Knew, Hiding in Plain Sight, The View from Flyover Country, and The Last American Road Trip.
She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St Louis, where she researched politics and digital media in authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union. From 2012 to 2014, she wrote op-eds for Al Jazeera English, and from 2016 to 2020, she wrote op-eds for The Globe and Mail. She has a newsletter (https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/) and lives in St. Louis with her husband and children.
(Goodreads.com)
