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

152 Pages·2018·1.52 MB·English

by  Ranbir Sidhu

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.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
*****ATTENTION CITIZEN SHOPPERS*****
Your Government is Being Discontinued.
We don’t apologize for any inconvenience.
“Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our
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customers, who are the citizens.”
— Jared Kushner, on behalf of The White House Office of
American Innovation
“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run
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and make money on it.”
— Donald Trump in 2000
kleptocracy
noun | klep·toc·ra·cy | \klep-tä-kr -sē\
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
Disclaimer
Fuck It. We Lost.
I. A Flash of Military Muscle
II. The WrestleMania Presidency
III. The Rise of Honey Badger
IV. The Apotheosis of Ayn Rand
V. Transnational Kleptocrats Unite!
VI. Autocracy Now
VII. Voodoo to Voldemort
VIII. Putin Picks His “Idiot”
IX. Count Your Holy Wars
X. Revenge of the Basement Trolls
XI. Wagner on the Turntable
XII. Donald Does Berlin
XIII. Billionaires Gotta Billionaire
XIV. Goodbye, America?
Afterword: How Democracy Dies, Not with a Bang but with a Whimper?
Endnotes
*****Disclaimer*****
Message from a Wannabe Dystopia Near You
Full disclosure: I’m writing this from Greece. There are reasons for this.
Over the last few years, I’ve 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 violence—the kind I grew up with when I lived there
in the 1970s. But watching my adopted home, the United States, where I’ve
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 heartbreaking—it’s like watching a lover die.
I’ve been following events in the United States mostly from afar—on a Greek
island in the Mediterranean, and in the fifth-oldest continuously inhabited city in
Europe. The beaches aren’t bad either. An economic exile here, and a cultural
one from the madness of New York City, where I lived for seventeen years, I’ve
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
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can’t even afford soap, a judiciary whose independence is continuously being
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threatened, and a press that’s looking more every day like the government’s
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official propaganda mouthpiece. In a recent, well-respected national survey,
and after eight long years of nothing but one business after another closing, a
staggering 40 percent of surviving Greek businesses believe they’ll have to
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shutter their doors by early 2018 if nothing changes.
The lessons from Greece are clear. When it’s naked self-interest and political
survival that shape policy, it’s 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 times—too much already is
vanishing into a collective amnesia brought on by a continuous assault of idiocy,
hypocrisy, corruption, and “the crazy”—while also offering a guide, and to some
extent a survival manual, for the small-d democratic soul.