Anand Giridharadas: We Are Having East Germany Like Gestapo Raids in America

EXCERPT:

GIRIDHARADAS: "Here's what I think the real tipping point is and will be. The thing that I would say Donald Trump deserves most praise for is that he intuited in 2016, and then again in '24, that there was an emotion out there among many, many people, of feeling undefended, of feeling unseen and unheard by the system, of feeling defenseless against chaos and entropy, and that political emotion was underserved, was under-recognized by those of us in the media, was underserved by the Democratic Party, was underserved by his own different flavor of Republicans, and he was able to see that. People wanted to be advocated for. Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them, but he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that. When you start having gestapo raids in America and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create, then we are moving very, very far from his — the president worrying about what regular people need, right? He is distracting people with this flurry of activity, but none of this, none of these images you’re seeing are going to make your life better. None of these things, contrary to popular belief, have anything to do with the still high price of eggs. None of these things will make it easier to start a business. None of these things will make it easier for people to get the education they need, change their lives, leave their kids better off. This is all a distraction, shock and awe, as you said earlier, so that Donald Trump can do one thing, and you saw it at the inauguration telegraphed to you: enrich his billionaire cronies, enrich his oligarch friends. That is what he is actually doing when he’s not busy releasing his crypto coins. And all of this is sort of bread and circuses for the people to stare at while he's robbing you from the back."