Kevin Killian on the Rise (and Fall) of Trump

Last week, Kevin Killian wrote about the rise of Trump, and the hope for his fall, for McSweeney's, as part of an ongoing feature (until the midterms) where the journal will publish essays "from powerful cultural voices alongside one simple thing, chosen by the author, that you can do to take action against the paralyzing apoplexy of the daily news." "Trump was elected—and I now expect Hitler was, too—to help a tiny slice of super-wealthy corporations slide all the money there is up to the top," writes Killian. More:

The art was all in distraction, the disruption of attention. I don’t know whom Hitler owed his rise to, but if there were billionaires involved the little people would never know it.

In her prop chair Fran Lebowitz wriggled, as if warming to her theme. She was speaking to a house peppered with Berkeley liberals, people who had voted for both Clintons, who had given Obama eight years. “Billionaires should be forbidden from holding public office,” she announced. The lady behind me cried, “Throw them all in jail!” Beside her a stone-cold judge intoned, “They shall be put to death.”

The privatization of every square foot on earth and the premium of ever more desperate labor forces, cheaper than the ones we had before are the neoliberal techniques that produced the catastrophe of Trump: a steady, if sometimes obscure, progression from Hitler to Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, to Trump. We ask ourselves how the grand New Deal passions of racial equality and support for the working class were so speedily trampled over, reduced to the status of jokes... 

Read on at McSweeney's.