President Donald Trump is the Culmination of Everything Naomi Klein Has Been Warning Us About

Here's how she thinks we can beat him.

By Matthew Korfhage

Naomi Klein is in the unfortunate position of being utterly right about America. In her new book No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Haymarket Books, 288 pages, $16.95) President Donald Trump is her sheet-staining fever dream, the culmination of everything the Canadian activist and academic has written about and warned against for the past 17 years.

She is known primarily for two books. First it was No Logo, back in the Adbusters halcyon days of 2000, in which she railed against the all-pervasive corporate branding of public life. In 2007, she followed it up with The Shock Doctrine, a book whose thesis—that governments like the 9/11-era Cheney administration use times of catastrophe as an excuse to do terrible, terrible things—has become so ingrained into the American psyche that it now seems almost a bromide. This gives the first half of No Is Not Enough an almost remedial quality, as America retraces line by line every Cassandric proclamation Klein made years back.

Trump, she argues in the book’s early pages, is the convergence of both trends she’s described. On the one hand, he’s the “personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one-man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands.” On the other, he is a lifelong parasite to disaster, a man who “seized on New York’s economic catastrophe to boost his own fortune, extracting predatory terms from a government in crisis,” doing the same for New Jersey casino towns. Trump, in short, is late capitalism’s indigestive fart. If he didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him.

And, as Klein told London's Guardian newspaper recently, his shitty, scheming ineptitude doesn't make him less dangerous—it makes him more so. "He is undoubtedly an idiot," she told the paper, "but do not underestimate how good he is at that."

Just as Mike Pence seized on Katrina as a means of gutting labor unions and infrastructure, despite the fact that poverty and lack of infrastructure led to the gravest tragedies of the disaster, Klein fully expects Trump to build his mandate on the backbone of a misbegotten war, noting that all his contractors are wartime profiteers who came to exist in the wake of 9/11. “This creates a disastrous cocktail,” she writes. “Take a group of people who massively profit from ongoing war, and then put those same people at the heart of government.” Her depressing accuracy thus far makes this a warning one must take seriously.

But while Klein is able to build, brick by brick, an impressively damning and intricate architecture of American fuckedness—she is a specialist in Trump's terrifying mulligatawny of narcissism, psychopathy and incompetence—her counterproposals are more nebulous, and much less convincing. We cannot just say "no," to Trump, she writes. We must also say "yes," and propose our own progressive shock doctrine ($15 minimum wage, universal health care, etc.), fighting a grass-roots, affirmative war on all fronts at the same time, with a consistent and positive agenda.

But then, this script has succeeded in the past: It was the game plan of the 1970s Christian right, in a time when all seemed lost for them. Victory requires only that one lose all faith in everything that is, and place one's hopes single-mindedly on a utopia that will someday come.

Naomi Klein appears at Powell's at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills, Beaverton, 503-228-4651, powells.com, on Monday, June 19. 7 pm. Free.

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