Trump Was the Symptom. Corporate Impunity Was the Disease

Joshua Scheer

For decades, Americans have been told that rising crime, political polarization, and Donald Trump’s ascent are separate crises requiring separate solutions. Political scientist Marie Gottschalk argues they are all symptoms of the same deeper disease: an economic and political system that has steadily expanded punishment for ordinary people while shielding corporations and the wealthy from meaningful accountability. In a wide-ranging conversation with Chris Hedges about her new book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, Gottschalk traces how deregulation, mass incarceration, militarized policing, endless war, media consolidation, and bipartisan deference to corporate power converged to create the conditions for today’s authoritarian politics. The result, she argues, is a country where state violence at home and imperial violence abroad reinforce one another—and where Trump’s rise represents not a break from the American system, but its logical consequence.

IMarie Gottschalk’s Crime and No Punishment is about far more than crime. It is a sweeping examination of how the United States built a political and economic order that punishes ordinary people while increasingly protecting the powerful. In her interview with Chris Hedges, Gottschalk argues that America’s crisis of democracy cannot be understood by looking only at Donald Trump. Trump, she insists, is not the cause of the country’s decline—he is the product of decades of bipartisan decisions that hollowed out democratic institutions while shielding elite power from accountability.

The central argument is simple but devastating: America now operates under two justice systems.

One system aggressively prosecutes street crime, drug offenses, and immigration violations. The other has steadily decriminalized corporate crime, allowing executives responsible for massive financial and social harm to avoid meaningful punishment. Over the last four decades, prosecutions of corporate executives have steadily declined even as the United States built the largest prison system in the democratic world. The wealthy increasingly pay fines that amount to little more than the cost of doing business, while ordinary Americans fill the nation’s prisons.

This inversion of justice did not happen overnight. It emerged through decades of deregulation, financialization, corporate consolidation, endless military spending, and bipartisan political choices that concentrated wealth and power at the very top while abandoning working-class communities. As Chris Hedges observes during the interview, “Trump is the symptom. He’s not the disease.”

That argument echoes themes Robert Scheer recently explored repeatedly in his conversations about authoritarianism in the United States. Trump did not invent America’s democratic crisis. He inherited institutions that had already been weakened by concentrated corporate power, declining public trust, militarized policing, mass incarceration, and a political class increasingly disconnected from the people it claimed to represent.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Millions of Americans lost their homes, pensions, savings, healthcare, and financial security. Entire communities were devastated by foreclosures and unemployment. Yet almost no senior banking executives were criminally prosecuted. Instead, the banks responsible for much of the crisis received enormous government bailouts while many executives became even wealthier.

That failure represented more than a legal failure—it was a moral and political collapse.

The neoliberal political establishment never truly answered for its role in creating the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Americans watched Wall Street rescued while Main Street was sacrificed. They saw families lose everything while those responsible escaped accountability.

One question continues to haunt that period:

How many bankers actually went to prison?

The answer, for all practical purposes, is almost none.

That failure shattered public confidence in both political parties and created precisely the kind of resentment and distrust that Donald Trump would later exploit. Much of the political establishment continues to treat Trump’s rise as though it emerged from nowhere, when in reality it was built upon decades of accumulated economic betrayal.

Gottschalk argues that Americans are also encouraged to fear the wrong crimes.

Political campaigns, cable news, and sensational headlines obsess over robbery, gangs, drugs, and violent street crime. Meanwhile, corporate fraud, environmental destruction, predatory lending, workplace deaths, regulatory capture, financial crimes, and public health harms receive comparatively little sustained attention despite causing vastly greater social and economic damage.

The imbalance is striking. America has devoted extraordinary resources to policing poor communities while allowing many forms of elite criminality to become normalized.

The consequences extend far beyond economics.

One of the interview’s most compelling arguments is that America’s empire abroad inevitably returns home. The country’s endless wars have not remained overseas. Military tactics, equipment, training, and a battlefield mentality have increasingly shaped domestic policing. Veterans enter police departments carrying experiences from foreign occupations, military hardware flows into local law enforcement, and police increasingly operate as though neighborhoods are hostile territory.

This is what Gottschalk describes as the “blowback” of empire.

Police violence itself is also more complicated than many Americans assume.

National conversations often frame police violence as primarily an urban issue affecting large cities. Gottschalk presents evidence showing that rural communities experience extraordinarily high levels of police violence as well. White Americans in rural areas face significant risks, while Indigenous communities remain among those most likely to be killed by police. Much of this violence receives little media attention because it occurs far from major news organizations.

The broader point is that state violence has become national rather than merely urban.

Gottschalk reserves some of her sharpest criticism for the Obama administration.

She argues that following the financial collapse, President Obama inherited a rare opportunity to fundamentally restructure Wall Street and restore public confidence through meaningful criminal prosecutions and structural reform. Instead, deferred prosecution agreements proliferated, executives largely escaped prosecution, banks became even larger through consolidation, and millions of homeowners continued to bear the consequences of the crisis.

History offered a chance to redraw the relationship between finance and democracy.

That opportunity was missed.

The political relationships surrounding that era continue to raise uncomfortable questions. One example involves former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who defended a controversial 2007 phone call he placed to Citigroup executive Robert Rubin on behalf of Ameriquest Mortgage’s parent company shortly after taking office. Patrick later acknowledged the call reflected poor judgment, though the Massachusetts Ethics Commission declined to sanction him. Whether viewed as symbolic or substantive, episodes like this reinforced public perceptions that political elites remained unusually close to the financial institutions they were supposed to regulate.

The media also plays an essential role in maintaining this imbalance.

Corporate news organizations devote endless coverage to violent crime, celebrity scandals, and cultural conflict while giving comparatively little sustained investigative attention to corporate crime, financial misconduct, media consolidation, regulatory capture, and the political influence of concentrated wealth. This distorted emphasis shapes public understanding of where the greatest dangers actually lie.

Ultimately, Crime and No Punishment is not simply a book about crime.

It is a book about democratic legitimacy.

When ordinary citizens watch bankers receive bailouts, corporations negotiate modest fines, executives avoid prison, and powerful institutions repeatedly escape accountability while ordinary people face aggressive policing and incarceration, faith in democratic government inevitably erodes.

Perhaps the book’s most important insight is that none of this was inevitable.

Corporate America has not always exercised this degree of influence over American politics. Following previous financial scandals—including the savings-and-loan crisis—stronger regulation and accountability were politically possible. Similar opportunities existed after the Great Recession. Political leaders simply chose different paths.

Those choices shaped the America we inhabit today.

The enduring lesson of Gottschalk’s work is that America’s growing instability did not emerge because the country became too soft on crime.

It emerged because the country became increasingly soft on powerful people while becoming increasingly punitive toward everyone else.

That single insight connects Wall Street, corporate crime, mass incarceration, militarized policing, endless war, media consolidation, declining public trust, and ultimately the political conditions that made Donald Trump’s rise possible.

Chris Hedges: In the opening chapter of Marie Gottschalk’s book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America”, a chapter titled “Social Murder”, she writes, “The United States is an exceptionally militarized, lethal, and violent country. The growing concentration of economic, political, and military power is draining America of vital resources to sustain healthy and peaceful communities. It is pushing more people to the margins where a police officer, a prison cell, a tent, a military recruiter, or a deadly dose of fentanyl-laced heroin is waiting for them. Rates of homicide, gun violence, suicide, drug overdoses, incarceration, traffic deaths, poverty, and police use of force are exceptionally high in the United States compared to those of other Western countries.” She continues, “In a historic reversal, U.S. life expectancy has fallen below that of much poorer countries as a growing number of people in this country are at risk of losing their homes, health, livelihoods and savings. Tens of millions of U.S. gun owners are locked and loaded, ready to take the law into their own hands or turn their guns on themselves. And escalating political violence has put the electoral system and democracy in America in mortal danger.”

She warns that the United States is increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. Powerful economic and political interests are rendering less powerful groups and individuals in the United States more susceptible to premature death and other harms, or what Frederick Engels calls ‘social murder’.

Joining me to discuss her new book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power and Violence, in America”, is Professor Marie Gottschalk. She is the Edmund Cain Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the author of “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics”.

So, Marie, I said before we went on the air, I thought your book was just a compendium of all of the political and historical missteps that have resulted in the rise of the cult-like figure of Trump. You open the book by looking at the twin evils of state violence at home and imperial violence abroad. I’m just going to read, I thought it was a really prescient little section, you say, “The country’s deep investment in its overseas empire, including the massive military budget, and the unassailable assumption that the United States is the indispensable nation destined to police the world, has compounded the problem of violence in America.” Can you talk about that inner link between imperial violence and violence at home?

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, there’s so many links. I studied mass incarceration for many years, and we focused on how we can shift money from policing to social welfare issues and defund the police. But we ignore the fact that defunding the police is not going to solve the fundamental issues in the United States and that for all the talk about polarization, the giant military budget goes through every year almost without any significant opposition. And that as a society, those resources are not available to be tapped. So, the first thing is just where the money is going.

The second thing is that there’s blowback from the Empire that we see that the policing that is done overseas and what we learn about policing overseas, how policing developed since the early 20th century, was very much intertwined with what the American military was doing and also of recruiting veterans to go into our police forces to use high-level military training in our police forces, use military equipment. And so, this kind of blowback from the Empire, and after 9-11 we talked about blowback whether it was going to increase threats of terrorism at home, but we’ve ignored the blowback from policing, and also the disparate impact of the Empire on certain parts of the country. It’s very easy today to disparage rural areas and to say that this is the heartland the support of MAGA, but in many ways rural areas have carried some of the heaviest burdens of the Empire. Many people from rural areas have gone for two, three, four trips overseas, served in the military and they’ve come back. Deaths have been lower than other wars, but casualties, injuries, PTSD, mental health problems, opioid problems related to overseas service are astronomical in many of these communities.

Chris Hedges: You make the link between the law and order agenda pushed through in large part by the Clinton administration, and at the same time, the deregulation and lack of oversight of corporate crime, corporate malfeasance. Those two issues for you are also interrelated.

Marie Gottschalk: It was fascinating to me, and I have to admit it was a major blind spot of myself teaching mass incarceration. I just focused on crime in the streets and didn’t really focus on, I sort of knew there was crime in the suites, but I didn’t intensely focus on it, and I didn’t see these as two important twins that go together. And so, while we’re all focusing on mass incarceration and increasing number of people for crime in the streets or in US prisons putting the US really to be the world’s warden, almost the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. And yes, you’re right to finger the Clinton administration. At the same time, we have these crime waves from corporate America, and we have this phenomenal decriminalization of crime in the suites. So, we have an evisceration of our regulatory units. We have the financialization, not only of the Treasury of the Secretary, the SEC, taking people from the financial industry but increasingly during the Obama administration, to some extent Clinton administration, you have people from the financial sector who are staffing key positions in the Department of Justice. And so, what we’ve seen is a lightening up on corporate crime, both in investigating it and prosecuting it, and we had this intensification of punishing people for street crimes.

Chris Hedges: Well, because all they do is slap fines on them. Nobody’s ever really sent to jail unless they’re Bernie Madoff, and that’s because he stole from the rich. But there’s a quote in the book, I think it’s from Jamie Dimon, he says, “Go ahead, fine me. I don’t care.” What’s $15 million, whatever it is, he doesn’t care.

Marie Gottschalk: Right, and it was a quote directed at Elizabeth Warren when he was testifying, right? And if you see some of these fines from the financial crisis, they look like a lot of money, billions and billions of dollars, right? But often they don’t even equal the quarterly profits of these corporations. The corporations are able to often deduct these from their taxes. And many times, the government doesn’t even follow up whether they’ve paid these fines or not.

I think the other thing important to focus on is these so-called ‘deferred prosecution agreements’. This was a mechanism, dates back to the early 20th century, and it was to help young juveniles who got in trouble with the law to say, “Look, you stay clean. You don’t get in more trouble. We’ll just not charge you. We’ll not prosecute you.” Well, beginning toward the tail end of the Clinton administration and then really taking off in the Bush administration and Obama administration, these became the mechanism of choice to deal with corporate America. And these are basically negotiated agreements between corporate law firms and the Justice Department. If you break the deferred prosecution agreement, you’re supposed to be prosecuted. That’s what it is, a deferred prosecution. But it’s often like Britney Spears’ “Oops, I did it again.” I break the agreement and I’m given another deferred prosecution agreement. These agreements are often not monitored in any close way.

And so, with crime in the streets, we obsess about people who commit robbery or people who commit burglary, are they going to recidivate again? But we have major corporations who are repeat recidivators, and they get deferred prosecution agreements. The other thing about these agreements is you have a shift towards prosecuting the corporation rather than the corporate executives, right? And so that even if you have these, it’s still not directed at the individuals, but rather it’s directed at the corporation, which is a big change in the United States.

Chris Hedges: Talk about the political effects as these huge corporate entities accrued more and more wealth and more and more power. You also write about the rise of the American oligarchic class. How did that affect our political system?

Marie Gottschalk: I think we have not fully reconciled with the enormous impact of the Great Recession and that we said the Great Recession was over, Obama campaigned in 2012, “The economy is back, we’re back.” But for many parts of the country, we were not back. And many parts of the country understood that this traumatic economic event happened. Millions of people lost their homes. We had the biggest mass migration of people since the Great Depression. People lost their pensions. People lost their healthcare. And it was a rebound from the Great Recession that was very unequal and that the coastal areas, the high-tech parts of the country, rebounded while many other parts of the country were mired in this economic distress. Tax bases were eroded, public spending didn’t come back, spending on public health didn’t bounce back. And I think that was for many people a crystallizing event of experiencing this economic trauma and nobody was to blame for it.

And many of the elite – the head of the Fed, the heads of corporations – treated it like it’s an act of nature, it’s an act of God. And yet we knew that there were many reports coming and that something had to be done and it wasn’t done. And many people in the United States understood that nobody went to jail for that, nobody was charged for that. And I think that that has been a very powerful undermining of trust in government, and also that there was no reckoning with the banks. The largest banks came out stronger than before. People understood that hundreds of billions of dollars went to save the banks, but the Obama administration supported a very shoddy foreclosure plan that as Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, we now understand said, “Well, the only reason for that was to foam the runway for the banks”, so to slow down the foreclosures a little bit so they could process them. It wasn’t really to help the people who were in threat of losing their homes.

And I think we focus on lack of trust in Congress, but there’s a fundamental lack of trust in corporations right now. And the public opinion polls are very interesting in that increasingly people don’t trust corporations. They don’t have trust in capitalism. They have increased favorable views of socialism. If we look at the current president, 45, running in 2016 and then coming back again in in 2024, and we all want to blame this on this kind of misogynist racist deplorables that he’s appealing to. And I think there are much more complicated reasons that yes, he’s got this rage that he appeals to from certain parts of the country, but there’s also a powerful economic rage that then has been directed towards immigrants, towards women, et cetera, et cetera. But I also think it’s directed towards increasingly the economic elite.

Chris Hedges: It was a little interesting for me, a footnote in the book, which I didn’t know until I read it, and I’d like you to address it, and that is the spiraling mass incarceration rates in rural areas.

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, so we often think of mass incarceration as an urban phenomenon and one that primarily affects African American men. And what we’ve seen over the last decade is a kind of shift in that your chances of being incarcerated actually are higher in rural areas and suburban areas than they are in urban areas right now. And so even though we’re overall, in some states, seeing the incarceration rate go down, it’s often driven because the incarceration rate in urban areas is going down. And meanwhile, in rural areas, it’s going up. And so, it’s misleading to say we finally are going to have a downward trend in incarceration rates. There’s actually great variation across the country in this.

Chris Hedges: And this is also accompanied by, which I didn’t know until I read your book, “A rise of police violence in rural and suburban communities,” you write, “which have accounted for about three quarters of such fatalities. In 2020, the fact is not widely known for several reasons, research on police homicides overwhelmingly focuses on large cities, even though most of these fatalities occur in communities with fewer than 100,000 people. Furthermore, major cities tend to have more political networks, organizational resources, and media outlets, so, police killings in urban areas are more likely to attract public attention. Indigenous people are the most at risk of being killed by the police, but their deaths, which typically occur in rural underpopulated areas without witnesses to record the deadly encounters on smartphones, do not garner wider public attention.”

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, you know what I’m trying to do here is to talk about police as state violence and to see that it’s not just an urban phenomenon, and also to understand some of the deeper structural roots and causes of that. And it’s remarkable to me that really we have very good data on how many police get killed each year, but we don’t…

Chris Hedges: I just want to interrupt you. I know from your book, almost none are charged or they’re charged with very minor offenses. I mean, it’s staggering.

Marie Gottschalk: Right. Very few get charged. Very few get convicted and then even if they get convicted, the sentences are pretty nominal. Even in departments that have banned chokeholds, you can have police who use chokeholds and sometimes they won’t get charged and the internal punishment might be taking some of their vacation days. But trying to look at rural deaths and to see state violence as something that spans the United States, right, is a very important way to try to think about the coalitions to challenge state violence and that certainly African Americans are disproportionately killed by the police. But in many parts of the country, being a white person in a rural area will put you at high risk for being killed by the police. And it’s often how we think about racial disparities. White people are less likely to be killed by police than African American people are. But white people in the United States, compared to white people in the United Kingdom or Germany, are very high at risk for being killed by the police because we have such high rates of police violence. And the police violence is probably even higher than what we know because we don’t collect good data on police killings of civilians.

Chris Hedges: So, I just want to read this passage and have you comment. You said, “More white people are killed by U.S. police officers each year than people from any other racial or ethnic group. Eight of the 10 states with the highest rates of fatal police shootings are in the West, where black people constitute barely 3 % of state populations on average. As for the other leading states, one is West Virginia, which is one of the whitest and least diverse states. The other is Louisiana, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states. White people make up the majority of people in rural areas in nearly every state and also constitute two thirds of the people killed by the police in rural communities.” Those statistics were completely unknown to me.

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s not known to a lot of people, right? Because we think that if we just fix our urban police departments, we’re going to fix this problem. I think the other piece that I don’t emphasize enough in the book, though I do mention, is many of these rural areas are run by sheriffs. And sheriffs are a whole force onto their own. They’re elected. They are above the law in many ways. And they are a prime recruiting ground now for this constitutional sheriff’s movement, which is that we can interpret the law the way we see fit because we are elected and we are, they argue, the prime representation of the public will.

Chris Hedges: Or you compare it to police systems in Europe, not only in terms of training, which is much more extensive, but also the vast variety of law enforcement entities that exist throughout the United States, which are disparate, which are not connected.

Marie Gottschalk: Right, and some places you have a police force that’s one person, right? And the average police force is 10 or 12 people. How do you get high quality training? In many states, we have more extensive training required for a hairstylist or manicurist than we require for someone who’s going to carry a gun and be able to shoot and kill someone.

Chris Hedges: It’s a matter of weeks, isn’t it? What’d you say, it’s like 11 weeks or something?

Marie Gottschalk: Right, yeah, 11 weeks is the average. In Europe, in some countries it’s three years of training, and in some of the Scandinavian countries, getting into a police training program is as hard as getting into an elite university in the United States.

Chris Hedges: I want you to talk about what you call the ‘fetish of secrecy’.

Marie Gottschalk: The fetish of secrecy is we don’t know what the police are doing, right? We don’t collect good data on civilian deaths. And we often focus on civilian deaths, and we forget that there are many more times shootings, sexual assault, beatings, all other kinds of abuse by the police. Much of the data that we have on police abuse is collected by enterprising journalists, citizens. It’s no national database on what the police are doing. The 1994 Crime Bill said that police departments should collect this data, but there have been no real strong incentives like we’ll take away federal funding if you don’t collect this data. So, we don’t have even good databases to track this information.

Chris Hedges: You also write about non-fatal police violence and abuse. You say, “While killings by the police have become a major issue in recent years, other types of police violence and abuse have received comparatively little national attention. Sexual assault and sexual misconduct are among the most frequently reported forms of police misconduct, second only to excessive use of force. Low income, LGBTQ people, black women, and members of other historically disadvantaged groups are most likely to be victims of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by law enforcement. Police officers across the country conduct roadside digital anal and vaginal exams on the thinnest of pretext. Furthermore, school officials and police nationwide persist in strip searching students, from preschoolers to high schoolers, in violation of the Constitution because courts cannot bring themselves to impose a penalty upon them for doing so.”

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable, isn’t it?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, but again it’s this culture of impunity.

Marie Gottschalk: It is a culture of impunity and the reasons why: first, we don’t prosecute. And then the second reason is if you want to bring a civil lawsuit, we have this thing called qualified immunity, which essentially has immunized most of the police from really ever facing serious civil lawsuits. And even if you’re able to get your lawsuit into court, and even if you win, the police themselves usually don’t even pay the penalties or the cost of the civil lawsuit, the fine.

Chris Hedges: You also write about police unions. Of course, you have a notorious police union in Philadelphia, where you teach, which can often resemble a white hate group. These police unions bestow, you write, political endorsements. They run their own candidates. It goes far beyond the traditional role of enforcing established policies. Talk about the role of police unions.

Marie Gottschalk: Police unions are a very powerful force, and some police commissioners say, “We don’t even have control over our unions,” right? And so, if there’s a shooting, often police have the right, for example, if there’s video of that shooting, to see the video ahead of time before they’re interviewed, right? So, they can make their stories align with what the video is there. They often aren’t interviewed right away when there’s a shooting of a civilian. Many of these things go to arbitration and the arbitration is very heavily tilted towards the police. So, it’s very difficult to discipline police, fire police, to impose new strictures on the police.

Chris Hedges: When did this begin? I mean, you had Rizzo in Philadelphia. It was the 1960s, right? And I think at one point Philadelphia had the most, in terms of per capita, was killing more people. Of course, the whole Mumia Abu Jamal case. But what is it, in your view, that triggered this culture of impunity, this ability of the police to carry out lethal violence and non-lethal abuse?

Marie Gottschalk: I have to go back to the 20th century and really going back again to the Empire actually and bringing military back into the United States at a time when there’s more attention on developing police forces. Because at that time, Capital didn’t really want to pay for police forces. They had their own private police forces. But increasingly with labor unrest, rising concerns about income inequality, political mobilization with the populace, Capital began to think maybe we need professional police forces, maybe we need to pay for those police forces. That was the same time that the United States was going out as an empire and then bringing back veterans, who had developed policing tactics overseas. And there was this idea that we should make professional police and professional police should be autonomous and they should behave like the military. And so, these roots of this militarization of the police and its autonomy are intertwined with the development of the Empire.

Chris Hedges: But there was a backlash, I mean, certainly in the 60s. Wasn’t there a certain period of an attempt at a corrective or not?

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. We think about Lyndon Johnson and the Big Crime Bill and the Kerner Commission and saying that we need to invest more in jobs and health care and the social safety net and things like that. But the other thing that came out of the Crime Bill of 1968 was actually that we need to have more professional police. And here, professional police was defined by more equipment, more training and more autonomy for local police because one of the ways that local police bought into “okay, we might get this infusion of money from the federal government” was that we’ll take that, but we need to have autonomy. And so, you give a lot of this military equipment but you’re also having rising autonomy of the local police.

And again, you also see the blowback from the Empire because this was a period of “let’s develop nonlethal weapons”, but many of these so-called ‘non-lethal weapons’ that were used overseas during that period, obviously Vietnam, many of them were actually quite lethal. Tear gas that was used in Vietnam that was imported back here was very, very lethal. Rubber bullets, things like that. But we began to use the language of non-lethal weapons, even though these actually could kill you and if they didn’t kill you, they could seriously harm you. So, we talked about this new professional policing with non-lethal weapons, but it was highly militarized policing.

Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the parallels between deindustrialization and the militarization and excessive force by police and, of course, the huge expansion in the carcel state?

Marie Gottschalk: So, one of the reasons that we got the carceral state – I served on the National Academy of Sciences Commission on the Causes and Consequences of Mass Incarceration – and one of the causes we came to as a committee to agree upon was that you had deindustrialization in the cities in the 1950s and 60s. And there were rising fears that people didn’t have jobs and that that might be a threat in some ways to the stability of cities and with the decline of jobs, decline of social services, things like that in the cities. And so, there was a sense that you needed to assert more control over cities.

There’s a common thing that if unemployment goes up, then disorder will follow. That isn’t always true, but it’s a really common belief. And so, there’s an idea about cracking down. If you think that that’s one of the things that fueled increased police and increased incarceration, then we can think that something like that is happening at a delay in rural America. As you got NAFTA, as you got more industry that was in rural areas and in the heartland moving overseas, you had this wave of deindustrialization. In the 50s and 60s, many companies moved out of the cities, moved to greenfield sites where they didn’t have to deal with labor unions, fewer environmental protections, cheaper labor, all that kind of stuff. Then they started moving to Vietnam, to China, to Mexico. And with this deindustrialization in these areas, you have some of the same fears that you had in urban areas that helped to fuel mass incarceration in urban America.

Chris Hedges: I just want to read a passage you wrote about the Obama administration because it seems to me that this passage explains how the Obama administration really paved the way for the arrival of Trump. “The Obama administration failed to reverse the remarkable inversion in the criminal legal system of the last five decades. That is, the vast expansion of the carcel state to punish street crimes, drug offenses, and immigration violations since the 1970s and the accelerating de facto decriminalization of high-level crime in the suites since the 1990s. As non-prosecution agreements, and deferred prosecution agreements proliferated to settle cases stemming from the financial and foreclosure crises, these get out of jail free cards became even more deeply legitimized and institutionalized to deal with all kinds of corporate crime under Obama and his successors. Furthermore, Obama’s mortgage relief program ended up being a boondoggle for leading banks and mortgage servicers, who turbocharged the foreclosure crisis turning millions of people out of their homes and illegally repossessing many properties. An estimated nine to 10 million families would end up losing their homes, about two thirds of them to foreclosures. Many people simply walked away from their devalued properties,” as you said earlier, “returning the keys to the banks, an action that would destroy families’ credit for years.” I think that you make this point in the book. I mean, people who turned to Trump had at one point supported Obama.

Marie Gottschalk: At one point, had supported Bernie Sanders too, after Obama, right? And so, you know, there’s a common argument that, the support for Trump is largely racially driven, but there were millions of whites who voted twice for Obama. Obama won states like Indiana, which we can’t imagine the Democrats right now winning, right? But he won Indiana, and a good proportion of the Sanders voters, we understand, then moved over to Trump. And if you listen to Trump’s final commercial, his main commercial in the 2016 election, it could be a commercial by Bernie Sanders except that the voice is unmistakably Trump’s. But it’s pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the so-called global elite, the oligarchy, and it’s interspersed with this multicultural, working-class people of seemingly all different races, ethnic backgrounds, etc. And it’s a very, very powerful commercial about this perception that these people have been abandoned in the United States.

I want to add one other thing about Obama. What I don’t want people to come away with is thinking corporations have always had all this power. There is no choice. There’s nothing we can do about it. And what I try to do in the book is say, “Yes, corporations throughout American history have disproportionately had power, but it’s waxed and it’s waned.” And I try to identify moments when it was possible to do something else. So, after the Savings and Loan Crisis, George H.W. Bush was forced to put some regulations in. The Clinton administration stripped down those guardrails and let the economy rip and be deregulated, crashed and burned with the Great Recession. Obama comes in and we read back now and say it was always polarized with Obama. Yes, it was very polarized about the Affordable Care Act, but there was remarkable support ranging pretty broadly across the political spectrum to restructure the banks, to do not just window dressing about economic reform, but something much more penetrating so that you wouldn’t have these banks become too big to fail, that you would make them pay in some certain way, that you would make them keep high reserves compared to previously. And the Obama administration blinked on that. And Obama’s justification, he said, “If we sent these corporate executives to jail and we use the criminal system,” he says in his memoir, “that would have been violence to the social order.”

I think about that and think about the violence to so many Americans who lost their homes, who lost their pensions, right? But this would be violence to the social order. So, what Obama sort of argues is, okay, we’re going to do regulation, right? We’re going to let our Department of Justice close its eyes to what’s going on and instead we’re going to do regulation. And then he supported a very weak economic reform, regulation of the banking industry. He delayed in what side he was going to come out on that. By that time, Capital had regrouped. They were back on a roll. The largest banks had consolidated. They used the hundreds of billions of dollars in the TARP money to come back, to buy up smaller banks. Then at that point, Obama had missed the moment, and yet there were opportunities, legislation in Congress to take a much stricter position with the financial industry and it didn’t happen. And Obama justified it, “Okay, we’re going to do regulation, we’re not going to do criminal,” but he didn’t really do either.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk, before we talk about Trump, the media a little bit and the fact that you have this handful of oligarchs buying up – Larry Ellison, Bezos and others – and what that has done that kind of corrosive effect on our political life?

Marie Gottschalk: You know, I’m a professor today in part because I used to be a journalist and I sort of saw some of what was happening. I worked for an independent newspaper. It got bought up by Gannett. We tried to organize a union. I watched what happened when an independent was…

Chris Hedges: Which paper was it? I have to ask.

Marie Gottschalk: It was the Burlington Free Press. It was a really fine newspaper that then shrunk its news, didn’t do as much investigative journalism, et cetera, et cetera.

But the problems with the press predate Jeff Bezos, right? That in fact, we’ve had this consolidation of the media for several decades now. We have not had administrations willing to use antitrust law, the FCC, to prevent those consolidations that are going on. We’ve also not had a good push to support local journalism like you have in other countries where people pay a tax and they see it as a public service that you should have good local journalism, right? That’s what you have in Norway, and you pay for it like you pay for roads, you pay for good local journalism. What we’ve seen now is this all happening on steroids. And the other piece of it, and again, goes back to Clinton administration, the Clinton administration let private equity rip after the 1980s and the crisis that we had with some of the corporate raiders, private equity recoiled a bit, but then some deregulation that happened during the Clinton administration allowed private equity to blossom again, and private equity has been very corrosive to journalism. And one of the things I’m trying to do with the book is to say that we need to think of all these aspects, right, of what is corroding our society and not just look at Trump, either Trump 45 or 47, and one of them being journalism.

Chris Hedges: Well, Trump is the symptom. He’s not the disease. And I think by the end of your book, I think you do a good job of explaining why we have a figure like Trump, a con artist, demagogue because the one thing he did was tap into that very legitimate sense of betrayal, by both parties, a sense of anger and in some ways the mask that has been ripped off and we’re seeing all of the poisons that you document in the book being turbocharged by the Trump administration.

Marie Gottschalk: We are and people say to me, “How could all these Americans have voted for Trump in 2016?” And I said to many Americans, “Hillary Clinton looked like a shill for Wall Street.”

Chris Hedges: Which she was.

Marie Gottschalk: Right. And when it came to her $100,000 speeches that she was getting…

Chris Hedges: Goldman Sachs.

Marie Gottschalk: Goldman Sachs. You know, her fancy home in the Hamptons, etc, etc. And her saying, “When Bill and I left the White House, we were penniless,” and then their net wealth was being in the tens of millions of dollars. And so, people saw that and I don’t think we should underestimate what, hey may not know every in and out of the Great Recession and the financial crisis, but they can pick up on some of that. And especially when Trump came down his elevator and made his announcement and he stoked some of those concerns.

Chris Hedges: So now, the deregulation, the destruction of watchdog agencies, just the entire edifice that provided ineffective, at least largely ineffective, but at least some protection, are just being ripped apart. Of course, the Trump administration has no respect for the system. I mean, they tried to overturn when he lost the first presidential race. When he ran this time, he said that if he lost in 2024, he wouldn’t acknowledge the results. He’s talking about a third term. Where are we?

Marie Gottschalk: Where are we? I guess it’s who’s ‘we’, right? I think the elite in the Democratic Party are, “There were good days, we need to go back.” And Obama looks better when you compare him to Trump. Biden looks better when you compare him to Trump. George W. Bush looks better when you compare him to Trump, right? Until the elite finally reconcile with what their responsibility was for where we are, we can’t start rebuilding. And it’s not about going back. And in some ways, it’s about a reckoning with what the wrecking ball was from both parties and the elite of both parties. And then it becomes, this is not just going to come by putting somebody else in the White House. And the takeover of the Republican Party was not just about Donald Trump. This has been a decades-long project to figure out how to shift the polity in the United States, and this didn’t come out of nowhere. And if we think we’re just going to let somebody new in 2028 to clean it up, it’s not going to happen. And there isn’t, I don’t sense, that energy in the elite levels of the Democratic Party to really reckon with this. I think there are the grassroots that they’ve been trying to trash in the Democratic Party for a long time, or trying to contain it, those forces. But there does seem to be this kind of, bring back the good old days without recognizing that the good old days were the Clinton years of deregulation, were Obama having this phenomenal moment, this political moment, got himself to for a short time, a veto proof Senate. And what did he do with it? Right? He squandered that moment.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that’s the tragedy of it. It’s kind of like the sterility of the late Weimar Republic. It’s extremely worrying. I think you’d probably agree the Democratic Party’s sabotaging of the Bernie Sanders campaign was one of the greatest political sins because he was speaking to those issues and his commitment to the working class, unlike Trump’s, of course is real. And as you mention, even on university campuses, there’s a paragraph in your book about shutting down the encampments, the closure of free speech on university campuses.

Marie Gottschalk: Well, this is something that’s very near and dear to me because, and even at my own university, the narrative is, “Well, we just have to weather what’s going on in Washington, and it’s all just happening down in Washington.” And we forget the really tragic year we had in universities in 2023, 2024 and really that we’re living in right now of a complete chill and lockdown for open expression on universities. And we’re right now going to impose possibly some very permanent draconian open expression rules at my university that I can’t believe might actually pass and be imposed here. And these are pre-Trump. These are things that happened under Obama and even at my own university, I talk about in the book, we called out, my public security people, a SWAT team, looking for a student who allegedly threw paint on the statue of Benjamin Franklin. Like, how did that happen? And how do we allow, like, the outrage, right, that we’re calling out SWAT teams on our students for something so minor like that. And that again is also a public reckoning.

Likewise, at my own university, we essentially had an attempt for a hostile takeover of our board that ended up losing our president at our university. And that was not all about just what happened in Washington, but it is the tentacles of these larger political forces that many people just think, including many administrators at my university, that we can just get below the radar, wait this out, maybe things will be better in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election and not really see that democracy is in peril and that we’re all of fault and we all have to save it rather than kind of cowering, which is what I see with many of the elite universities, including my own.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it’s really quite tragic. I spent 20 years overseas and universities are always the last readout of free expression in a real political debate. Once they shut those down, it’s almost unfortunately terminal. I was at Harvard and the Dartmouth students would always come and dump green paint all over John Harvard every year. So, I can just imagine the SWAT teams coming for them. Thank you very much, Marie.

And I want to thank Sophia, Max, and Malena who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!