M. Gessen
One Year of Trump.
The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can.
By M. Gessen
Opinion Columnist
- Jan. 18, 2026
A year into Donald
Trump’s second term, friends who live outside the United States continue to
express shock at the news that comes from this country, often mixed with
concern for my safety. I shrug. Even those of us in the United States who
oppose this administration’s actions have a way of normalizing them. On
Tuesday, I saw a news release in my inbox: A new filing in the legal case
against the construction of the giant immigrant detention facility in Florida.
I — like many other Americans, it seems — had almost forgotten about Alligator
Alcatraz.
In Europe, attention has
been unwavering. Journalists are writing articles and making documentaries
about America building a concentration camp. On these shores, we have simply
become a country that builds concentration camps. It’s only one of the changes
we have absorbed in the last year.
We have become a country
where people are disappeared by a paramilitary force that hunts them down in
their apartments, on city streets and country roads, and even in the courts.
Less than a year ago, videos of ICE arrests would go viral and social media
posts about ICE sightings would send chills down our spines. Now even the most
high-profile detentions have faded from view: Who has been released? Who has
been deported? Who is still missing?
Who can keep track?
We have become a country where a
person can be summarily executed in public for protesting that paramilitary
force. After an ICE agent killed Renee Good by shooting her three times at point-blank range in Minneapolis on
Jan. 7, President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other federal officials
said the shooting was justified as an act of self-defense (the video shows otherwise) and pointed to Good’s ostensible
affiliation with left-wing groups — apparently affirming that protest is now
punishable by death in America.
We have become a country
whose federal government deploys military and paramilitary forces in the
streets of its major cities, terrorizing the residents in the guise of
protecting them. A foreign observer taking stock of the United States could
describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war. But we can barely keep
current the list of cities where troops have been or still are in the streets:
Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Memphis; New Orleans.
The number of armed federal agents deployed to Minneapolis may now be five times the
size of the city’s police force.
We have become a country
whose government is attacking its universities, defunding research, reversing
scientific advances, assaulting museums and hollowing out cultural
institutions. Few of these attacks — carried out in broad daylight, announced
in executive orders, extolled in speeches and put on display in giant metal letters —
meet meaningful resistance. We are making ourselves stupider.
We have become a country
that demonstratively tramples on international laws. Our military bombs a
different nation every few weeks, commits murder on the high seas and removes
foreign political leaders by force. Our government threatens the world, including
our allies, with its imperial ambitions.
We are a country ruled
by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose
avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute. Foreign leaders
try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works
to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they
can do.
To be sure, some elements of our
current condition predate Trump. This country has long maintained the world’s
largest carceral system, and one of the least humane in the Western world; it
formed the foundation for the concentration camps. Police executions of Black
people have long been a pattern. The origins of ICE and its parent agency, the
Department of Homeland Security, conceived as a
secret police force, go back to 9/11. The culture wars date to at least the
1980s. And disregarding international law, playing the world’s heavily armed
policeman, has been a longstanding bipartisan tradition — as have increasingly
hostile, restrictive immigration policies. The presidency itself has been
growing less transparent and more powerful for at least a couple of decades.
I am not arguing that
what we have become this year is just more of the same. Few people would make
this argument anymore. But the truth is, even though we are taught to think of
history as a series of definitive turning points with specific dates — wars,
revolutions, assassinations, declarations of independence and decrees
announcing martial law — no transformation is instant or total. This Trump
administration has moved at breakneck speed. And still, it hasn’t broken
everything yet.
We are still a country
with a robust civil society. The lawyers have fought the administration in
court. The people have rallied against Trump’s usurpation of power and have
organized to protect their neighbors from ICE. But Trump’s attacks on
universities, his assault on the
judiciary, and his threats against nonprofits and philanthropies have already
altered the way civil society functions. The universities and the foundations
aren’t what they were a year ago, and neither is the judiciary, where so much
civil-society work is concentrated. And the execution of Renee Good has surely
affected every potential protester’s mental calculus.
We still have
independent media. But taking stock of how much the media landscape has changed
is sobering. Even before the 2024 election, the owners of The Washington Post
and The Los Angeles Times curtailed the independence of their editorial pages.
Soon after the election, ABC News and then the parent company of CBS News paid
millions of dollars to settle what certainly appeared to be frivolous lawsuits
filed by Trump. (He has filed several more, including one against The New York
Times, and another against 20 individual members of the Pulitzer Prize Board,
which includes Times journalists.) Now, under new ownership, CBS is rapidly
transforming itself into a Trump-friendly network.
Autocrats destroy the
free press in at least two ways: by cracking down, as Trump has done through
lawsuits and regulatory pressure, and by reapportioning access to information.
In October, the Trump administration effectively kicked legacy media outlets
out of the Pentagon, replacing them with loyal journalists and influencers. The
media, like civil society, is much diminished compared with what it was a year
ago.
We still have elections. But how free
and fair will the 2026 elections be? Trump doesn’t just carry a grudge against
the election authorities of many states; he made that grudge a centerpiece of
his 2024 campaign. Since he returned to office, his administration has taken a
series of executive actions and filed a series of lawsuits aimed at restricting
access to the polls, purging voter rolls, limiting the independence of local
election authorities, and generally laying the groundwork for the systematic intimidation
of both voters and election officials. States have joined this effort. Florida
is cracking down on voter registration drives. Ohio and other states have
introduced restrictive voter ID laws. Georgia has limited poll hours and banned
providing food or water to people standing in line to vote. Texas has
gerrymandered a map that threatens to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters
and may wipe five Democratic congressional seats out of existence, and the
Supreme Court has allowed this controversial new map to be used in the 2026
midterms. Add to this Trump’s threat to deploy the military to deal with the
“enemy from within” during the elections on the one hand and his promise to
send Americans what amounts to a bribe — $2,000 checks “toward the end of the year” — and you have the prospect
of elections that are far less free and a lot less fair than the last ones.
As for the next
presidential election, Trump has made his intentions clear: He is not planning
to leave his throne. He may look for a pretext to cancel the vote. (When
President Volodymyr Zelensky told him that Ukraine can’t have an election
during the war, Trump visibly lit up: “So you mean if we happen to be in a war
with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”) He may find a way to
invalidate the vote after the election — he has been laying the groundwork for
such a move since his first term. Even if he doesn’t, it is foolish to think
that this iteration of our national nightmare will end in three years.
One term for regimes
that maintain the trappings of democracy, such as legislatures, courts and
elections, but use them primarily as decoration is “electoral
authoritarianism.” This is what we are becoming.
It matters what we call
things — what we call ourselves. It matters for wonky reasons like reading the
polls: Public opinion functions differently in democratic and nondemocratic
societies. But it matters more for how we think about the future. We can’t count
on change being brought about by elections when we can’t count on elections. We
can’t count on the freedoms and resources we enjoy today to still be available
to us tomorrow.
Ask any people who have
lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some
version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller
and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom. In Russia, mass protest
used to be possible. (The first time people got prison terms for peaceful
protest, in 2012, I wrote a whole book about it.) Then mass protest became
impossible and the only option was what we called the one-person picket: a
person standing alone with a sign. Then people started getting arrested for
standing alone with a blank piece of paper, then for “liking” something on
social media. Russian journalists used to know that they could write freely as
long as they stuck to culture and avoided politics; now a person can get
arrested for performing a tune by a banned songwriter.
Of course, the United States is not
Russia — or Hungary or Venezuela or Israel or any of the many other democracies
that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. But now is the
time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other
countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems,
limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep
the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the
room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s
what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us
needs to do — right now, while we still can.
