A year into Donald Trump’s second term, friends living outside the United States continue to express shock at the news coming from this country, often mixed with concern for my safety. I shrug. Even we who live in the United States and oppose the actions of this administration have a certain tendency to normalize them.
On Tuesday (13), I saw a press release in my inbox: a new protocol in the legal case against the construction of the gigantic immigration detention center in Florida. I—like many other Americans, it seems—had almost forgotten about Swamp Alcatraz.
In Europe, the attention has been unwavering. Journalists write reports and produce documentaries about America building a concentration camp. Around here, we have simply become a country that builds concentration camps. It’s just one of the changes we’ve absorbed over the last year.
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We have become a country in which people are “disappeared” by a paramilitary force that hunts them in their apartments, on the streets of big cities and country roads, and even in the courts. Less than a year ago, videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests went viral, and social media posts about ICE sightings gave us goosebumps.
Now, even the most high-profile arrests have disappeared from our view: Who was released? Who was deported? Who is still missing?
Who can keep up?
We have become a country in which a person can be summarily executed in public for protesting against this paramilitary force. After an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good three times at close range in Minneapolis on January 7, Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other federal officials asserted that the shooting was justified as an act of self-defense (videos show otherwise) and pointed to Good’s alleged ties to left-wing groups — seemingly confirming that, in America, protesting is now an act punishable by death.
We have become a country whose federal government sends military and paramilitary forces to the streets of its main citiesterrorizing residents under the pretext of protecting them.
A foreign observer taking stock of the situation in the United States might describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war. But we can barely keep the list of cities where troops have been or are still on the streets updated: Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans. The number of armed federal agents sent to Minneapolis may now be five times greater than the city’s own police force.
We have become a country whose government attacks its universitiescuts research funds, reverses scientific advances, attacks museums and empties cultural institutions. Few of these attacks—conducted in broad daylight, announced in presidential decrees, celebrated in speeches, and displayed in huge metal letters—are met with significant resistance. We are becoming more ignorant.
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We have become a country that, blatantly disregards international laws. Our military bombs a different country every few weeks, commits murders on the high seas, and forcibly removes foreign political leaders. Our government threatens the world, including our allies, with its imperialist ambitions.
We are a country governed 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 win his favor with gifts. This rarely serves to curb their appetite or even attract their attention, but it seems to be all that is left for them to do.
Admittedly, some elements of our current condition predate Trump. This country has long maintained the largest prison system in the world, and one of the least humane in the West; it was he who provided the basis for Swamp Alcatraz and other concentration camps for immigrants. Executions of black people by the police have long been standard.
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The origins of ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, conceived as a secret police force, date back to 9/11. The culture wars date back to at least the 1980s. And disregard for international law, the role of heavily armed “world police,” has been a long, bipartisan tradition — as have increasingly hostile and restrictive migration policies. The Presidency itself has been becoming less transparent and more powerful for at least two decades.
I’m not arguing that what we’ve become this year is just “more of the same.” Few people still support this argument. But the truth is that although we are taught to think of history as a sequence of definitive turning points, with specific dates—wars, revolutions, assassinations, declarations of independence, and decrees proclaiming martial law—no transformation is instantaneous or total. This Trump administration moves at breakneck speed. And yet, it hasn’t broken everything — yet.
We are still a country with a robust civil society. Lawyers have confronted the administration in court. The population mobilized against Trump’s usurpation of power and organized networks to protect their neighbors from ICE. But Trump’s attacks on universities, his offensive against the judiciary and his threats to nonprofits and philanthropic foundations have already altered the way civil society functions.
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Universities and foundations are no longer what they were a year ago, and the same goes for the Judiciary, where much of civil society’s work is concentrated. And Good’s execution certainly became part of the mental calculation of every potential protester.
We still have independent media. But taking stock of how much the media environment has changed is a disturbing exercise. Even before the 2024 election, the owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had curtailed the independence of their opinion pages. Shortly after the election, ABC News and then parent company CBS News paid millions of dollars to settle what certainly appeared to be frivolous lawsuits filed by Trump. (He has already filed several others, 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-aligned broadcaster.
Autocrats destroy the free press in at least two ways: through direct repression, as Trump has done with lawsuits and regulatory pressure; and through the redistribution of access to information. In October, the Trump administration practically expelled the Pentagon’s traditional media outlets, replacing them with loyal journalists and influencers. The media, like civil society, is much smaller compared to what it was a year ago.
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We still have elections. But how free and fair will the 2026 elections be? Trump doesn’t just hold a grudge against election officials in many states; he has made that grudge a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign. Since returning to office, his administration has taken a series of executive actions and filed lawsuits aimed at restricting access to the polls, purging voter registrations, limiting the independence of local election officials, and generally setting the stage for systematic intimidation of both voters and election officials.
States joined this effort. Florida is cracking down on voter registration drives. Ohio and other states have introduced restrictive voter ID laws.
Georgia limited the opening hours of polling stations and banned offering food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Texas approved a redistricting map that threatens to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters and could eliminate five Democratic House seats, and the Supreme Court has authorized the use of this controversial new map in the 2026 midterm elections.
Add to this Trump’s threat to send the military to deal with the “internal enemy” during the elections, on the one hand, and, on the other, his promise to send Americans what amounts to a bribe — $2,000 checks “near the end of the year” — and you have the prospect of elections that are much less free and much less fair than previous ones.
As for the next presidential election, Trump has already made his intentions clear: he does not plan to abandon the throne. You may look for an excuse to cancel the vote. (When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told him that Ukraine cannot hold elections during war, Trump visibly brightened: “So you mean if we are at war with someone, there is no election anymore? Ah, that’s good.”) He may find a way to invalidate the result after the election — something he has been laying the groundwork for since his first term. Even if it doesn’t, it is delusional to believe that this version of our national nightmare will end in three years.
There is a term for regimes that preserve the appearance of democracy — such as parliaments, courts and elections — but use these institutions mainly as decoration: “electoral authoritarianism”. This is what we are becoming.
It matters what we call things — what we call ourselves. This matters for technical reasons, such as reading opinion polls: public opinion behavior is different in democratic and non-democratic societies. But it matters even more for the way we think about the future. We cannot count on changes promoted through elections when we cannot count on the elections themselves. We cannot count on the freedoms and resources we enjoy today to still be available tomorrow.
Ask anyone who has lived in a country that has become an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they talk about is freedom. In Russia, mass protests used to be possible. (When people were first sentenced to prison for peaceful protest in 2012, I wrote an entire book about it.)
Then, mass protest became impossible, and the only option became what we called a “one-person picket”: someone alone, holding a sign. Then, people started to be arrested for being alone with a blank sheet of paper, then for “liking” something on social media. Russian journalists knew they could write freely as long as they stuck to culture and avoided politics; today, someone can be arrested for performing a song composed by a banned lyricist.
Of course, the United States is not Russia—not Hungary, not Venezuela, not Israel, not any of the many other countries that were democracies and have become, or are becoming, autocracies. But now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways in which other countries have stifled protest, devastated their electoral systems, limited press freedom and erected concentration camps.
The only way to stop this space from imploding is to occupy it, to shore up the walls: to claim all the space that still exists to speak, write, publish, protest, vote. That’s what the people of Minnesota seem to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — now, while we still can.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
