Source: New York Times
by M Gessen
“The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms. Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once. And now that has become familiar.” (05/28/25)