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One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can. -- M. Gessen
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/trump-one-year-later.htmlA 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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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