The United States of Putinism

What Has Happened to Us?

Update Oct.13 - One region of the world where bullies have the edge is the Middle East. Donald Trump’s breakthrough on the Gaza war, should it get to a second phase, will be justifiably celebrated by all concerned -- including the Arab states that can expect to benefit financially from an end to the conflict, as doubtless will the Trump family. For those of us who have watched Trump’s unmistakeable ascent with emotions that are everything short of favor, this is further evidence that for worse or better, he is achieving a dominance in domestic and global affairs that is unique in memory.

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The hyperventilation of the Trump era inspires analogies to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and fascism of every sort. But what may be the most precise description is how, in many ways, our country is coming to resemble post-Soviet Russia.

The USSR imploded in 1991, and for a decade or so it flailed in pursuit of a new identity. Then came Vladimir Putin, and over more than twenty years he has transformed Russia into what it has become today: belligerent, inequitable, and repressive, with a largely quiescent population.

The Russian populace has always tended toward submissiveness. It was a small revolutionary minority that toppled the tsar embraced Communism and until the 1980s virtually the entire population of the fifteen Soviet republics accepted their fate as vassals of the Kremlin.

American citizens have been much more influential, for better or worse, in the evolution of our society. Beginning with the Revolution, through the Civil War and the liberation and anti-war movements of the 1960s, our population has been instrumental in the shaping of the nation.

Until now.

Fifty percent or so of the electorate gave Donald Trump a second term as president, knowing the chaotic consequences of his first term: two impeachments, criminal indictments, and civil penalties unprecedented for the presidency. January 6, 2021, was a unique moment of historical violence, and in 2025 the perpetrators of that assault on democracy were pardoned.

Many important pillars of U.S. civil society — political, academic, media — have largely succumbed to Trump’s intimidation and edicts. While there have been periodic protest marches and some examples of resistance, the overriding reality is that MAGA has prevailed — and in some cases it has demolished or transformed seemingly immutable institutions of government, scholarship, and research and has undermined confidence in the meaning of truth.

How will we restore the constitutional checks and balances when they have been eliminated, with judicial and congressional acquiescence at the highest levels of leadership? Can the Pentagon, the State Department, Justice, Homeland Security, HHS, USAID, the CDC, and on and on be restored to their traditional roles? They were never by any means perfect, but now they have been transformed or obliterated.

And that is the comparison to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He has been repressing every facet of public and private life with impunity. He invaded Ukraine, determining to do away with a challenge to dominance of what he considered Russia’s rightful empire,

Internal Russian opposition to Putin has been neutralized in many instances in brazen fashion: the persecution and murder of the democratic activist Alexei Navalny and the assassination in the air of Putin’s maniacal rival Yevgeny Prigozhin are just two examples of the Russian president’s impunity.

Trump’s strategy of using executive powers and subordinated agencies of his administration to punish former antagonists and present critics is, for now, less directly lethal but nonetheless an egregious abuse of power.

And there is crony capitalism — Trump’s enrichment of himself and a selected cohort — that is shameless. Trump’s sons and the Kushner, Boulos, and Witkoff families are engaging in corruption so blatant, and in plain sight, that their predecessors in American life seem positively trivial. Remember the scandal of Billy Carter’s pathetic extraction of money from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya? Or Hunter Biden’s grief-stricken and alcoholic misadventures for which he was convicted and then pardoned by his father?

So why is such a vast swath of American society, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, from Congress to the universities, from the law firms to the media, accepting what is happening and even enabling it?

My sense is that the onslaught to our society is so relentless that the effect is numbing.

When I lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, most people there seemed to accept their fate and did what they could to live safe and relatively comfortable lives. In today’s Russia, from what we can see at a distance, this is still the case. If the casualty estimates from the Ukraine war are close to accurate, more than a million Russian families have suffered the loss of young men, dead, wounded, or permanently scarred in pursuit of Putin’s objectives, and his alone.

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Vladimir Putin was, at least initially, elected to the presidency of Russia. But neither man was given a popular mandate for autocracy and a modern version of dictatorship — certainly not Trump.

That is why what is happening in the United States is so unfathomable. In our 250th year as a nation, is this really what Americans want as our destiny?

Of course not. What, then, are we going to do about changing the trajectory?

Repression, injustice, and discrimination were in the past alleviated by popular will but never really disappeared. They are being revived. The U.S. role in the world was intended to ensure security and democratic norms, again with imperfect results.

But never before have Americans accepted tyranny as a way of life. Which is why the present United States of Putinism has to be seen for what it is: undoubtedly the greatest test of popular will this country has faced in the memories of every last one of us.