'Human tragedy': How Trump is making 'extreme cruelty routine' — not unlike Putin: analysis

When Boris Yeltsin was serving as Russia's first post-Soviet Union, post-communist president during the 1990s, optimists were hoping that Russia would become a full-fledged liberal democracy. But it didn't work out that way, and Russia moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction under his successor, Vladimir Putin.

In an opinion column published on May 28, the New York Times' M. Gessen makes a comparison between Putin's presidency in Russia and Donald Trump's second presidency in the United States — and explains why Russia's post-communist history serves as a warning for Americans.

"Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power," Gessen explains, "I was shocked many times. I couldn't sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships. I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012 — the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action."

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Gessen continues, "I couldn't breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022."

The Times columnist goes on to compare Trump's first four months back in the White House to events he saw in Russia.

"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 chainsaw 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," Gessen observes. "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."

Gessen warns that extremism in the U.S. is becoming normalized.

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"In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us," the columnist laments. "Once you've absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren't that remarkable. Once you've wrapped your mind around the Trump Administration's revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn't entirely unexpected."

Gessen continues, "Once you've realized that the (Trump) Administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news."

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M. Gessen's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).