Are We Suffering from Trump Apathy?

Masha Gessen, the Russian journalist, author, and translator who immigrated to the United States in 2013 because authorities were considering taking children from gay parents, writes in The New York Times about Russia’s slide into autocracy and repressive rule:

“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…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.”

This was not the first time Gessen was startled: “Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, 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.”

Can it happen here? What is happening in America parallels much of what has occurred in Russia under Putin. Along the way in Russia, Gessen writes, there were many smaller indicators, such as the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps to crush outlawed LGBTQ persons, and to brand many journalists and activists as “foreign agents.”

The American terra firma over the last four months has experienced an earthquake: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; mass deportations without due process; a judge arrested in her courthouse; threats and assaults on venerable universities and law firms (accompanied by both capitulation and resistance); and now 4100 National Guardsmen and 700 U.S. Marines deployed in our second most populous city. The deployment will reportedly cost $134 million for 60 days.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of the American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

In America, too, increasingly fewer things can occur to surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of renditions to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan without due process aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve settled in with revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t quite so shocking. Once we have internalized the pain of “death by a 1,000 cuts” in National Institutes of Health grants and scientific research, the pain seems something we will have to live with as a new normal.

Isn’t anyone upset that an administration committed to eliminating profligate government spending will drop somewhere between $25 and $45 million for Trump’s birthday celebration?

How about the $5 million settlement with the family of rioter Ashli Babbitt in a wrongful death action arising out of her criminal conduct on January 6, 2021? Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dan Hodges, who was on duty at the Capitol that day, deplored the settlement, saying that Babbitt was “a conspiracy theorist armed with a lethal weapon and combat training, breaking into a secure area of the Capitol who did not heed orders to cease from law enforcement.” 

A similar outcome may be expected from the $100 million Florida suit against the government brought by five leaders of the far-right Proud Boys. Trump pardoned or commuted their sentences earlier this year. The plaintiffs argue that their constitutional rights were abridged “to punish and oppress [Trump’s] political allies.” Wanna bet that they, too, get a handsome settlement in this tight-fisted environment?

Bearing “those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of” may be, for many, the most desirable course.

Perhaps that is why the Democrats have been flaccid as outrage is heaped on outrage. Why hasn’t the Supreme Court firmly ordered Trump to discontinue executive orders that violate the Constitution instead of treading water? Why hasn’t the business community fought the inflationary and growth-stunting tariffs?

As a lawyer and a prosecutor, I held the misguided belief that this country was what it was because of the courage and independence of the Bar. Now we know that much of Big Law only has the courage of their retainers, leaving a handful of courageous firms to pursue their rights in court.

We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to the once-unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit—when illegal deportation is reversed (like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia a few days ago), or the courts temporarily stay some unlawful executive order, at least temporarily—it’s natural to relax a bit. Optimists are rarely neurotic; they don’t see the problems.

Trump has provoked civil unrest. Thousands will take to the nation’s streets on Saturday, not to celebrate Trump’s birthday but to protest his immigration policies and his military parade. They are well organized and will carry American, not Mexican, flags. But is this National Day of Protest likely to convince the 80 percent of our fellow citizens that polls say favor the harsh immigration crackdown, however unfairly administered? America may not end up like Russia, Hungary, or other autocracies, but as Gessen writes, “Freedom against tyranny is our birthright, and we will never bow to a dictator.

On the other hand, the intensity of the assault on our Constitution, our public and private institutions, and the rights of the most vulnerable among us dismays and even frightens me. All we can do right now is to resist. We need to resist everywhere and refuse to give up.”

No one sensible condones vandalism or violence, but like the big law firms that did not submit to Trump’s edicts, the Los Angeles protestors show that the spirit of freedom still beats in our hearts. We’ll see more demonstrations this weekend as ICE expands its raids and as Trump’s military parade gets underway. Apathy is worrisome, but it isn’t destiny.

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