The tragic change a single year has made in America | Margaret Sullivan

OhA year ago, everything was so different. In late October 2024, before the US presidential election, thoughtful Americans could certainly recognize their country’s deep flaws – its injustices and inequalities – but they could still recognize it as the United States. A democracy. A place where the rule of law meant something. A nation led by a dignified and decent civil servant, despite his advanced age and increasing frailty.

Nowadays, at the end of October 2025, many of us barely recognize the country we live in. People suspected of being illegal immigrants are arrested and shoved into vans, sometimes denied due process. The east wing of the “people’s house” – the White House – is being destroyed to house an obscene ballroom. Donald Trump persecutes his political rivals or perceived enemies and demands that the Justice Department hand over $230 million. Armed military personnel are sent to American cities under false pretenses. The Pentagon, renamed the War Department, has effectively shed day-to-day journalistic control by spending what could amount to nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money. Universities, law firms, and media companies are buckling under the president’s threats, and billionaires are being treated like royalty.

“The United States, just a few months before its 250^th anniversary as the world’s first democracy, lurched toward authoritarianism and fascism,” Garrett Graff, the American historian and author, wrote in August. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it happened here.”

We wake up every day to new horrors. And it’s difficult to understand – and painful to realize – how far we’ve come and how quickly it’s happened.

Yet we know that Trump was duly elected. Even after his deeply worrying first term and even after the warnings sparked by knowledge of Project 2025, the right’s blueprint for an authoritarian second term — even after Trump himself publicly declared that he would be a dictator from day one — enough Americans chose him over Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.

As frightening as the current reality is, it is even scarier to realize that we are only nine months into this presidential term. Where will three more years of this decline leave us? What if those three years become even longer, since no one is stopping this president from deciding that a third term is necessary, perhaps for national security reasons?

Of course, all is not lost. There will be midterm elections next year that could bring a different balance of power, if Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress. Some elected officials are trying to exercise some responsibility, such as Democratic Representatives Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, respectively prominent members of the judiciary and the House Oversight Committees, who are launching an investigation into the attempted embezzlement of money from the Department of Justice.

And a presidential election in 2028 could set us on a path to recovery, just as last year’s elections set us on this unfortunate path.

Millions of Americans are protesting in the streets of their cities and communities, as they did last weekend during the No Kings rallies.

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, wrote recently that “the great sleeping giant of America is waking up,” just as he did after the communist witch hunt in the 1950s, during the protests against the Vietnam War, or during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

On these occasions, the rating ship was eventually righted.

Reich says he knows the signs of this awakening and sees it happening now. As proof, he cites the recent massive protests, the widespread bipartisan backlash against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s removal from television, and the near-unanimous refusal of journalists to sign the Defense Department’s demands to report only what is sanctioned.

“The sleeping giant always remains asleep until a venality becomes no longer harmful, an action so disrespectful of the common good, a brutality so noisy that he has no choice but to wake up.”

This is an optimistic view and I respect Reich’s experienced perspective. Maybe he’ll be right.

Meanwhile, the big questions remain: Will America ever recover? Can it regain its status in the world and its adherence to the rule of law?

Or should we recognize that the 250-year-old experiment worked for a while, then – suddenly, completely – failed?

My pessimistic brain tells me the latter is true; that all may indeed be lost. My hopeful heart tells me, however, that we must try, by whatever means possible.

For me, as a media critic, it’s about urging journalists to live up more fully to their mission of holding power to account. For others, it might be working on congressional campaigns, organizing rallies, or finding ways to protect voting rights.

Less than a year ago, we were in a very different place. In a year? Or in three years? The truth is we don’t know. All we can do is try not to give up.

What gives me hope now

The contact I have in class with young journalists, both idealistic and realistic, always boosts my morale. I’m also hopeful about the journalism I see among the startup news organizations, many of them nonprofits, that are helping to fill the gaps left by the tragic decline of local newspapers. And I am encouraged by the recent No Kings protests, where millions of Americans gathered peacefully and showed their patriotism and love for their country.