Published mid-regime, this is a comprehensive overview of the last 3.5 years.

As an American-Russian journalist who has lived both worlds, Gessen can see the trajectory of the US better than most. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and a professor of East European Political History, is another author in this domain. With America’s adoption of the firehosing technique, coined during the annexation of Crimea, having Gessen cover the incremental erosion of norms and standards is a valuable recap for American citizens (and guide for any citizen in an established or rising autocracy).

Gessen's ability to summarize and put into words what the majority of Americans think and feel is refreshing. They also point out “smaller” news stories that many people may have forgot about or missed: the removal of the Spanish White House website and erasure of its corresponding twitter account, NOAA attacking forecasters who disagreed with the president on the weather, and the National Park Service having its Twitter account suspended for noting the removal of civil rights, climate change, and health care content from the White House website.

Gessen highlights so many important aspects of the current term that I’m going to just list a few of my notes. It’s a short read well worth the time.

On following the President’s statements:
"How can we balance an appreciation for the ludicrousness of Trump’s subliterate, ignorant, absurd tweets and the power his words and actions wield? The stakes demand respect; the president does not deserve it—but his office does. The discrepancy of scale is crippling."

On political fatigue:
“Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

The anxious present (similar to Snyder’s “politics of eternity”):
"In the Trump era, there is no past and no future, no history and no vision—only the anxious present. There can be no hopes, dreams, and ideals where there is no shared reality; and there is no political community where there is only the self-obsessed and endlessly self-referential president."

Recovery:
"Recovery from Trumpism—a process that will be necessary whenever Trumpism ends—will not be a process of returning to government as it used to be, a fictional state of pre-Trump normalcy. Recovery will be possible only as reinvention: of institutions, of what politics means to us, and of what it means to be a democracy, if that is indeed what we choose to be."