A Tragic Shift Just One Year Has Brought in the US
In late October 2024, the situation was entirely different. Ahead of the US presidential election, considerate Americans could acknowledge the nation's significant faults – its inequities and inequality – but they still could perceive it as America. A democratic nation. A land where the rule of law carried weight. A country guided by a honorable and decent leader, despite his elderly years and growing weakness.
These days, in late October 2025, numerous citizens hardly identify the nation we reside in. Persons suspected of being unauthorized foreigners are rounded up and shoved into transport, at times blocked from fair treatment. The eastern section of the White House – is being torn down to build a lavish event space. The leader is harassing his political rivals or supposed enemies and demanding federal prosecutors transfer a huge total of taxpayer money. Uniformed troops are deployed to US urban areas on false pretexts. The defense headquarters, relabeled the Department of War, has effectively freed itself of day-to-day journalistic scrutiny while it uses possibly reaching close to a trillion USD from citizen taxes. Institutions, legal practices, journalism organizations are buckling due to presidential intimidation, and wealthy elites are treated like members of the royal family.
“The US, only a few months ahead of its 250th birthday as the globe's top democratic nation, has fallen over the edge into autocracy and fascism,” Garrett Graff, stated in August. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen in America.”
Every morning starts with fresh terrors. And it is difficult to grasp – and agonizing to acknowledge – just how far gone we are, and the speed at which it has happened.
Nevertheless, we know that the leader was duly elected. Despite his highly troubling initial presidency and even after the warnings that came with the knowledge of the conservative plan – following Trump himself said publicly he planned to rule as a tyrant just on day one – sufficient voters elected him instead of his Democratic opponent.
While alarming as the present situation are, it’s even scarier to recognize that we are just three-quarters of a year into this administration. How will an additional three years of this deterioration position us? And what if the three years becomes a more extended duration, since there is no one to limit this leader from determining that another term is necessary, perhaps for national security reasons?
Certainly, not everything is hopeless. We will have congressional elections next year that may bring a different governmental control, if Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress. There are government representatives who are trying to impose certain responsibility, for example representatives that are initiating an inquiry concerning the try to cash appropriation from the justice department.
And a national vote three years from now could start our journey toward restoration precisely as the prior selection put us on this disappointing trajectory.
We see countless citizens protesting in public spaces across municipalities, as they did in the past days in the No Kings rallies.
An ex-cabinet member, stated lately that “the slumbering force of America is awakening”, similar to past after the Communist witch-hunt era during the fifties or during the Vietnam war protests or throughout the seventies crisis.
On those occasions, the listing ship eventually was righted.
He claims he knows the signals of that revival and sees it happening currently. As support, he cites the recent massive protests, the widespread, bipartisan pushback against a television host's removal and the almost universal defiance by media to accept government requirements they report only what is sanctioned.
“The slumbering entity always remains asleep till some venality grows too toxic, some action so offensive of the common good, specific cruelty so disruptive, that it is compelled other than to stir.”
It's a positive outlook, and I respect the author's seasoned opinion. Perhaps he will turn out correct.
Meanwhile, the major inquiries remain: can America ever recover? Is it possible to restore its status in the world and its adherence to the rule of law?
Or must we acknowledge that the 250-year-old experiment worked for a while, and then – swiftly, totally – ended?
My cynical mind indicates that the final scenario is true; that everything could be gone. My hopeful heart, however, tells me that we need to strive, by any means possible.
For me, as an observer of the press, that means urging journalists to commit, more fully, to their mission of overseeing leadership. For different individuals, it could mean engaging with political races, or planning demonstrations, or discovering methods to defend voting rights.
Not even one year prior, we lived in a separate situation. In the future? Or in several years? The truth is, we cannot predict. Our sole course is to attempt to continue fighting.
What’s Giving Me Optimism Currently
The contact I encounter in the classroom with aspiring reporters, that are simultaneously hopeful and practical, {always
