Confronting Trump | New Yorker

In May, in a colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, a lawyer paid a weekly visit to his client, Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza. They sat together in a small room separated by a glass panel. Kara-Murza, who was poisoned in 2015 and 2017 allegedly by Vladimir Putin’s secret police, was serving the second year of a 25-year sentence for publicly opposing the invasion of Ukraine.

The lawyer had news: Kara-Murza had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for columns he wrote for a Washington newspaper. Mail. This news, Kara-Murza recalls, “sounded as if from another planet, from some parallel reality.” He was, of course, happy, although he assumed that he would never receive the prize in person. Like Alexey NavalnyLike many political prisoners before him, he believed he would die in his cell.

And yet the unimaginable happened. On August 1, Kara-Murza participated in a prisoner exchange, and at the end of October he took the stage at the Small Library of Columbia University to receive the Pulitzer Prize. He gave a short speech to an audience that included other winners, including Fast David Hoffman, who won the award for his editorials on the technologies that authoritarian regimes use to suppress dissent. The incident, as Kara-Murza admitted, was “surreal.”

For employees and readers of the magazine MailThe next day was equally surreal: the newspaper’s publisher and CEO, William Lewis, announced that the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris would not go ahead. All sorts of explanations have been offered—respect for the reader, a return to the more neutral roots of the editorial page—but these distortions didn’t convince anyone. Most concluded that what happened was that newspaper owner Jeff Bezos, who has a lot of business with the federal government and with the election approaching, did not dare insult Donald Trump. This was the same Bezos who espoused the newspaper’s Trump-era slogan—”Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and supported much of its outstanding reporting. Bezos now appeared to be suffering from spinal degeneration. Columnists expressed their confusion and anger. Three members of the editorial board, including Hoffman, resigned. According to NPR, two hundred thousand readers canceled their subscriptions within days.

What is the meaning of this sad episode? Or, for that matter, a similar last-minute decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of Los Angeles FC. Timeto destroy the support for Harris that his editorial page editors had prepared? (Signal to quit. Signal to unsubscribe.)

Every editor who is not too stupid or too self-confident to notice what is happening knows that the impact of support will be modest at best. The editors of this magazine, when it I recently published a long essay describing (for the thousandth time) the authoritarian prospects of a second Trump presidency and supporting Kamala Harris, he was under no illusions. Editors may be as prone to sanctimony as the common cold, but it was never intended that such an endorsement would suddenly change the balance in battleground states, let alone win a majority in the Deep South or the Great Plains . The fact is that we, like other publications, tried to make convincing arguments and had editorial freedom to do so.

Perhaps experience should tell us that it is ridiculous to clutch pearls whenever a person with enormous political power or financial means acts in his own selfish interests. Bezos is hardly alone. Senator Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6 and privately called him a “stupid” and “despicable man,” supports him. Billionaire Nelson Peltz called Trump a “terrible person” but still helps fund him. Is there anything else you need to know about Donald Trump? Deeply conservative and moderate figures with a long track record of working with Trump, such as his former chief of staff John Kelly and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, have officially declared him a fascist who poses a threat to national security. security, and yet they can’t seem to dissuade Elon Musk, Stephen Schwarzman, Paul Singer, Timothy Mellon and a number of other plutocrats from supporting it. Eric Vuillard”Daily routine” opens with a lightly fictionalized scene in which two dozen German industrialists and financiers are summoned in 1933 to a meeting with Hermann Goering, who demands their allegiance. If the Nazi Party wins the election, Goering tells them: “This will be the last election for ten years—or even,” he added with a laugh, “for a hundred years.” Where have we heard such “jokes”?

An important part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And although his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons with previous incarnations of fascism, all the elements are present: the identification of “parasites” and the “enemy within”; the threat of using armed forces against dissidents; erasure of the truth, “big lie”. magician rally Last Sunday at Madison Square Garden there were no crisp gray uniforms, no swastikas, no disciplined greetings. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism and lies.

In Russia, Putin has not so much reproduced the Stalinism of the thirties as modernized it. He did not bother himself or spend money on recreating the totalism of the old Gulag system. Instead, he carefully selects his victims—an opposition journalist here, a liberal politician there—and ensures that their destruction is clearly understood by the Russian people. Likewise, the authoritarianism that Trump intends to establish will be critical. There will be neither Lefortovo nor Treblinka. But mass deportations? It’s a campaign promise, Trump told the garden crowd, that must be fulfilled “on day one.”

Literature of anti-authoritarianism – “Czeslaw Milosz”Captive mind“; Essays and letters from Vaclav Havel to his wife Olga; Memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam; The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass were written by souls larger and far more heroic than ordinary mortals. However, they describe ways in which human beings, all of us, can refuse complicity and act despite repression and resentment if that is what public life comes down to. Newspaper reporters and editors Mail those who resign or speak out against something seemingly trivial, such as a scathing editorial, may not be risking their lives or their immediate material comfort, but they are writing an endorsement worth signing: to get back on their feet , you need to have a spine.