In this episode of “The Opinions,” the editorial director David Leonhardt and the Opinion columnist M. Gessen discuss the very human inclination to try to return to normal life in the midst of a serious crisis.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the director of the New York Times editorial board. Every week, I’m having conversations to help shape the board’s opinions, and today I’m talking with my colleague the columnist Masha Gessen.
Masha is one of the country’s sharpest thinkers on the threats that President Trump poses and on the best ways to resist them. Masha recently wrote about shock exhaustion, a feeling they know well from Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. Under Putin, so many awful things happened in such close succession that the shock eventually faded and the crimes that Putin committed became routine. Masha is worried that we’re entering a similar phase in the United States.
So today we’re going to talk through this together: the shock of Trump’s first months in office, the defiance that does exist, and how all of us can refrain from becoming numb.
Masha, welcome.
Masha Gessen: Great to be here.
Leonhardt: So I want to start with this feeling of shock exhaustion that you described so well. Can you give us some sense of what that looked like from your time in Putin’s Russia? And for listeners who aren’t familiar with your whole history, when was it that you were in Putin’s Russia?
Gessen: So I am Russian. I went back to Russia from the United States as a correspondent in 1991 and stayed for 22 years, until I was forced to leave by the Kremlin. And then I continued going back and forth and reporting until a couple of weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine commenced. So I reported on Russia for more than 30 years, and on Putin’s autocratic rise, autocratic breakthrough and autocratic consolidation for the duration.
And it’s interesting — you call it shock exhaustion. It’s not a term I would use, actually, because I don’t know if it’s about exhaustion. I think it’s a very human, and in a way very beautiful, desire to normalize, to habituate, to find our footing in any situation, and to keep on living. It’s sort of a great, life-affirming ability that we have, except it has a way of normalizing things that we really shouldn’t live with. I think I first became aware of how it works when I was a war correspondent. And you know, you go into a country — if you get there at the beginning of a conflict — for the first few days, people are just shocked. They’re literally and figuratively shellshocked. Their entire way of life has vanished and they can’t believe it’s happening. Then, two, three days in, people are cooking on the sidewalk or having classes in bomb shelters, and it’s routine, and it’s as though it’s always been like this. And it’s this incredible human ability, but it’s also in itself shocking to me.
And to finally answer your question, how did it happen with Putin? With Putin it happened for me over and over again, so in 2000, 2001, when he went after independent media. It started as a sort of all-out attack, and it was shocking that it was that open, that frank and that brutal. And then we just got used to the fact that there was little, less and then no independent media in Russia. Then, in 2004, Russian troops shelled a school where children had been taken hostage, and then Putin used that terrorist attack as pretext for canceling gubernatorial elections in perpetuity. And that was shocking. Then we got used to that.
I can keep going — through the invasion of Georgia and the annexation of Crimea, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Every time you have this moment of, like, I can’t go on, and then you can.
Leonhardt: Yeah, and before we get into some of the bigger political things, I have to ask you a personal question: I mean, you were there during a period when Putin was killing critics, and you were writing incredibly critical and cleareyed journalism. Did you fear for your own safety? Did you take precautions?
Gessen: Well, I think your question actually goes to the root of this whole normalization phenomenon. We all tell ourselves stories in order to live, and I write about this in my piece on Christo Grozev, the investigative journalist who has been targeted by the Kremlin for years now, and had an entire assassination squad following him around Europe.
I think every time we see that somebody has been poisoned or shot, apparently for their criticism of the Kremlin — and this is a fairly large camp of independent journalists — we always tell ourselves some story about why that can’t happen to us. And I know it’s a thin story, but that’s how you cope.
Leonhardt: There obviously, in addition to similarities, are a whole lot of differences between the situation in Putin’s Russia and the situation in the United States today. I just want to pull out one, which is the time frame. You describe something in Russia that happens over years. Here in the United States, we’ve just been through this incredible blizzard over the last four-plus months of President Trump taking a fundamentally different, to use a neutral word, approach to power. I believe he’s violating the rule of law. I know you believe he’s violating the rule of law. How do you think it matters to this larger subject of exhaustion and of numbing out, that so much of what we’re dealing with in the United States has happened in a span of weeks or months, as opposed to years?
Gessen: It really scares me. It really scares me in the face of it because it’s just an incredible amount of destruction in a very short amount of time, and democratic institutions are not designed to respond to things quickly. So it’s a very effective way of attacking democratic institutions. But it also scares me from the psychological point of view because I think that he has made a whole bunch of things thinkable in a very short amount of time: summary deportations — well, summary deportations existed before, but these particular deportations that are just spectacularly and intentionally brutal, with people being stuffed into unmarked vans. The attack on the judiciary, the attack on the universities, the attacks on the media, all the stuff that’s stuffed into his “big, beautiful bill.” The decimation of the federal government.
Any one of those things is enough to spend a week sort of walking around in a haze, trying to wrap your mind around it. And we’ve wrapped our minds around all of them. None of that is unthinkable anymore because it is actually happening, and so I’m afraid it will be like the effect of habitation to war, where there comes a point very quickly where it’s only military analysts who look at how the front line is shifting this way and that way over the course of days or weeks.
Trump has opened all the fronts. I really fear that most people will look at it and, first of all, respond to their subjective feeling that their own lives haven’t changed that much. Or if they have changed, they can still live with it and then stop paying attention.
Leonhardt: As you mentioned, there is something deeply human and beautiful about people’s ability to cope. I’ve read a lot of social science research, and one of the things that’s quite striking is, often, people who have a traumatic accident in their life — the kind of thing that might cause them to be paralyzed — there is a very big short-term hit to their self-description of life satisfaction, and then it actually returns to roughly where it was. People are incredibly good at coping in ways that are truly wonderful.
But as you pointed out, in this case, there’s really a dark political lining to it. And I’m curious: From your experience in Russia, what advice do you have for those of us living through this in the United States right now? How do we, on the one hand, avoid just becoming depressed and obsessed by politics at all moments? And on the other hand, how do we essentially avoid becoming complicit in the diminution of American democracy?
Gessen: That’s such a great comparison to people who survive some sort of catastrophic health event. I think that the most useful thing that we can take from Russia is that — my experience, the experience of my friends, most of whom are journalists — over the years, invariably, we would look back every few years to where we had been a year ago, two years ago, 10 years ago, and think: Wow, there was so much possibility for action. There was still so much we could do.
I mean, at this point, Russian independent journalists are looking at where they were four years ago and thinking, wistfully: Wow, when I could still have access to actual living people in the actual country that I’m covering, that was an amazing possibility for doing journalism, now that I live in exile and can’t go back. I think we can actually build on this life-affirming impulse to say we need to take advantage of all the space that is available at any given point. We know what we’re dealing with: We’re dealing with an anti-democratic force that aims to continuously reduce the space available for action, whether it’s action by journalists or action by lawyers or action by academics. For any group of us to act in our particular fields, that space is shrinking, and so when we find our footing after a shock, we need to take stock of the space that’s available and take advantage of all of it.
Leonhardt: From what you’ve seen in Russia, but also elsewhere, what are more effective ways to confront the creeping threat of authoritarianism? What should people do that makes clear that they understand this isn’t business as usual?
Gessen: We don’t have a lot of successful examples to look at, and that’s very disheartening. It also is a call to invention. We do have a lot of unsuccessful examples to look at, so we can at least ask the Democratic Party not to repeat the mistakes of their colleagues in any number of European and Latin American countries, where parties that are in opposition to a party staging an autocratic attempt, which tend to be a kind of right-wing, populist, autocratic party, try to outflank them on the right, particularly on issues like immigration. In the United States, it’s immigration and trans issues. This idea of moving toward an imaginary center to reclaim something? And we know that that doesn’t work.
The only thing that can possibly work is a visionary, loud, appealing alternative, rather than a milder form of the same thing that the very charismatic aspiring autocrat is offering.
Leonhardt: This is good because you and I agree on so much, and I think this gets to one place where we may not entirely agree and may actually disagree. So I’m really torn about that question, which in many ways is a question about: Should you compromise with an enemy, or should you even see it as compromise? I absolutely take the point that if you start to give in to a bully, a bully just tries to take more and more and more. Absolutely.
I don’t really know what the right answer is, but I think I see a little bit more evidence on the other side of the question, and I want to raise it. So you can tell me why you disagree. I think this notion of Trump derangement syndrome is real, and I think the idea that because he’s such a threat that whenever he says up, other people say down, can actually end up essentially becoming a favor to Trump.
So Trump said we must open the schools in the summer of 2020, and many progressives said we must keep the schools closed. In the end, I think that kind of worked out poorly for progressives. I think immigration is another example. The way he talks about immigration is so horrific and racist. And then the Biden administration had this policy that was so open — the most open of any democratic administration — that it became a huge political weight on the administration and, I would argue, was also substantively problematic. So I absolutely take your point that showing weakness can lead a bully to do more. But I sometimes think that Trump’s opponents think that they take that too far, and they say: Anything he does, we need to do the opposite. And that has sometimes increased his political appeal, because it has put Democrats in a place that a very small percentage of Americans are in.
Gessen: Well, first of all, on the facts, I disagree that the Biden administration immigration policies can be characterized as open. I think they were hugely problematic, but they were pretty damn restrictive, comparable to the last few administrations. And certainly, Trump wants to have a more restrictive immigration politics.
But I think maybe it would be useful to tackle it from a different standpoint. I think where I agree with you is that a kind of reflective “you say up, we say down” is ineffective both because it can be substantively wrong but also because it offers no alternative theory to voters or to the American public. I think that Trump’s ideas, which are for the most part very, very, very bad ideas, are rooted in a sort of articulated worldview. One of the key elements of this worldview is that he has a really horrible view of human nature. He just really thinks that people are awful. People are mean, greedy, out for themselves. I think he probably is like that himself, and I think he thinks that everybody else is like it, and that’s why he’s so transactional and that’s why he impugns that kind of motivation to his partners, his interlocutors and his voters.
I think that Democrats would do best by advancing a different theory of humanity. I think that where we have seen effective democratic and anti-autocratic leadership emerge around the world, it’s always been based in the idea that people are good, they care about one another, they like helping each other, which is actually a fact about human nature. And policies can be based on that. And you know what, if you actually thought about opening the schools — and I was writing this at the time — if you thought about opening the schools from that point of view, from the point of view of good humans who are in fundamental need of connection, you would’ve wanted to open the schools.
Leonhardt: Just in terms of political history, I think there’s something really interesting about that, because I agree with you about Trump’s dark view of humanity and dark view of many things. I mean, he sort of doesn’t seem to care about the truth. It’s not that he’s unwilling to say true things, it’s just that whether something is true has virtually no bearing on whether he wants to say it. He’ll just say it. And political history suggests, to quote David Axelrod, the Obama guru, that what voters tend to look for is the remedy, not the replica.
So if you think about how we might emerge from the Trump era and what people will go looking for after it, they probably will not go looking for another Trump. History suggests instead they will be looking more for an anti-Trump to a Trump. And this is true, generally. I mean, Donald Trump is clearly an anti-Barack Obama, and Trump followed him. And Barack Obama in different ways is an anti-George W. Bush, and Obama followed Bush. And so, as Democrats think not about where the puck is today but where the puck is going to be, to use another phrase, it seems to me that history argues not to try to imitate him but to think about what Americans don’t like about him, even Americans who might have voted for him, and try to give them an alternative story that they might be able to embrace, even during Trump’s term, but certainly after it.
Gessen: I think that’s a great point. I would add to it that Democrats also have to be super worried about whether the puck is going to be anywhere at all.
Leonhardt: That’s fair. That’s fair. That actually brings us really quite nicely to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is, I see some tentative reasons for optimism. I am guessing that while we agree on the facts, you may see less reasons for optimism, and so I want to ask you if you can help me avoid being naïve, to be frank about it.
So you look at the sheer number of federal judges who have ruled against Trump, who’ve stopped things like his executive orders against law firms, who have said: Yes, they’ve failed to bring back Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, but they have stopped Trump from sending anyone else there. They’ve stopped many of these orders against universities. These orders from judges have come from not only Democratic-appointed judges but Republican-appointed judges, even some Trump-appointed judges.
And then you start to see little signs of people saying: This isn’t OK. The Wall Street Journal just ran a story about how law firms that have caved to Trump and signed deals are struggling to hold on to some of their lawyers and have lost some of their business. I look at all this and I say: It’s not sufficient. It’s not enough. We need so much more. But I also see some signs of hope, and I at least want to lift up the people who are opposing him. I’m curious how you think about that balance, and how we can end up avoiding the nihilism that can be a favor to would-be autocrats.
Gessen: I think you’re right that we should look at the judiciary both as a source of hope and, I think, as a source of extreme worry, partly for known structural reasons. If we look at autocracies that have taken hold, destroying the judiciary has always been a key part of establishing autocratic rule, and the judiciary is the hardest thing to restore once it has been destroyed. It’s a very, very complicated universe of courts and lawyers and cultural norms and educational institutions and law firms as institutions that are distinct from individual lawyers, and he’s attacking every one of those elements. He’s actually very smart about his full-on attack on the rule of law as a part of the American system, including the provision and the so-called big, beautiful bill that would allow the administration, essentially, to ignore court decisions with impunity.
We have to find a way to balance sounding the alarm and conjuring hope. There’s a useful distinction in the study of political hope between hope and faith. Faith is when you kind of sit back and think that, well, America is exceptional and everything will work out in the end. And hope is when you observe and participate in the thing that carries out the truth of the theory that it will actually get better. So hope is connected to action, and you can’t take action without hope, but you also can’t have hope without taking action. So it’s a feedback loop.
Leonhardt: Well, Masha, thank you for helping us think about all these important issues, and thank you for joining me today.
Gessen: Thank you. This was a pleasure.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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