How Trump's Chaos Is Becoming Normal
Can you believe it’s already June? So much has happened since President Donald Trump returned to the White House four and a half months ago, it’s hard to process. In that short amount of time, Trump has unilaterally thrown the global trading system into chaos and tried to end the constitutional right of birthright citizenship. His administration has stripped billions in federal grants from universities, arrested international students, and put tens of thousands of federal workers out of jobs. The constant din of chaos is exhausting, and it’s easy to grow numb to it, to normalize it. New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen explains the parallels they see with early 2000s Russia, when President Vladimir Putin consolidated power, and what we can — and can’t — learn from that period.