Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era

New York Times

28-05-2025

In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov's 'The Seagull' at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.
We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one's country, one's city, one's skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.
And then the show goes on.
This isn't a theater review, and I'm not here to tell you why you should go see the play, 'Seagull: True Story.' I have too many social connections to Alexander Molochnikov, the exile Russian director, and anyway, the current run is sold out. I'm interested in something else: that moment when the shock fades and the (figurative) show goes on.
I think we are entering that moment in the United States.
Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn't sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships.
I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as 'foreign agents.' The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives.
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