Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

send the message that “they” will never become “us”—that Trump had reversed history and shrunk the circle of “us.” In September 2017, he delivered his first speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations. He announced, “In foreign affairs, we are renewing [the] founding principle of sovereignty. . . . As president of the United States, I will always put America first. . . . As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.” For the leader of the world’s most powerful country, the sovereignty of which was by no stretch of the imagination questioned, challenged, or undermined, these were strange words. These were strange things to say, too, on the floor of an organization created to foster cooperation among nations. But Trump was saying that he viewed cooperation as a fundamentally suspect proposition. “We can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return,” he said. Trump used the word “sovereign” or “sovereignty” twenty-one times in the speech. The following year, when he addressed the assembly again, he said the word ten times. In 2019, he was down to five utterances of “sovereign,” but his message had been honed. “The future does not belong to globalists,” he said, using a term the alt-right had turned into an anti-Semitic slur. “The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.” No longer a nation of immigrants, Trump’s America was ...