The Heartbreaking Transformation Just One Year Has Brought in the US

One year ago, the environment was utterly different. Before the American presidential vote, considerate residents could recognize the country's significant faults – its unfairness and inequality – but they continued to see it as America. A free society. A land where constitutional order meant something. A country guided by a respectable and upright leader, despite his older age and increasing frailty.

These days, in late October 2025, numerous citizens barely recognize the land we inhabit. People believed to be undocumented migrants are detained and forced into vehicles, sometimes denied due process. The left side of the White House – is being torn down for a grotesque event space. Donald Trump is targeting his opponents or supposed enemies and insisting the justice department hand over a massive sum of citizen dollars. Armed military personnel are being sent across metropolitan centers on false pretexts. The Pentagon, relabeled the War Department, has – in effect – freed itself of routine media oversight while it uses possibly reaching nearly $1tn of taxpayer money. Institutions, legal practices, media outlets are submitting under the president’s threats, and rich magnates are regarded as aristocracy.

“The US, shortly prior to its 250-year mark as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into autocracy and fascism,” a noted author, stated in August. “Finally, more quickly than I believed likely, it transpired here.”

One awakes amid recent atrocities. And it's difficult to grasp – and agonizing to acknowledge – how deeply lost we have become, and the rapid pace with which it unfolded.

Nevertheless, we know that the leader was duly elected. Following his highly troubling initial presidency and even after the warnings that came with the knowledge of the conservative plan – even after Trump himself declared plainly he planned to rule as a tyrant solely at the start – a majority of citizens elected him rather than his Democratic opponent.

While alarming as the present situation are, it’s even scarier to recognize that we have only been nine months into this administration. How will an additional three years of this downfall find us? And if the three years turns into an prolonged era, since there is no one to stop this president from deciding that additional tenure is required, perhaps for defense purposes?

Granted, all is not lost. There will be congressional elections next year which might create a new balance of power, should Democrats recapture one or both houses of Congress. We have government representatives who are striving to apply a degree of oversight, such as Democratic congressmen currently starting a probe regarding the effort to cash appropriation from legal authorities.

And a leadership election in the next cycle could start us down the road to recovery just as last year’s election placed us on this disappointing trajectory.

There are numerous residents protesting in public spaces throughout communities, as they did in the past days during anti-authority protests.

Robert Reich, wrote recently that “the slumbering force of America is rising”, similar to past post-McCarthyism in the 1950s or throughout the Vietnam war protests or throughout the Watergate scandal.

On those occasions, the tilting vessel ultimately corrected itself.

Reich says he knows the signs of that resurgence and notices it unfolding at present. As support, he points to the large-scale demonstrations, the extensive, bipartisan pushback to a television host's removal and the near-unanimous rejection by reporters to accept the defense department’s demands they only publish what is sanctioned.

“The slumbering entity consistently stays dormant till specific greed turns extremely harmful, some action so offensive of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he is compelled other than to stir.”

It's a positive outlook, and I respect Reich’s experienced view. Perhaps he will be validated.

Meanwhile, the big questions persist: will the nation regain its footing? Can it reclaim its standing globally and its devotion to the rule of law?

Or should we recognize that the historical project functioned for a period, and then – swiftly, totally – ended?

My cynical mind suggests that the latter is correct; that all may indeed be gone. My hopeful heart, nevertheless, convinces me that we need to strive, through all methods we can.

For me, as an observer of the press, that means pushing media professionals to commit, more thoroughly, to their mission of overseeing leadership. For some people, it might involve participating in election efforts, or planning demonstrations, or discovering methods to protect voting rights.

Not even one year prior, we lived in an alternate reality. In the future? Or in several years? The truth is, we cannot predict. The only option is try to continue fighting.

What’s Giving Me Hope Now

The contact I encounter during teaching with young journalists, that are simultaneously hopeful and realistic, {always