The historian and Harvard professor reflects on the Republican’s second term: ‘His hold on power is extraordinarily tenuous. And when he falls, he will crash’

Future historians may well look back on the winter of 2026 as a turning point in Donald Trump’s presidency and, quite possibly, in the American democratic experiment itself. In August 2017, less than a year into his first term, Trump made clear in Charlottesville that he was prepared to excuse violence by white supremacist groups. On January 6, 2021, he sent a MAGA mob — among them armed paramilitary organizations such as the Proud Boys — to the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of an election he had lost. And it is worth recalling that, during his campaign for a second term, Trump warned of a “bloodbath” should he fail to prevail.

In January of this year, he crossed yet another threshold. He ordered Border Patrol agents and ICE officers into Minneapolis, targeting immigrants — whom he has accused of “eating pets” and of “poisoning the American blood” — and moved to suppress the civic movement that emerged in their defense. He labeled protesters “professional insurrectionists” and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to suspend their constitutional rights. The operation unfolded with a level of violence and lethality that was striking even by recent standards. Its consequences were irreversible: Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, killed by masked agents on the snow-covered streets of Minneapolis, in full view of the world. More than 30 migrants have died in ICE custody.

On Monday, January 26, as the historian and Harvard professor Jill Lepore opened the doors of her Cambridge home after a historic snowfall to speak with EL PAÍS, footage of Pretti’s killing was circulating relentlessly. Alongside it were clips of Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, casting Pretti — unarmed, shot 10 times in the back — as a “domestic terrorist.” Completing the scene was Gregory Bovino, head of the Border Patrol, who, adopting an aesthetic that evoked an SS nazi officer, claimed that Pretti had sought to “cause maximum damage” and to “massacre law enforcement.” As multiple videos viewed by millions of Americans made plain, Noem, Miller, and Bovino were lying brazenly. Minneapolis was being used as a laboratory for militarizing the streets.

Lepore, the author of monumental works on American history such as These Truths and We, the People, and whom the critic Fintan O’Toole has described as the “greatest American living essayist,” read these scenes as evidence of a society coming apart. She paused work on an urgent essay for The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, to consider the question that now hangs over American politics: can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

Question. From a historical perspective, how do you understand what is happening right now in the U.S., particularly the aggressive actions by ICE and Homeland Security, not only against immigrants but also against U.S. citizens? Is this a new moment in American history?

Answer. It’s possible to find antecedents for bits and pieces of what has happened during the past year of Trump’s second term. Moments like in 1970, when the National Guard was called in to suppress student protests and ended up killing students at Kent State University. But this isn’t really like Kent State. Looking for analogies— is it like this, is it like that — can be a distraction. What we are witnessing is unprecedented in American history. To find true precedents for what has been happening over the past year, we would have to look not to U.S. history, but to the histories of other countries.

Q. What kind of countries or regimes come to mind?

A. You can look at regimes that use military or militarized police forces to suppress the civil rights of ordinary people. There are many examples of that in the 20th century across the world. That has not been the practice of the U.S. government. Yes, you can point to moments like the Palmer Raids or the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1950s, and before that the imprisonment of Eugene Debs under the Sedition Act. You can always find individual episodes. But this is different. What we’re seeing now is a convergence: the worst excesses of American imperialism, combined with the worst denials of basic civil rights to Americans, combined with the most vicious and vengeful nativism in American history. If you roll all of that together, you get this administration. As strange as it may sound coming from a historian, I think history has not been very useful here. In many ways, it has been a distraction.

Q. In These Truths, you describe U.S. history as both a democratic experiment and an ongoing struggle over who belongs to “We the People.” Under Trump’s second presidency, marked by restrictions on civil rights and repression, how would you describe the current state of that experiment?

A. Extraordinarily vulnerable. We are in a moment of deep disarray, on the edge of a political catastrophe — if not already in the midst of one. I don’t think the situation is irretrievable. What may be hard to see, from outside the United States and even from within, is that the vengeful, violent, and lawless worldview of this administration is not shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans. People may agree with Trump’s policy preferences, but even many of his supporters do not see this as consistent with their values.

Q. One concern is that extreme situations can become normalized and quickly forgotten. Is there a risk that society’s attention span may be too short to sustain the political action needed to produce a correction?

A. I share that concern. I’m deeply worried about this moment. We’re speaking on a day when Minneapolis is snowbound in subzero temperatures, and yet people are out in the streets. A friend wrote to me that her daughter came home from work with her face frozen from tears, just from walking across the city. There is a profound sense of despair.

What worries me most is whether the administration will prevail in imposing a false version of events surrounding what are, essentially, two killings in recent weeks, and in insisting that the agents involved enjoy complete immunity from prosecution. That is deeply alarming. At the same time, there is resistance. In Massachusetts, democratically elected officials have called for the impeachment of the head of Homeland Security and for legislation barring immunity for these agents. Many people are saying: this cannot prevail, this cannot be allowed to become normal. But much hinges on what happens next. This week feels like a terrible inflection point.

Q. You’ve written that impeachments tend not to work as a mechanism for accountability for bad public officials, especially the president. How does that history inform your view of the present?

A. After the Civil War, there was an attempt to impeach president Andrew Johnson. A constitutional scholar, Francis Lieber, supported impeachment on both legal and principled grounds: the country needed to demonstrate that the people had the power to remove a president who violated the Constitution.

The argument against impeachment was that the nation needed to heal, that impeachment would be too divisive after such a devastating war. That argument prevailed. It was the wrong decision.

Q. That logic resurfaced in the Trump impeachments.

A. Yes. You could argue either way about the first impeachment, which involved the call with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But after the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I see no constitutional justification for acquittal. The only explanation is fear of the political consequences for senators themselves. And that fear went beyond electoral calculation. Mitt Romney later wrote that some Republican senators who considered voting to convict had received credible threats against their wives and children. Faced with that choice, they voted to acquit. That doesn’t make the decision right. But it suggests we haven’t yet fully reckoned with what rising political violence and the menace of the most extreme Trump supporters has done to public service in this country.

Q. In your work, you’ve examined how history is mobilized to legitimize exclusionary projects. Under Trump’s second presidency, do you see the emergence of an official version of history that normalizes repression?

A. We’re still waiting to see what kind of history this administration ultimately produces. With 2026 approaching — the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. — there is an enormous amount of official storytelling underway. The Trump administration’s favored vehicle for that storytelling, the America 250 Commission, appears not merely committed to its own version of American history, but aggressively so. The repression of a fuller, more accurate account of the nation’s past is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. The National Park Service, for example, was instructed to remove any mention of the nine enslaved Africans who lived with and served George Washington at his Philadelphia residence. We are seeing the removal of Native American history from historic sites, the erasure of labor history, immigration history, even basic women’s history. Entire histories are being willfully deleted. There is an organization called Save Our Signs that is archiving photographs of historical plaques and museum labels that have been taken down, simply to preserve a record of what had long been part of our civic culture.

Q. This goes beyond reinterpretation. It looks like a top-down erasure that clashes with the reality of the United States as a diverse society.

Q. You’ve often stressed that U.S. democracy has survived crises because certain actors refused to accept inevitability. Where do you see those counterweights operating today?

A. We can see many of those actors. The question is whether they are effective, given the power of this administration and the polarization of the country. In Minneapolis, ordinary people are out there with whistles and their phones, documenting and alerting others to the presence and movement of ICE agents. They appear to be extremely well organized and active in large numbers. But there are limits. One is external: Trump-aligned media depict them as violent leftist extremists, as the source of the problem rather than a response to it. What they are doing has not broken through that media wall. The other limit is internal. If people cross into real violence, and I think some would go much further than what we’ve seen, that would be disastrous. The cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti involved people attempting to document or interrupt ICE activity. They have been labeled domestic terrorists by the administration, which is absurd and obscene. But others will eventually be caught on camera committing violent acts. When that happens, it will sharply limit what these movements can achieve.

Q. You’ve also written about conspiracy thinking. How do conspiracy narratives function in moments like this?

A. A conspiratorial worldview is extraordinarily appealing when what is happening in the world becomes difficult to explain, especially when people experience large-scale structural changes in their ordinary lives. There was a huge acceleration and spread of conspiracy theories at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Q. Why were conspiracy theories so powerful then? And why do they seem powerful again now?

A. That moment had a lot to do with the massive dislocations of the Industrial Revolution: expanding global trade, changes in financial systems. All of that was explainable — sociologically, economically. But for many people, those changes were baffling and not immediately intelligible. Conspiracy theories have the appeal of being dead-simple. If you’re living through a confusing moment and want a simple explanation, a conspiracy theory is deeply satisfying. I think we’re in a similar moment now. There’s a sense that invisible forces — literally invisible — are driving what’s happening in the world, and that makes people feel powerless. So conspiracy thinking becomes appealing: I don’t know what the hell is going on — well, it’s a conspiracy.

Q. How does that connect to stories like the Epstein case, which is also seen as a vast conspiracy?

A. The real horror of that story isn’t only the sexual predation, terrible as that is. It’s the picture it gives of millionaires and billionaires flying on private jets to private islands, with private chefs and private massages — complete contempt for and indifference to the suffering of others. And many of them are elected leaders. The Clintons were on those planes. Faculty from my own university were on those planes. That whole disgusting Epstein class. So if ordinary Americans, suffering through deindustrialization and Rust Belt poverty, believe that a group of extremely wealthy people are enjoying all the fruits of globalization at the expense of their own lives, health, and even life expectancy of 48 years, they’re not wrong. The populist rage has real reasons behind it. What’s contemptible about Trump and Trumpism is taking that rage and redirecting it at immigrants. Immigrants are not responsible for Rust Belt suffering. Blaming people who are even more vulnerable is the classic tactic of right-wing populism.

Q. What happens to democratic life when conspiracy and fabrication operate from the center of power?

A. We’re watching it happen every day. It resembles the way a ministry of propaganda works during wartime. Woodrow Wilson created one during World War I to persuade Americans who opposed entering the war, using posters and radio to depict Germans as savage animals. What’s different now is that we effectively have a ministry of propaganda being used to depict half of the American population as monsters.

Q. So is Stephen Miller a kind of propaganda minister?

Q. Is what’s happening also connected to racism?

A. It’s a very effective tool for Trump and his administration. You read reports about ICE recruiting from white supremacist websites. That’s clearly being used. I don’t think racism is the sole driver of everything that’s happening, but it’s certainly in Trump’s interest to inflame racial hatred. I honestly think he finds it amusing.

Q. Let’s imagine that you were inside Trump’s mind trying to understand what his goals are. What do you see?

A. I don’t really know. His mind seems disordered, increasingly so. He may be thinking about succession: how to retain power after leaving office. He may be focused on undermining Democratic victories in the midterms, or on Don Jr.’s potential 2028 run.

He reminds me of someone in my extended family who had a severe mental illness. My mother used to say: This is a person whose mind does not operate by reason. You can’t reason out what they’ll do next. You just have to brace yourself, because anything could happen.

Q. That unpredictability resonates strongly outside the U.S. as well.

A. Yes. Exactly. Sometimes you’re left asking: what was the point? It’s not what you expect.

Q. You’ve shown how democratic backsliding often comes wrapped in legal language. How should we understand claims that immigration crackdowns are simply law enforcement?

A. It’s factually untrue. Much of it is lawless. It’s also important to say that the Biden administration’s immigration policy was a disaster. Americans have wanted immigration reform since the mid-1990s, and no one — Obama or Biden included — has delivered it.

Polling shows that Americans support immigration but want it to be orderly and predictable. They feel the federal government has failed them on that, and that’s fair.

But do they want what’s happening now? Absolutely not. The legal framing is barely a veil — maybe lingerie, but not clothing. It exists only so courts have something to cite. What’s happening is gross, indecent, illegal, and unconstitutional.

Q. You’ve traced the history of data and prediction in politics. In part, because for you the use of data also affects the quality of democracy.

A. My new book argues that we’re witnessing the rise of what I call the artificial state — one in which public discourse is dominated by machines owned by corporations. Most people now learn about the world through platforms owned by the three richest people on the planet. We’ve surrendered the public sphere to corporations whose interests are purely financial. This coincides with democratic backsliding and the rise of autocrats, and in the long run it may be the hardest thing to reverse.

Q. So, technology as a mediator of social life is central to democratic backsliding?

Q. Is there any way back?

A. Europe has to lead. In the U.S., we’ve given away the store. These platforms are inverted: there are more bots than humans, and people don’t see that. We’ve essentially accepted rule by machine, which is rule by corporations. Europe is far more concerned about this, even figures like the Pope. I look to Europe to defend human freedom of expression.

Q. Younger generations seem especially overwhelmed by this environment.

Q. And there’s also the ideology of tech elites themselves.

A. They don’t believe in democracy. My new book traces how they came to reject the state. They believe their power is planetary, even extraterrestrial, and they’ve appointed themselves caretakers without being elected. In 2016, Sam Altman from OpenAI said, “If I weren’t in charge, I’d be saying, ‘Why do these fuckers get to decide everything?’” It’s still a good question. They know they’ve usurped the authority of the state, and they’re happy about it.

Q. How have digital platforms altered the visibility of repression?

A. Silicon Valley made sweeping promises in the 1990s about democratization through the internet, then again in the 2000s about social media. Hillary Clinton spoke of the “freedom to connect.” Now the same promises are being made about AI.

They were empirically wrong twice already. While these technologies have wonderful aspects, their political effects have been largely malign. Why people believe the story a third time is baffling. Perhaps it’s amnesia, or normalization.

Q. Is overload itself part of the problem?

A. Absolutely. It’s very hard to get your bearings. People feel they’re living through a historic moment: AI, climate change, the end of the liberal world order. It’s overwhelming. And yet, you still have to get up, feed your kids, walk the dog, go to work.

Q. Is the liberal world order worth saving?

A. Yes, I think so. Why? Because the alternative is so much worse. It’s that same, almost Churchillian argument: not that it’s perfect, but that everything else is worse.

Q. Then why, in your view, are so many people around the world supporting authoritarian leaders?

A. I don’t fully know. But I’ve seen interesting scholarship suggesting that, for Americans, their increasingly tenuous connection to democracy and to the liberal world order is partly a consequence of the end of the military draft in 1973. The U.S. military is now entirely volunteer, yet the country has been engaged in long wars — Afghanistan, Iraq — and in various military operations abroad.

These conflicts happen at such a remove from most Americans’ daily lives. In the past, many members of Congress were veterans or had children in the armed services. Bill Clinton was the first U.S. president who had not served. Eisenhower always warned that it would be dangerous to have presidents who didn’t know firsthand the danger of war, the suffering, what real looks like. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has argued that the end of the draft led, a generation later, to the rise of a culture of militarism: Hollywood films like Top Gun, the popularity of first-person shooter video games like Call of Duty, and Second Amendment militia groups who cosplay as soldiers.

This distorted relationship to force feeds into what we now see — ICE agents with no military training, no ethical formation around the use of force, yet an appetite for “playing soldier.” There was even a clip circulating recently of someone saying an operation was “just like Call of Duty.” It’s pretending to be in the military without actually being so.

Q. And the gear, the uniforms, the aesthetics. How do you read that?

A. I think it reflects a lack of immediate, intimate experience with what it actually means to use force, at home or abroad, in a decent way and in service of democratic ends. Today, it’s largely the children of the poor who serve, and they serve with integrity.

Generationally, there’s been a loss of what the United States once understood itself to be — a beacon of freedom. My father served in World War II. He lost friends and relatives. He was deeply proud of what that service meant. Honestly, I thank God he’s not alive to see what is being done now in our name.

Q. You often emphasize the role of fiction and spectacle in shaping political imagination. In a country governed through spectacle, how do films, television, video games, and popular culture reinforce fear and authoritarian narratives—or resist them?

A. There’s a whole theatricality to ICE operations. David French, the Times columnist, recently argued that it’s largely about spectacle. People who support what ICE is doing enjoy watching these confrontations; for others, it’s heartbreaking. The costumes matter — they’re part of the script, almost like a Marvel universe. And then there’s outright manipulation. The Guardian reported on a Black woman arrested during a protest. In the original footage, she’s dignified, walking in handcuffs. But the Department of Homeland Security released an AI-altered image: her skin darker, her face distorted, crying, defeated. That’s fiction being used deliberately to humiliate. There is potential for counter-narratives, but I’m not sure how effective they are. I’m not really on social media.

Q. Is the fragmentation of a shared reality the core problem here?

A. I think fragmentation is a huge problem, and I think it will long outlast Trump.

Q. Trump dominates the attention economy almost completely. Is there any way around that?

A. Personally, I think people should abandon social media. But that’s just me.

Q. What do you make of Democratic figures, like Governor Gavin Newsom, who try to imitate the “strongman” style on social media, as an alternative to Trump?

A. When I toured the country with my book on the Constitution, I asked people who they admired in national politics. No one ever said Gavin Newsom. I think he admires himself quite a bit. There are people I admire — Bernie Sanders, for example — but he doesn’t play that gladiatorial game. Pete Buttigieg is often mentioned by audiences like mine: very measured, very disciplined. Newsom seems to be begging for a cage match. And I don’t think more cage matches are going to make life better. This is the argument Democrats are always having with themselves: by what means can we regain political power without destroying our integrity?

Q. You’ve compared this moment to the 1930s just before World War II. Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel?

A. In the 1930s, there was a massive effort to revive democracy with town halls, radio forums and panel discussions. Schools got deeply involved. It was a society-wide commitment. But the threat then was largely seen as external — fascism, communism, technocracy — so Americans felt they needed to fortify democracy together. Today, the threat feels internal: fellow citizens, even the sitting government. That makes it much harder. Still, I honestly believe Trump’s hold on power is extraordinarily tenuous. And when he falls, he will crash.

Q. You closed a 2019 essay with a warning: “Heaven forbid this republic become one man’s kingdom.” Six years and two failed impeachments later, Trump has entered the second year of his second term. Where do we stand today in relation to those words? We stand both nearer and farther.

A. Nearer because Trump’s second term has seen far more abuses of power than his first. And farther because the forces aligned against those abuses are gaining strength.

 Q. In one sentence, how would you define Trump’s presidency in historical terms?

A. Trump thrives on emergency, traffics in emergency, and craves emergency. His has been an emergency presidency.

Q. Finally, speaking to your fellow Americans and readers abroad, who believe democracy must be repaired rather than abandoned. What does history suggest about when reform is still possible?

A. History suggests that reform is still possible, but there’s a major gap in our knowledge. We know a great deal about how democracies rise and how they backslide. What we don’t really understand is how fallen democracies recover and become democratic again. So, in many ways, we’re going to have to feel our way forward in the dark.

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