100 days of shock therapy: What everyone should have learned from Trump’s first months back in office

RU

A candidate to spite everyone

The first round of debate about the problematic state of political institutions — in America and in the world — began back in 2016, when Trump was elected to his first term. That same year, Britain voted for Brexit, and Europe's right-wing parties reared their heads in the wake of the migrant crisis. The use of social networks to broadcast fake news to audiences comparable in size to those of conventional media became one of the hottest topics of the discussion on both sides of the Atlantic.

But there was no clear answer to the question of what was wrong — either with the institutions or with the societies that were allowing them to degrade. After the 2020 election, Biden replaced Trump, the wave of right-wing radicalization in Europe appeared to be waning, and the public seemed to relax, turning its attention to other issues. But from the vantage point of 2025, we can clearly see that the period from 2016-2000 was not the crisis — more like a warm-up exercise for the real thing.

Trump is not just back; he is back with a team of his own and is ready to go all-in. He flaunts actions that, for past politicians in other times, would have led to their immediate resignation — and he does this as if on purpose. Political opponents are trying to scare voters with warnings about Trump's dictatorial ways? Trump responds by promising to become a dictator on day one. They reproach him with xenophobia? Trump channels the Nazis in response, calling migrants “parasites” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” They accuse him of corruption? Trump puts the world's richest man on his team and does not interfere when the billionaire is awarded record government contracts. They reproach him for sounding un-Presidential? Trump responds by imitating oral sex with a microphone and devotes a significant portion of his campaign rally to discussing the reportedly ample genitalia of golfer Arnold Palmer. Someone says a presidential candidate should represent family values? Trump was convicted of a felony for concealing hush money payments to a pornographic actress he had been involved with during his wife’s pregnancy.

Trump has also broken every conceivable rule in international relations. He has fallen out with neighboring Mexico and Canada. He quarrels with Europe over NATO, tariffs, and Elon Musk’s support for the continent’s far right. He challenges China by imposing trade duties based on a poorly conceived formula in which tariffs have been mistaken for trade deficits.

Trump's persona is not the only problem — after all, much of what he is doing fits perfectly in line with his campaign promises. The problem is that half of the electorate opted for this. Admittedly, the average voter has little interest in ideology or foreign policy, focusing instead on consumer prices. When they rise, fueled by a record-high inflation rate at home and abroad, it is all too tempting to vote for an opposition candidate who promises to rein in the price of eggs — although it’s curious that, as inflation continues its upward climb, few of Trump’s backers have abandoned him.

Spikes in inflation tend to feed the popularity of right-wing populists, but the global surge of inflation in 2023-2024 did not bring these forces to power everywhere, meaning that institutional safeguards worked in some places but not others. And it's not just about inflation. Trust in public and government institutions has been declining for decades.

In recent years, only around 17-20% of Americans approve of Congress, and about the same percentage trust the government overall. Such disastrously low numbers have remained consistent since the Obama era almost regardless of what was happening in the country and the world. This is a far cry from the situation as recently as the 2000s, when responses showed greater correlation with actual events.

If your voters' trust in government hovers around 20%, it means that they are not as interested in voting “for” their candidate as they are in voting “against” the opposing one. Polls in all recent U.S. elections confirm this logic, with the polarization of society tripling since the 1990s. (Whereas in the mid-1990s only 17-20% of voters had a “strongly negative” attitude towards the voters of the other party, by the 2020s their share had risen to 55-60%).

General frustration and distrust in political institutions all but guarantees that crazy-talking populists will eventually come to power — a rule well known to the Russians, who saw the authoritarian nationalist “Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” gain the highest percentage in the country's first parliamentary elections in the tumultuous early 1990s.

But what is the origin of this distrust and public frustration today? What has gone wrong with public and state institutions in the last ten or fifteen years?

Failure of political institutions

If society does not trust institutions, then the problem is with the institutions, not with society itself. Indeed, political institutions are riddled with issues in many countries. It is especially true of American institutions, which looked very progressive at the end of the 18th century but have become somewhat outdated since.

One can no longer deny the poor performance of the two-party political system: first, it promotes polarization, destroying any nuance and shade, and second, it has minimal safeguards against the arrival of populists, because “the winner takes all.”

When examined closely, the U.S. is not very different from European countries in terms of right-wing populist sentiment. In Germany, for example, the far-right AfD has a relative majority and gets 26% in the polls. In the latest French election, the nationalists of the Le Pen family’s movement took an even more significant plurality — 33%. But neither in Germany nor in France did the populists gain control of parliament or government, as the other parties formed a coalition that prevented extremist forces from gaining a majority. Germany and France remember all too well how the socialists of the Weimar Republic were unwilling to unite with the communists against Hitler — and how that worked out for the entire world.

France has a double safeguard, as Paris holds parliamentary elections in two rounds (a fact that played a decisive role in the failure of the populists). By contrast, the U.S. system has a double incentive in favor of populists: first, radicals merge with moderates within one party, and if they get a relative majority at some point (like the Trumpists in the Republican Party), they gain control over the entire party. Second, since there are only two parties, a coalition against the populists is impossible. One party wins, and the other loses.

Trump won despite winning only 49.9% of the popular vote (77 million votes), with polls suggesting he earned roughly two-thirds of the vote in the primaries — meaning he originally had only about 30% of the popular vote (just about as much as the populists have in Germany and France). In other words, some 46 million voters in a country of 340 million brought Donald Trump to power with little or no resistance along the way.

Trump's victory is far from the only example of institutional failure. An overwhelming majority (86%) of Americans believe that mandatory mental health and criminal background checks for firearm purchases should be mandated federally. Yet despite frequent shootings in American schools, in some states buying a gun is as easy as getting a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Incidentally, the proportion of Americans who think such background checks are unnecessary only slightly exceeds the aggregate share of those with serious mental illness (5.5%) and felony convictions (3%) — the very categories that should be kept away from guns.

So why has Congress been so persistent in refusing to carry out the will of 86% of its citizens? In part, this could be because the National Rifle Association is the largest lobbying organization in the U.S., sponsoring congressmen of both parties and dispensing millions of dollars to individual senators. And that's just the money that’s transparent — the Super PACs system allows unlimited funding of any candidate's campaign while keeping the source of the funding opaque. This system is essentially legalized political corruption, and it has long angered the media, civil society, and individual politicians alike. However, congressmen are reluctant to ban it — for obvious reasons.

If money has legitimate leverage over politics, it can't help but affect social and economic policy, and few countries illustrate this reality better than the U.S. Meanwhile, it is social and economic factors that determined Trump's emergence above all else.

Failure of socio-economic policies

Having escaped the devastating effects of World War II, the U.S. for a time became a role model of good governance and the engine of global economic growth — before veering off that trajectory in the last quarter century. Formally, the U.S. is still the world leader in labor productivity, but even this parameter is not unquestionable. An evaluation that uses working hours instead of calendar days as a basis for calculations shows that the U.S. is already inferior to the Scandinavian countries and several other European states. It's just that Americans work many more hours because of weak labor laws.

While the U.S. is still doing reasonably well when it comes to the production of goods, it has faced major challenges with their distribution in the past two and a half decades. In Europe, the poorest 50% of the population receive a total of about 20% of the national income. This was also the case in the U.S. of the 1980s. Today, however, the poorest half of Americans receive only 13% of total income.

As for the richest 1% of citizens, in Europe they earn about 12% of total income, with the European community condemning this proportion as an indicator of strong inequality, compared to 8-9% half a century ago. In the U.S., they received a modest 10% of the total income in the 1970s and early 1980s, but today their share exceeds 20%. Since the mid-1990s, the richest 1% of Americans have been earning substantially more than the poorest 50% of U.S. citizens.

Meanwhile, median American incomes (after taxes and adjusted for inflation) have grown very little since the 1970s — only by about 20% — while in countries like Britain and Norway, they have more than doubled in that time. For the past few decades, the average American has seen that, despite a record-breaking stock market and the emergence of more and more billionaires, they remained, at best, where they had been — or even got poorer, as housing affordability has fallen dramatically over the past five years.

Importantly, income only reflects the money you receive, not the quality of life you get for this money. The difference is noticeable from birth: in most European countries a mother can get paid maternity leave (no such thing in the U.S.), arrange cheap or even free daycare for her child (available only to the poor and only in some states in the U.S.), and have the option of free college education for her children (in the U.S., free tuition is limited to a handful of special programs in some universities, and higher education is generally very expensive).

But the main difference is in health care: in 2024, 35% of Americans surveyed (the equivalent of 120 million people) responded that they could not afford quality healthcare, and 11% (29 million) said they had been forced to forgo healthcare in the recent past because of its high cost.

The tens of millions who cannot afford healthcare, college tuition, or a home — and who think this is unfair — form the core of the angry electorate willing to vote for any anti-system candidate. Many of them are long past caring whether their candidate is far-right or far-left, which explains the considerable overlap between the electorates of Bernie Sanders and Trump.

But why do angry Americans end up voting for a candidate whose program, views, and even biography, represent the exact opposite of what would inspire the reforms that would benefit them? This is the cohort that would gain from an increase in social welfare spending and a decrease of money in politics. Who managed to convince them that Trump was the most suitable candidate for them? How did odious right-wing bloggers end up being more influential than the entire lauded American press?

On this count, we should address a fundamental flaw that has become a challenge to the entire world in recent decades — a revolution in the consumption of information that has turned the traditional media, which once held the title of the “fourth estate,” into helpless observers.

Failure of mass media

Trust in mass media in the U.S. has been declining at about the same rate as trust in government: from three-quarters of Americans trusting the media in the 1970s, to about half in the early 1990s, and to less than one-third in recent years. This challenge is not uniquely American, as similar numbers are observed in the UK, with only slightly more confidence in France and Germany.

Mass media are losing influence not only because of a general decline in trust but also because of a massive shift in the way audiences consume information. In 2023, YouTube overtook television in audience size for the first time in the U.S. — a trend shared by other Western countries. Following YouTube, social media has also overtaken television in terms of reach.

More often than not, the average American learns the news by scrolling down the feed on their phone. Technically, news sites are still ahead of social media as a source of information, but this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt, as “news sites” are increasingly consumed in the form of headlines offered to them on social media. Even if a reader takes the trouble to follow the link, they will read at best two or three sentences of the article before getting back to their doomscrolling.

What difference does it make, one may ask, if television, newspapers, and social media are the main means of disseminating information? There are two reasons why the new format is a true game changer.

First, traditional media now make up only a small fraction of the total news flow. Before social networks became a thing, most people communicated with a small circle of friends, colleagues, and relatives. Today, a typical Twitter or Facebook user is exposed to the opinions of dozens, if not hundreds of people daily, and each of them is bent on expressing their precious opinion on world politics and the economy, drowning the voices of reputable media in the noisy chorus of diverse influencers and online “friends.” When discussing sports or movies, accuracy of information and the partisanship of opinion doesn't matter, but when discussing whether masks should be worn during a coronavirus epidemic or whether migrants reduce the average income level of the population, the situation demands that experts armed with statistics compete in the social media feed on an equal footing with a dozen random individuals.

Of course, all sorts of scoundrels have made their way onto television and into newspapers. However, while a journalist at least has a professional obligation to verify the facts, a random friend in your feed is officially entitled to base their opinion on absolutely nothing — and in most cases, they will use this right. It's just the way our minds work: anecdotal evidence provided by someone we know, especially if it evokes emotions, usually carries more weight than dry statistics recounted by a journalist. (Notably, we tend to perceive anyone we have been following online for some time as a personal acquaintance.)

Second, social networks and news aggregators optimize suggestions for user preferences, and as a result, the media space turns into an infinite number of bubbles bringing together people with common interests and political views. The main problem is that it increases by several orders of magnitude the effect known as confirmation bias, which polarizes society and reinforces the opinions of people who communicate only with supporters of their views — to the point that they become completely immune to other positions. Whatever outlandish views a person may have and wherever they live, they will easily find their “bubble,” filled mostly with people like them.

The first effect multiplied by the second leads to a rampant spread of conspiracy theories and stimulates the popularity of belief systems built on shared fears and phobias. Discussions in such an environment are unmoderated, often making them toxic and useless (which becomes an additional factor of bubble separation and polarization). Conventional media like CNN or the BBC, which treat political neutrality as a core value, are trying to hold their own in this raging, toxic ocean, but they are losing their edge. Fearing accusations of bias, they are giving up part of their agency out of caution. As a result, the loudest voices are those of emotional, radical influencers — each of them ministering to their own often hostile flock.

Journalists tend to justify their declining influence by saying that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” They say that in the social media ecosystem, fakes will always spread faster than truth, because they are made with a viral effect in mind — that inventing emotionally engaging hoaxes will always be easier than writing accurate, verified news. There is some truth to that, but it is not the whole story. If mainstream media ask themselves whether they have done everything they could to counter disinformation and bring socially significant information to the widest possible audience, they will have to admit that they have done ridiculously little on this front.

Most U.S. newspapers are paywalled, and that alone contributes to a bubble in which a publication's content is consumed by those like-minded readers who are willing to pay for that content. Furthermore, only a handful of television programs educate the audience on the most acute political topics — or expose conspiracy theories.

You can say all you want that “exposing fakes doesn't work” — but you haven't even tried it! Most fact-checking projects are small, niche online publications that rarely get a voice on major media platforms. Unsurprisingly, their fact-checking efforts fall short of countering misinformation. Political and economic educational projects on television and in the major media, which would explain in simple language how the world works, are also an exception.

As a result, a user who consumes content passively is constantly exposed to fakes and conspiracy theories but cannot learn the truth until, and only if, they start actively looking for answers. Such curious users will always be a minority. Only if journalists adopt a proactive approach and start targeting the audience that does not trust them at present — and start using the right formats and meanings to fight for this audience — will they have the right to say they have fulfilled their duty and “have at least tried.” In the meantime, the conclusion is simple: if three-quarters of the population does not trust journalists, journalists are doing something wrong.

In truth, enlightenment is the job not only of journalists, but also of the education system. Recent events show that this institution has failed just as seriously.

Failure of education

In a sense, education today is experiencing an unprecedented rise: thanks to the development of YouTube, the information space is full of educational videos for all types of audiences, from five-year-olds to esteemed professors. The world's leading universities are increasingly making their courses available to the public, libraries are digitizing books, and any barefoot teenager from India or Africa with access to the Internet — which is already accessible to two-thirds of the world's population — can learn almost anything they want.

But the flip side of this explosive growth of knowledge is that educational programs cannot accommodate it, and so they are gradually shifting from teaching knowledge to teaching skills. The implication is that children in school should receive only basic knowledge, as they can find the rest on their own. But what knowledge in the modern world is basic, and what is not? There is no consensus on this in society. Even worse, whatever the criteria for assessing basic knowledge, a significant share of the population, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, does not possess it. In the U.S., 21% of the adult population is functionally illiterate (the proportion is similar in Russia), and 54% have a knowledge level below the sixth-grade standard.

In a setting where one in five people cannot read and write properly, political education appears somewhat irrelevant. And yet recent events show that in addition to cruciferous plants and Ohm's law, secondary education should explain mechanisms of inflation, the risks of raising tariffs, and the impact of migration on income levels. Even the Ancient Greeks knew the difference between ochlocracy (mob rule or majority rule) and democracy (rule of the people), but 2,500 years later, politicians from high tribunes — and their supporters in social networks — continue to call democracy “majority rule,” genuinely failing to grasp why a court may have the right to overturn the decisions of a president elected by the majority.

In Russia, a country with a predictable future and an unpredictable past, every government rewrites history textbooks, understanding the importance of historical memory in politics. For some reason, dictatorships grasp this reality better than democracies do. For a voter to be sickened by a candidate's rhetoric about “parasites poisoning the blood of our nation,” the voter must have an instant, Pavlovian response to this kind of language, based on the knowledge of its origins and the all but inevitable consequences of its use. Judging by the Germans' reaction to Elon Musk's gestures, they are still capable of such a response. But Americans never got a vaccine this painful, meaning that the education system should compensate by tripling its efforts — which is hardly what is happening today.

In their defense, teachers might say: “We have no influence on federal education standards, so what do you want from us if the government has decided to eliminate the Department of Education altogether?” And indeed, the education system cannot protect itself — this is the job of civil society. Had the initiative to abolish the Department of Education been met with millions-strong protests, it might not have been adopted. (The same is true of Trump's other much-hated decisions.) But civil society — the lauded American civil society that has been a role model since the founding of the United States — also seems to be falling on hard times.

Failure of civil society

While politicians and journalists can be disconnected from society, civil society organizations and movements ought to represent it simply by definition. But the reality is more complex. Trump has used activist movements as a bogeyman in his campaign, portraying them as urban crazies on a mission to normalize all sorts of dark fantasies. While this is typical of the right-wing agenda, the question is not whether Trump is right in his campaigning, but why it works. Since it largely does, that means a significant portion of society does not feel that activist movements represent them.

For one, the U.S. undoubtedly still faces many pressing women's rights issues. The lack of paid maternity leave or free daycare are vivid examples: what kind of career can we talk about if women are deprived of the most basic social support? Domestic violence also remains an acute problem, and the U.S. is worse in this regard than any European country is. However, in the media space, the women's rights movement is no longer associated with struggles over social support or combating domestic violence. Clashes on the use of gender-neutral job titles, sexual objectification in advertising, and inappropriate role models in children's stories make much more noise.

Apparently, not all women suffering from domestic abuse or giving their last dime to their child's babysitter feel that fighting for gender-neutral job titles protects their rights. When the struggle becomes truly substantive and practical, it is immediately noticeable, as was the case with the pushback against the abortion ban. But the civil society space is too cluttered with activism that has no practical relevance to the people who need its support the most.

The hypocrisy of such pseudo-activism is evident to even the least educated voter, leading to distrust of civic movements. Today, every humanities student who, for whatever reason, has not yet earned a degree in gender studies is bound to become a colonialism expert. Caring for third-world countries is noble and right, but if the idea is so popular, where are the thousand-strong marches demanding to save the 25 million starving Sudanese, who will inevitably be hit even harder by the closure of USAID? How many colonialism experts can actually find Sudan on a map?

This hypocrisy, of course, is certainly not a purely American phenomenon. In Russia, several divisions of anti-colonialist fighters could have been recruited from among the dissatisfied middle class (before many of them escaped to the coffee shops of Tbilisi), but talking about enslaved peoples is not the same as fighting real slavery. Nine out of ten Russian Twitter activists simply do not know that more than 1 million people in Russia are stuck in labor slavery, and that a total of almost 2 million people are in some form of modern slavery. Meanwhile, the struggle against real slavery in Russia is limited to tiny NGOs like the Alternativa movement — because real activism is difficult, often dangerous, and requires effort and sincere motivation.

While Trump's actions have led to protests — even a few large ones — the intensity of this protest movement has so far been insufficient to produce any serious impact. Even after Trump is gone in less than 4 years, the problem of distrust in society will remain, and the only way to rebuild confidence is by addressing the very real vulnerabilities of the people who now feel left behind.

What can be done?

If Donald Trump did not exist, someone would have had to invent him. For decades, the public in the U.S. and many other countries has been increasingly losing confidence in government, parliament, mass media, and activists. This decline reflects the degradation of institutions, and it took the world's most powerful nation offering up power to a criminal — one who promises to become a dictator and threatens to take over Greenland — for society to start paying attention. Greenland will probably be fine, and no dictatorship will take root in the U.S. The world will probably get off lightly. But society could use this opportunity to figure out what exactly can bring it back to normal and get voters to believe that parliament represents their interests, that the media are not deceiving them, and that civil society is capable of protecting them.

Addressing this question and articulating the desire to return to normality would be a big step forward. Fortunately, we have before us the example of several dozen countries where political institutions and public trust are in much better shape. Some obvious reforms — like limiting the role of money in election campaigns — should be possible to enact, even if stepping away from the two-party system is probably a long shot.

Others could set an example at the industry level: for example, in the media sector, there are discussions around the idea that outlets focusing on socially meaningful topics produce public goods, and therefore they can be funded directly from taxes (like the BBC) or through multistate core funds, enabling the media to be both independent from interest groups and not closed off by a paywall.

Some reforms will face objective difficulties, as in the case of the education system. It is, after all, very difficult to determine who, and by what procedure, should outline the contours of what constitutes “compulsory knowledge.” Citizens must be prepared not only for employment but also to carry out their civic duties by understanding their country and its history. However, even if all we accomplish is to open a public discussion about whether such a task is even worthwhile, half the problem will already be solved.

During Trump's first 100 days back in the White House, many have complained that the world has started to go crazy. In a way, it has. But electric shocks are sometimes beneficial. Such therapy is still occasionally used to treat epilepsy. But hoping for its healing effect is not enough — we ought to do something to make it happen. It’s past time to get started.