The diary has always been a vital form for making sense of political upheaval. Its intimacy captures what broader analysis often misses, like the quotidian encounters that reveal the deeper remaking of a society, or the way authoritarianism seeps microscopically into ordinary life.

We asked Aziz Rana to write this diary: to keep a record of twelve months in Trump’s America as events unfolded. One of the most astute legal thinkers working in the US today, Rana’s scholarship on empire, race and the constitutional order has given him an unusually sharp lens for making sense of the ongoing American crisis.

— Gavin Jacobson

25 February

It’s been a month since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and my family overseas – who are mostly in Kenya – have been calling to check on how I’m doing. I am touched, but also find myself grimly chuckling. It’s the first time in my life that I am genuinely uncertain about the path forward in this country. On some days, I think the most hyperbolic liberal fears about Trump’s authoritarianism are coming to pass. On others, I think those around Trump have already lost. It may be that both are true.

People like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem are deeply un-American, not in the jingoistic way that term is used, but in the sense that they despise what the country actually is – how it has been demographically, culturally and politically transformed by the twentieth century.

They don’t have anything like the sustained backing to expel non-white people in the numbers they would need. (That is, assuming we will still have basically working elections in the future.) But the problem isn’t even about popular support. It’s that there is no going back to the nineteenth century. You can’t erase how twentieth-century achievements have transformed the way people see themselves and those around them. Miller and Noem are pursuing a social engineering project that is bound to fail, but causing a lot of wreckage along the way.

For all the talk about quiescence at the start of the new Trump term, I’m heartened by the depth of institutional organising – union energy, lawsuits ready to go, immigrants’ rights groups helping targets. What worries me is the general disposition of my own educated class: lawyers, businesspeople, doctors, academics.

I am a lawyer and a university teacher. My own friends and family in Kenya retain a cultural memory of the political risks such professions carry. They have not forgotten that you can be harassed simply for who you represent or what you write and teach. This is not unusual. In recent years, so many lawyers have taken to the streets – facing down real repression – in countries including Pakistan and Turkey.

I worry that political courage is simply not an ethic for the highly educated professional class – myself included – that came of age in the US around the end of the twentieth century. The very vocations that are supposed to uphold dissent have become careers in which you are acculturated not simply to reduce risk, but to eliminate it from your life entirely. There is a lot of handwringing, rightfully so, about how the Democratic Party is not an opposition party. Its elected leaders are trained in accessing funders, and, through maintaining a skilful relationship with those funders, in running for and holding office. Nothing about “being good” at American politics prepares them for actually challenging power. But this is a fact of the broader professional class. Courage, in the US, is primarily for firefighters and soldiers.

26 March

I avoid online videos, but have seen the recording of masked ICE agents snatching a graduate student off the street for writing an op-ed about Gaza. It’s unclear how many people directly support these practices. My guess is that the Stephen Millers are vastly outnumbered. But if polling is any indication, one of the Trumpists’ greatest achievements has been to disassociate support for particular policies – such as these mass disappearances – from generalised attachment to a particular side. They have created a cultural world for a meaningful base, such that significant numbers are willing to accept measures that, taken in isolation, they might recoil from. This has long been a magic key to routinising cruelty, whether in ostensible democracies or dictatorships.

So much of US popular culture, from Star Wars and The Hunger Games to the endless retellings of fascism and communism, revolves around authoritarianism. On the screen, life in repressive regimes is preserved only by coercion, and is unceasingly grim – you immediately know you’re in a dystopia. These presentations have little interest in the way that culture and entertainment give lightness to society, and licence to that cruelty.

There is something self-aggrandising about most American cultural depictions of authoritarianism. The stories narrate life behind enemy lines – whether in the 1930s or in outer space – in a way that implicitly tells the viewer that the US is different. It really couldn’t happen here. This has left many Americans unprepared for everyday conditions of repression – how life changes only incrementally, how the things you’ve always enjoyed mostly remain the same. Some of my happiest childhood memories are times spent with family in Kenya under dictatorship in the 1980s.

16 April

Another mass shooting. The routine is not just emotionally numbing; it sends the public a message about the failure of US institutions. If politicians cannot respond to something like this – if they cannot protect children at schools from senseless death – then you cannot expect them to respond to any meaningful problems.

Hear this lesson often enough and you come to accept – practically at a subconscious level – that you and your loved ones are all alone, that everything you have can be taken away instantaneously, and that you cannot count on the government for anything. And while the state solves nothing, it can punish enemies – something you can cathartically enjoy.

19 April

We’re walking through Marble House, the mansion in Newport, Rhode Island that William Vanderbilt built as a birthday present for his wife Alva in the 1880s. It’s modelled after parts of Versailles. Everything about it – from the elaborately carved marble covered in gilding to the gold candelabras – is garishly fawning over the European aristocracy.

Trump is an obvious heir to the robber barons in his obsession with opulence, with kings and queens. And those who have found utility in Trump’s political ascent are an odd collection of allies. The Millers and the Hegseths want to return to white-settler rule, to erase the twentieth century. But Trump and the tech billionaires, like the owners of Marble House before them, are revolting against any version of the US bound by democratic ethics and constraints. They want a world apart and for themselves alone.

We’ve been watching The Gilded Age, which presents a fictionalised version of the Vanderbilts, and even shoots in Marble House. Walking through Marble House, you feel gorged on the ostentatious wealth – an affront to the pervasive deprivation of the historical period in which it was constructed. But on the show it just seems like another diverting mansion, a place to eavesdrop on conversations for an hour.

This is in keeping with depictions of the upper class we tend to get from the creator Julian Fellowes, a Conservative peer. His make-believe Vanderbilts have their flaws, but they basically share the same views of twenty-first century Americans – when it comes to race, gender and society more generally. But it’s not just Fellowes. Most period dramas are told from the view of aristocrats and robber barons and the central characters rarely express the actual views that were routinely held within their social class: a belief in eugenics, opposition to allowing the poor to vote, defences of workhouses for the indigent (even children), support for gunning down strikers by private armies, enthusiasm for colonialism, and so forth. We are led to identify with these characters because they seem just like ourselves, despite the wealth. And by extension, we are lulled into a sense that today’s billionaires, many in open revolt against democracy, share our same basic sensibilities.

25 May

The kids are at loose ends on a Sunday, so they’ve opened my laptop and recorded themselves as the “hosts” of a podcast about the NBA playoffs. They’ve got that tone of exaggerated outrage down perfectly, and appear to be having a blast poking fun at how they imagine I spend too much of my time.

8 June

In Fall River, Massachusetts, we’re wandering around an exhibit about the patrol torpedo boat that John F Kennedy commanded in the Pacific. I knew that the eldest Kennedy son, Joe Kennedy, Jr., was killed in the Second World War, but had never really grasped how dangerous JFK’s missions were, or how close he too came to death. It reminds me that, when George Bush, Sr.’s plane was shot down over Chichijima in 1944, all the other crew members died.

The Bushes and Kennedys were part of the small constellation of families that, for all the twentieth-century American talk of the “common man”, were of truly elite economic and political standing. The same year Bush was shot down, his father, Prescott, joined the Yale corporate board. And yet these fathers were willing to send their sons, who they must have imagined one day may be presidents, to die in battle.

I’m struck by the imperial implications. During the ascent of American primacy, these fathers of the governing class willingly sacrificed their children for that goal. It seems absurd to imagine today’s circle of billionaires and the politicians they fund identifying deeply enough with pax Americana to commit to sacrifices of any kind, let alone endangering their children. Homilies to the US political past – about the country as the saviour of democracy – ring so hollow in part because we all can see that the economic and political elite do not believe them to the point of actual personal consequences. It is a corollary to the broader risk-avoidance of the professional class to which I belong.

16 July

I’m catching up over breakfast with old friends who don’t work at a university. One asks why the campus protests stopped when unimaginable daily violence against Palestinians continues. I remind them that participants faced massive consequences – disciplinary hearings and government investigations – which have only metastasised under Trump. Joe Biden’s repression of Palestine activism was its own form of authoritarian training: young people were taught that silence is desirable.

Those lessons have been highly corrosive. I feel like the air in the US is one of complicity in a grave crime. All of the images from Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem – where every year thousands of extremists march through the streets chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your village burn” – is a rebuke to the routine of life here. You take this complicity with you wherever you go, and it gets reaffirmed whenever one of the architects of Biden’s foreign policy gets a prestigious position. Nothing in these announcements seems to acknowledge that a grave crime is being committed. And the very fact that in the US there are no cultural sanctions at all binds us together.

For good reason, we usually read silence as defeat, as acceptance, or even as tacit support. And we then conclude that the periods when speech is fully out in the open are perhaps the only ones when transformative views are deeply held. Lately I’ve been thinking about the silence in the years before social change, the decades that passed between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement.

The Biden-era repression gave birth to a type of watchful silence, too. The gulf between the reality on the ground and what politicians were willing to say about it has permanently reshaped the meaning of Palestine in American society. For most Democratic voters, it’s not a litmus test, at least not yet. But how a person in power or running for office speaks about Palestine has a symbolic meaning well beyond the issue. It is a marker of authenticity, and tells you something critical about any other position they may hold.

There has been an American sea change, but it did not take place exactly through deliberation or the airing of arguments. It is certainly true that, despite the risks, talk about Palestine and Palestinian cultural life – Palestinian voices, literature, food, art, music – is far more present than ever in the US. Especially in blue cities, a cultural solidarity with Palestine is ubiquitous in left-wing and even liberal spaces.

But even where that organic experience is thin on the ground, the sea change still proceeds. Something that defined the Biden-era response, across the institutions, was to try and limit conversation, seemingly so as not to have to mount a defense. But even where that silence was successful, it feels like in the silence those around you came nonetheless to recognise right from wrong. It is unspoken but assumed, in a way that makes me think of how transformative views take hold even when speech isn’t fully out in the open. The problem, of course, is that we live in a time of impunity, and in the US there is no version of silence that can outrun complicity, its companion.

7 August

We spent today in Norman Rockwell’s studio and then at W.E.B. Du Bois’s homesite, 20 minutes from each other in the Berkshires Hills of Massachusetts. These are physical spaces that both Rockwell and Du Bois invested with deep personal meaning. They have a simplicity to them that speaks to how they understood living in a world with others. Rockwell’s images have never fully connected with me. But staring now in particular at his paintings in honour of the United Nations, in defence of free speech, and in outrage at the murder of Freedom Riders during the civil rights movement feels like a way of acknowledging the seriousness and ethical care of a type of American liberal.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s homesite is just that: remnants of where he spent happy days as a small child. It’s wooded land marked by trails and a very thoughtful exhibit, but hardly visible from the street; you’d almost certainly miss it driving by. He had always wanted to properly rebuild the home, but he never had the finances to make it happen. All of this is its own statement on the limitations of even the most open-hearted versions of that American liberalism. And yet, today I also have found myself feeling like Rockwell and Du Bois were part of a shared American conversation, one miles away from Marble House and its American inheritors. The whole day has been an experience in paying respects to a version of the United States that was once genuinely in search of itself.

9 August

We’re in the car as a family, having just left a weekend concert. The traffic out is bumper to bumper, and it’s nearly midnight. But there are lush trees all around us, and we’ve rolled down the windows to enjoy the breeze and to hear the crickets. I wonder what my kids will remember from these times. I imagine the heaviness of it all will feature somehow, but I’m sure so will the joy that we feel right now in sharing moments like these.

15 October

At the end of a Zoom talk on the US Constitution – this is usually what I am invited to lecture on – someone asks a question about D’Angelo, who has just died. I’m surprised how affected I am by the news. Partly this is because he’s not that much older than I am – a presence from my youth and young adulthood has left. But it’s also because of how this year has made me reflect on the meaning of Black American commercial art.

In January, I watched Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, Johan Grimonprez’s documentary about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The movie features footage of Lumumba and of political battles at the UN scored to the music of John Coltrane and countless other Black jazz luminaries of the era.

I watched it before Trump returned to power, before the near-daily flurry of “anti-DEI” orders and pronouncements, the scrubbing of Black history from government websites – everyday actions to denigrate Black achievement, Black excellence, and just Black presence. I watched it before the country began violently closing its doors to the non-white world, while presenting white South Africans as threatened refugees in need of US protection.

Back in January 2025, I wondered if Black commercial art from the mid-twentieth century and today played different roles in American culture. It didn’t matter in some deep way that Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie participated in State Department public-relations tours in the Third World. Listening to transcendent Black music at that time would have exposed the hollowness of Jim Crow American culture. It would have been innately oppositional and so could not be entirely captured by American capital or be subsumed into the American imperial project.

But in the twenty-first century, with billionaires like Jay Z and Beyoncé making ads for Tiffany, Black commercial art forms and artists seemed far more integrated into just that global project. Did this mean that such art had become a quintessential American export — the sugar of soft power alongside the bitter medicine of hard power? I found myself questioning its inherently oppositional work, in part because I had a harder time finding the dividing line between it and general American corporate culture since the ‘90s and Obama.

And yet, listening now to D’Angelo’s music is shifting where I landed 10 months ago. Neo-segregationists are seemingly everywhere, including in the highest offices. Jim Crow stalks the country. And in this moment, the sound of the music feels like a deep cultural refusal and so preserving it similarly seems essential — a way of maintaining psychic independence from an assaulting state.

18 October

We’re at a “No Kings” rally outside of Boston, with hundreds of other people, even though we all know our presence won’t reach the national news. My kids are holding signs, made by our neighbours, which are brimming with 1990s-style patriotic reverence for the founders, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. Founders-worship is part of what got us to this point, including an uncritical embrace of undemocratic electoral and legal arrangements that dramatically overrepresent the American far right.

But I can also see that the narratives woven around these figures and texts are deeply meaningful to my neighbours. It is how they express that disorienting sensation of inhabiting a place that one no longer recognises. This is true even if much of what we are now witness to – from ICE raids to overseas violence – didn’t just begin on 20 January. And so I’m happy to be in community with them, and to share the sense of camaraderie. I want to hold on to the idea that Americans can have plural and even conflicting narratives about history, while embracing the same deep convictions about what is right and wrong. I am somehow reassured to be among people who do not share my cultural markers.

I also can’t help but note how much these protests have in common with those from a year ago, in defense of Palestinian rights, which the legacy media framed almost as a cultural invasion. If those demonstrations gave voice to global anti-colonialism, what is the cry of“No Kings” but an invocation of a particular brand of early American anti-colonialism? That brand may obscure the histories of pre- and post-Revolutionary settler colonialism, but, however domesticated, it still claims as American the rejection of subject status.

You can say these protestors are not calling for anything particularly radical – free speech, the rule of law, don’t put soldiers on American streets, treat immigrants and marginalised people fairly. But the young people protesting for Gaza didn’t see themselves as asking for anything particularly radical, either. They weren’t calling for socialist revolution. They understood themselves as promoting what they had always been told were unobjectionable American values – everyone is worthy of equal dignity, no one is rightless in this world.

It was the human-rights liberalism of the same 1990s reflected back to the very promoters of that liberalism, even if the likes of Samantha Power had nothing to say now. For both the “No Kings” rallies and the Gaza protests, isn’t it all milquetoast liberalism – not as a pejorative, but in the very best sense?

4 November

I’m watching Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech on my phone in bed, at an hour that suggests getting the kids to school tomorrow will be especially challenging. I’m moved, above all, by his references, from Debs to Nehru. These invocations are not just my own political touchstones, but they also speak to an entire demographic of Americans who are consciously and proudly connected to the Third World – though we have always been taught to disavow that intellectual and political inheritance.

Obama’s very success seemed to reaffirm that the condition for gaining higher office was to distance oneself from the anti-colonial legacy and to translate your own family’s Third World heritage into terms broadly comforting and bathed in American exceptionalism. Perhaps that is why another East African winning the mayoral race in the unofficial capital of the country, as an American person of the Third World, seems more remarkable than his self-identification as a democratic socialist.

My own Kenyan family is biracial, African and Indian. It is moving to see someone South Asian – and with the middle name Kwame – frankly identify as African. Mamdani embraces Third Worldism’s still-living potential, a vision of global and antiracist solidarity in the face of colonial and postcolonial efforts, by imperialists and local dictators, to divide and conquer. It has hardly been the only South Asian political trajectory out of East Africa: just look at Kash Patel or Rishi Sunak.

But in its way, I experience Mamdani’s victory as suggesting that we still carry the legacy of Makhan Singh and Pio Gama Pinto – those anti-colonial activists who gave everything in Africa in service of freedom for all. And it tells me that this way of being an American, which braids New York City, Kampala, Nairobi and beyond in shared and universal aspirations, is now rooted deep in US soil.

9 January

Another week of state violence, abroad and at home. Trump & Co. have followed up rolling executions at sea with the kidnapping of a foreign head of state, an assault that left 100 people dead. Two US imperial imaginations are at war with one another: the regional hegemony of ethno-nationalist settlers versus pax Americana and its “rules-based order”. That order was always grounded in US defection from those rules whenever it saw fit – from Vietnam to the Global War on Terror. But Trump and the Republican Party are doing more than defecting. They are actively making it impossible for anything like an international legal system to function.

For all of America’s military and economic might, Trump’s emboldened settler hegemony is on shaky ground, and not only because it implicitly admits of retreating to the hemisphere from a world to be shaped by regional authoritarian hegemons (Russia, China, Israel) all ruling over their own near-abroads. Few outside that small Trump orbit want to bring back McKinley and gunboat diplomacy. If anything, Americans are now witnesses to the discrediting of all accounts of their empire.

There is something profoundly hollow about the US discussion of these events. News criticism is largely pragmatic – colonialism in Latin America or in Greenland is a bad idea because it’s unlikely to work. Almost no one is articulating a basic point: that it is immoral to execute people at sea, or steal a country’s resources, or grab its land.

Mass roundups of non-white immigrants proceed as if this is just one policy option among many. Even with the ICE murder in Minneapolis – the fourth such killing in the last five months – the far right hallucinates an alternative reality in which the victims are to blame. That hallucination is of a piece with how we routinely talk about state violence – was it legal, do the streets need to be made safe, is the border secure? The deep stain of how the state has come to behave is rarely front and centre. This is another reason that life in the US feels permeated with complicity. We are all participants in a political conversation whose rules make naming a depravity into a violation of etiquette.

Still, I do believe that there is significant and ever-growing American outrage, and outrage experienced in moral terms; I can imagine a majority soon backing calls to abolish ICE. I remain deeply moved by the sheer number of everyday Americans, in Minneapolis and across the country, that refuse to accept the violence around them.

But this moral commitment coincides with that ever-present climate of decay, the water in which Trumpian extremism swims. And the international, especially European, silence on the American condition provides yet more cover for such decay. I also still believe that the Stephen Millers of the country are fighting a cultural war that they have already lost. But what continues to hang in the balance is the amount of destruction that they can inflict on the world nonetheless, and what type of country will be present on the other side.

In 1947, in demanding that the UN condemn segregation, Du Bois warned about where the US could be heading, given its internal political system – with its distortions that elevated the worst elements of the American political class – and the entrenched bipartisan refusal ever to hold perpetrators of state violence to account. All of this meant that the situation “spell[ed] danger”, not just to Black people, but also “to white folk all over the nation, and to the nations of the world”. It is a prophetic statement.