How Foreign Journalists See Trump’s First Hundred Days with the Press

In May 2020—with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the US, and shortly after a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, sparking mass protests that would spread nationwide—Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post, wrote a widely shared satirical dispatch imagining how the media would cover the events if they were happening in a foreign country. (“In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump,” it began. “The former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say.”) This was one of a number of pieces from the time that cast an outsider’s eye—imagined or real—over a frightening period in American history. In a newsletter in October 2020, I quoted from a piece in GEN by Indi Samarajiva, who had lived through a civil war in Sri Lanka and made the case that the US was already in a state of collapse. Many Americans were “waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky,” but that’s not what collapse looks like, he wrote. It is, rather, “just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else.”