I’m writing to you from an Uber in New York City, thinking about what a visitor just told me.
The man was dressed smartly. The style you’d associate with forty-something businessmen or a diplomat a from Nordic country. We chatted in line at a Starbucks at LaGuardia, where I just landed for meetings this week during the UN General Assembly. He said he was in town for the same reason, and he asked about my DEFIANCE hat, which got us talking politics.
At the end of the coffee bar, while we waited for our orders, he shook his head and said in a light accent, “I don’t even recognize this place anymore.”
He wasn’t talking about the airport obviously. He was talking about how America has become something different in such a short time. Before flying over, he confessed, he deleted his browsing history, the way a lot of foreign travelers now do before touching down in the United States. It wasn’t his idea, he said. His wife told him he should do it. He scoffed at what had made him do it, speculating that his social media history had probably been vacuumed up by the CIA before he boarded. (I didn’t bother correcting him that it would’ve been DHS, not that it matters to a foreign national.)
We grabbed our drinks. I asked if he wanted to sit down and share his thoughts, perhaps for an interview. He smiled politely and declined. Then he made his way ahead of me to baggage claim.
It was a brief interaction but not a surprising one. I’ve heard that tone of voice before. Last year around this time, I surveyed a number of foreign contacts who shared similar sentiments, including a German filmmaker who said his “heart raced at the border,” a Norwegian journalist who spent hours scrubbing five years of anti-Trump posts before visiting the States, and a British colleague who powers down his phone when he’s here before meetings — the way Soviet citizens once buried the telephone under a pillow before dinner guests arrived.
Those sentiments were an early warning sign, perhaps. Now they sound more like a travel guide because it’s become such common knowledge to U.S. visitors that things aren’t the same here. In fact, to many of the people arriving for the biggest global gathering of the year in New York City, the United States has transformed dramatically in a very short period of time.
Can you blame them for feeling this way? They watch on the news as journalists are arrested… as foreigners with zero criminal record are swept off the streets, held in secret detention, and deported… as members of the political opposition are spied on by the government… and so on.
Today marks one year since the president signed an executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, a broad and unprecedented directive that has given license to federal agents to investigate people and groups they deem “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalist.” The New York Times just published a devastating account of what’s happened in the wake of that order, including federal agents infiltrating neighborhood watch committees, church meetings, and an environmental group in Minnesota, surveilling hundreds of ordinary people. In a separate case, an elementary school aide in Texas got thirty years in prison, and the lone allegation against him was hiding a box of anarchist publications.
What’s happening with the free press is, I assume, top of mind for visitors like my friend in the Starbucks line.
On Friday, the White House banned CNN, Politico, and MSNOW from the grounds over their coverage, and yesterday those outlets filed suit to defend the principle that the government doesn’t get to decide what journalists publish. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports Trump has repeatedly discussed evicting the entire press corps from the White House, raising it again just last month. And on Monday night, the administration filled the vacuum by launching a 24-hour channel called TRUMP TV, billed by a White House aide as a livestream of the administration’s “greatest hits, unfiltered.” Critics immediately compared it to the state-run media of North Korea and China, and frankly, what else would you call it? He bans the free press then creates a government-run channel for the news of his administration. The North Koreans don’t need to take any notes while they’re in town for UNGA because we’re copying theirs!
So no, my new friend at LaGuardia wasn’t being paranoid. He was being observant. And he has plenty of company. Polling this year found that only 11 percent of Europeans still consider the United States an ally. I’m still marveling at that figure. Nearly nine in ten citizens of the free world’s oldest partnership have written us off, and it’s no wonder why. The diplomats arriving for UNGA are treating America the way they’d treat a visit to a hostile country — cleaning their devices, using their words carefully, and keeping everything off the record. It’s hard to view a place like that as “friendly.”
This time last year, I wrote that our foreign friends were holding up a mirror and wondering whether we’d look into it. Twelve months later, I think many of them have quietly put the mirror away. They keep their heads down, clear customs, and then catch their flights home, hoping that agents of Trump’s government aren’t tracking them.
The “looking in the mirror” phase is long gone. It’s up to us to be thinking every day about how we’re going to defy this madness. That’s one of the reasons I’m in town. I have some ideas. And I’ll be sharing them with you soon.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tonight at 5 pm ET!
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