The Opinions - How Strongmen Like Trump Get in Your Head

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

The columnist M. Gessen has spent most of their career reporting on and writing about authoritarianism in Russia. They now cover President Trump and the MAGA movement in the United States. In this conversation with Rachel Louise Snyder, a Times Opinion contributing writer and an expert on domestic violence, M. Gessen draws parallels between interpersonal violence and the way authoritarians coerce and control their subjects. The two discuss a question that domestic violence victims and those who live under authoritarianism often get: Why didn’t you just leave? Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I am M. Gessen, an opinion columnist at the New York Times. I often write about autocracy and what it's like to live under a totalitarian government. I spent my childhood in Russia and later went back as an adult and reporter from the country through the rise of Vladimir Putin. Now, in the United States, I often write about what's happening during the Trump president. So I've been writing about autocrats and aspiring autocrats for most of my professional life. I often find myself thinking about a lecture I happened to listen to several years ago.

It was a talk by a psychologist about a completely different subject, domestic violence. As she talked about the way abusers control their victims, I kept noticing how much overlap there is between that experience and what happens to people under autocratic governments. And then as I looked into the subject more, I realized that this was not a coincidence. For one thing, the study of trauma suffered by totalitarian subjects has informed the study of trauma in victims of domestic violence.

I want to talk about it with a friend and a colleague of mine, Rachel Louis Snyder. Rachel is a contributing writer at Times' opinion who often covers domestic violence. And she's helped me think through this connection between violence against women and autocracy. Thanks for being here, Rachel. Thanks for having me. Before we get to the meat of the conversation, can you talk to me about how you got into your area of expertise? I can, you know, it's a funny, it's sort of a funny answer. I had been sort of a baby journalist, and I lived overseas. I lived in London for a couple of years. I lived in Cambodia for a long time, six years. And I had traveled to like 60, 65 countries. And I did stories of gender-based violence and, and I did stories of gender-based violence and, all those countries, stories of, you know, child marriage, trafficking, all this sort of darkness.

And domestic violence was in all of those stories. But I was so, I was so young and naive that I would be like, but that's not my story. So I'm not going to ask this young, you know, 12-year-old married Roma girl about the violence in her house. And it wasn't until I moved back to America in 2009. I was still. standing on the driveway of a friend of mine, my dear friend, the writer, Andre DeBuse, whose sister, Suzanne, works for a domestic violence agency. And she drove up, he introduced us. I did that very American thing, like, oh, what do you do? And she said, oh, I work for a domestic violence agency. So I thought, oh, like, you have a shelter. And she was like, well, we do. But that's not primarily what we do. What we actually do is we have looked at the research to determine the highest risk indicators. of domestic violence homicide in order to prevent it.

So we basically predict domestic violence homicide. And I was like, you do what now? Like, this is a crime that happens behind closed doors. This is a crime that I, as a journalist, with all of the privileges that came, you know, I'm a white journalist, I'm traveling the world, I have education, I was blind to it. And in some ways my career ever since that day,

has been an attempt to pull off my own blinders to say, wow, this is something we need to talk about, we need to study. And so that's what I've done ever since that day. So let's try to unpack some things. And I want to start by talking about control and mechanisms of control. And I'm just going to go through a list, right, of things that stood out to me when I first started thinking about the overlap. And I want to get you a reaction. So, um, great. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I was used to seemingly every aspect of our lives being controlled. The state decided who could live in which city, which building, which apartment, where you would work after university, whether you could travel, even inside the country.

How does that relate to what happens in domestic abuse? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the primary questions, really. Abusers will start slowly. They'll talk about clothing, they'll talk about makeup. They'll say things like, you know, I see the way. men look at you when you wear that short skirt. And so I don't think you should wear that, right? So it's a sort of couched in this protectionism. And they'll chip away at attachments to meaningful things or people. And eventually you'll see somebody control money and work and how much

a victim interacts with friends or family. And you'll see the threat of violence as sometimes more effective and certainly more ubiquitous than actual physical violence. Yeah. The threat of violence, as we get more into talking about the Trump administration, right, just the amount of violence that we are witnessing now, given that this is a very violent society, it has been for a long time, right? But the spectacle of violence, ICE and political violence taken together, like I think it has transported us into different space where the threat of violence feels much more sort of palpable to many more people. Yeah, also, it is in the language that people in this administration are using, right?

It is in Trump sort of saying, well, Iran, you know, they better do the right thing. So there's an implicit threat there of violence, but there's also, you know, to connect it to domestic violence. It's also absolutely victim blaming and gaslighting. Right. It's the look what you made me do. Totally. I mean, look what you made me do is essentially what all scholarship up until second wave feminism looked at when it came to domestic violence, right? Like, you know, well, he wouldn't hurt her if she didn't bring it on herself, right?

if she could just act a certain way, be obedient a certain way, and we'll save this for another day, but it's also part of the tradwife conversations that are happening today. But, you know, I'll put a pin in that one. All right. Okay. Pins in place. Let's go to number two in my list. A special relationship.

So the domestic abuser convinces his victim that no one can understand the special love bond between them. And don't you think an autocratic leader does something similar? I'm turning the tables on you here, right? You are, you are. I'm like, well, do autocratic leaders give intermittent rewards? I bet they do. Yeah, they do. They do, absolutely.

Do you see what I did? I turn the tables right back on you right there. Well, well done, Rachel. Thank you, thank you. No, I think that's at least from a domestic violence perspective, and trafficking is the same way, you know, sex trafficking or even labor trafficking, actually. the, the, what undergirds all of them is how complicated these relationships become because victims will get these intermittent rewards, you know, they'll get gifts, they'll sometimes get

the gift of attention or time. And then of course, they have a violent episode and the cycle continues. So you're destabilizing the relationship, but you're also forcing that person into, a state of dependency and often gratitude, right? Like, oh my gosh, this person has fed me today, right? Withholding food or withholding sleep is common. I'm interested. Actually, I want to ask you how that works in an, okay, we're going to get back to your list, but how does that work in an autocratic society?

So one thing, and I think this is a key similarity, actually, between gender-based violence and particularly human trafficking, and to tell totalitarian societies is totalitarian leaders often set unrealistic goals for the people. So, for example, in the Soviet Union, there were these labor quotas. And they were completely insane. And especially in the early 20th century, they would set these quotas, and then there would be, like, one factory worker somewhere in the country who was, able to meet those quotas. But then it would turn out that the whole factory was working to falsify this person being able to meet the quota. Right. So you don't meet the unrealistic quota. Most people can't.

And they don't know whether they're going to be penalized for not meeting it or spared or rewarded for their factory performing better than the other factory. Right. And so you're always working at something where you can't fulfill the expectation, right? You're at the mercy of the regime or its representatives, you know, who are the factory directors or whoever they are, right? So they can, if they paid you, it was like, you're grateful. If they didn't report you for not filling your quota, you're grateful.

But you may also be penalized for not fulfilling your quota. Right. So that actually gets me to unpredictability and instability. which is key in a totalitarian society because you're always in some way outside the law, and so you're always punishable, right? Right. That's absolutely one of the key elements in domestic violence and sex trafficking is that destabilization.

You're degrading, you know, I'll just be gender-specific in this, although the acknowledgement that anybody can be a victim of violence, domestic violence, but you're degrading women over time. And I think, you know, I've interviewed at this point, I don't know, probably thousands of domestic violence victims. And they often use that phrase, that cliche living on eggshells. And when you really live on eggshells, your own sense of your humanity collapses in on itself, by which I mean you don't see yourself in relation to others anymore. You're really isolated. And so you check your own behavior.

The abuser has taken up residence inside your own mom. And so, you know, for example, that you've got to have dinner on the table at six and have the kids' toys cleaned up. And then, you know, the abuser comes home and the goalposts are moved. It's no longer dinner at six. It's that you made chicken and you were supposed to make steak, right? And so there is this constant sense of like, what am I supposed to do? At the same time as, you know, you can read in somebody's body language, their mood, somebody that you know really well. It's one of the things that actually makes domestic violence different from other crimes, like stranger crimes. Right. And so the next thing of my list is isolation. Yeah. Which you've already referenced. But when I was a kid, we lived behind the iron curtain.

And like getting books from abroad or listening to foreign radio was illegal. And we thought that there could be no alternative. even like I grew up in a dissident family and we thought that there was no alternative to the life as it was in the Soviet Union but there were a lot of people who actually truly believed that they lived in the best country on Earth.

Wow, yeah, that's so interesting. Isolation is really one of the first things you see in domestic violence victims' situations. They get isolated from friends, from family. And I said earlier that the abuser takes up residence in their mind. It's why you can see somebody, you know, walking around running errands, and still they are, as one advocate, put it, passive hostages. Because they are convinced that all the systems that might be in place to help them

if they're even aware of those systems are not going to be as powerful as that abuser. And so I think one way to think about it is to think of them as living in a kind of a state of solitary confinement. Except a lot of the time it's not solitary. And I'm mentioning that because you used the word hostage. And actually, that analysis was very helpful for me when I was writing about the Soviet period in Russian history. there was a Russian sociologist named Yuri Lievada who coined this term collective hostage-taking. And what he was describing

was this mechanism of horizontal enforcement, basically, where, let's say, if somebody was arrested for supposed anti-Soviet activity, everybody they socialized with, their whole family, their coworkers, might be punished, wouldn't necessarily be punished, but could be punished for not having been alert enough to this person becoming anti-Soviet.

And so the threat of bringing punishment, bringing violence onto the people you care about, either because you work with them and because you live with them and you love them, was enough to keep most people in line, right? Which makes me think of women who worry about bringing violence onto their children or onto the other people they love. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. I was listening to you, and I was thinking,

well, this might be one of the ways that domestic violence is different, right? Because victims are really isolated, but you're right, the threat of violence to a family. And we see that all the time, bystanders being killed. If you think about famous mass shootings in this country, like the Texas Tower shooting in the 60s,

people forget that he started the night before by killing his mother and killing his wife. or Sandy Hook, right? He started by killing his mother. So there is a danger to others. And one of the interesting things about domestic violence, actually I'm interested in how this works in your research, if it does, if there's a parallel,

you see victims being blamed for the violence against their children. So an abuser says, you know, if you don't get home right away, I'm going to kill the kids, right? kids are often used as leverage. And then if he actually does kill the kids, she is often slapped with failure to protect a homicide charge. Is there a parallel? Or is it what you were talking about with like the neighbors will get, you know,

scooped up and blamed? Yeah. I think there is a parallel not in terms of criminal punishment, but in terms of societal understanding, right? Which what in this country, I think, the criminal punishment, expresses, right, that the mother didn't take good enough care if the kids were killed, right? Yeah. And the social understanding in a totalitarian country is very often, yeah, if they, if this person

got himself or herself jailed and brought punishment onto their coworkers, then they were being irresponsible, right? Or if, I certainly heard it as a kid about dissidents, right? how could this mother get herself arrested? Doesn't she care about her children? Oh my gosh, really? Yeah. Wow. And it's like for somebody that we in this country now think of as a hero

for standing up against the regime. But that's not the social milieu. But I want to stay with this topic of collective hostage shaking for a second because I actually think that we in this country have witnessed a milder form. of it, but we certainly have witnessed it, right? When we see, say, university presidents, or even heads of law firms saying, you know, I'm just trying to protect people's jobs. Right. Or I'm, you know, I'm trying to protect my students and our funding and whatever university presidents are trying to protect. I take those statements with a huge giant grain of salt. except I think that that's probably an expression of something these people are feeling. They're feeling this huge burden of responsibility for other people and an enormous threat to being able to stay responsible for these people's livelihood, right? Do you take away the grain of salt because there's obviously some self-serving reasons for someone to follow?

into line, but like, why do you take it with a grain of salt? That's a great question. I think I take it with a grain of salt because focusing on that value of protecting people's jobs, say, in a university setting, requires ignoring all these other values that a university administrator is supposed to uphold. Right. Right. Like academic freedom. Right. Right. So that's why I take that sort of statement of motivation with a grain of salt.

So getting back to my list, probably the most important thing that I think ties these kinds of control together is the psychological effect. And I've heard it described as low-level dread, which is distinct from a state of high anxiety. In high anxiety, you're really unable to function. But somebody who lives in a state of low-level dread can go to work, can do the grocery shopping, can prepare lunch for their kids. And at the same time, they always have that, you know, as he said, the abuser has taken up residence in their brain, or the totalitarian leader has the regime has taken up residence in their brain. And there isn't room there in the state of low-level dread for acting creatively, for forming meaningful citizens. social connections. Yeah.

And most important, I think, for planning for the future. Yes, absolutely. That is, that so resonates with my experience of domestic violence victims. When they are in that state of dread, as you put it, they can't make meaningful decisions around, for example, breaking free. In fact, there's an organization in DC, DC SAFE that told me years ago, you know, ago when I was researching my book that they realized in a moment of crisis, like say there's a, you know, a violent moment and the police are called, and the police are there, and they're getting a, you know, a woman and her children to shelter, that if they could just provide a go bag

for that family that had like 24 hours of supplies in it, that had like a grocery card for food, that had some diapers, that had maybe some baby formula, just really basic things. They found that victims of domestic violence were able to make much better long-term decisions just by having all the things that can come from that moment of crisis, taking care of that for them in that moment.

So what's happening there is that their basic needs are met for a minute and they can think of something else? Yeah, yeah. Or that they feel taken care of for a minute? Yeah. You know, it actually makes me think, and I thought of this, I mean, I've thought of this really in every trial I've ever covered when it comes to domestic violence. But it makes me think of probably the most common question that I get asked as someone who covers domestic violence is why didn't they just leave. And it's really difficult to explain to a judge or a police officer why you can't just leave, right?

The bureaucratic hurdles, the financial hurdles, the manipulation. but I don't think we ever actually ask that of citizens of autocracy. I wonder if you see a parallel there. I think there's a parallel in the actual difficulty of leaving and maybe talking through it will be a little illuminating. Imagine what it's like to leave a country, right? The bureaucratic hurdles, the logistics of it, the expense of it. Right.

Again, we've talked about the inability to plan for the future. if you're isolated in a totalitarian country, how do you even imagine what it will be like to live somewhere else to have your circumstances change? Yeah. Right? It's not actually dissimilar, right, from the situation of somebody who has been isolated at home

who has been entirely focused on surviving in this situation. It's almost like having to learn a new language, right? And certainly it is like immigration, like learning to live anew. And I think people do understand that. about the subjects of totalitarian countries. Like they understand how hard it is, and I think they also have more compassion just for how hard it is to leave your home.

Like, people hope to the last to be able to just stay at home in a place that maybe they once loved and are hoping to love again. Yeah, and certainly among people they love. But, you know, it's interesting. Like, what do people in a totalitarian country imagine about,

living somewhere else, especially if they're told it's the best country in the world. Exactly. Well, you know, when my family was making plans to emigrate, a friend of my parents asked as a kind of joke, but maybe not exactly a joke, he said, what evidence do we have of the existence of the West? Really? Yeah. And... Like the very truth of the United States as a place or the Western Europe? There was no material evidence. We certainly didn't know anybody personally who had been to the United States. I thought Levi's was like a big thing on the black market. Levi's were a big thing, but how do we know that it comes from this magical place that is supposed to exist? Maybe they make it, you know, in Albania. And... Oh, right. Right. Like we had material evidence of the existence of the Eastern Bloc, but not places farther away. Wow. So you can't even imagine. There is a parallel there that I see with domestic violence. victims, like, how do I raise my kids? What am I going to do? What does it look like over there? Yeah. So let's try to bring this home. Okay. We've established the similarities, and now let me

point out something pretty obvious, which is the autocratic ambition, right, on the one hand, and gender-based violence, on the other hand, have really come together in the Trump administration. There's the president himself, accused of sexual violence by multiple women, and found liable in one case. There's the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegesith, accused of sexual assault. Robert of Kennedy Jr. has been accused of sexual assault. We can think back to the Kavana hearings during the first Trump administration,

which to me were like the first real illustration of how this movement that Donald Trump leads treats gender-based violence. Yeah. What do you think the effect of that is on us as a society? I knew we were going to get around to this. We can't forget Caesar Chavez, too, most recently. Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to imply that gender-based violence is limited to the right or to the Trump administration. We obviously know that it's not. You know, Eric Swalwell, the Democrat from California, is the most recent example.

Right. But there's this concentration in this administration. I would also say there's something else that's specific to this administration, which is a shamelessness about it. Yeah, there's almost a pride about it. And, you know, what do I think it does to us? I mean, at its most basic level, it travels, I think, through a society and it gives license to, you know, all kinds of, I'll say, bad actors in normal society, right? And there is evidence that domestic violence is on the right. There are a number of states where domestic violence homicides are on the rise. There's research around, you know, for a long time it was that there were three women a day killed in the U.S. Now it looks like it's closer to five. I do think it gives, it normalizes abuse.

It normalized, certainly it normalizes emotional abuse and coercive control. We haven't talked all that much about coercive control, but I think it's one. Can you define that? You know, coercive control is exactly what it sounds like. You are coercing somebody into doing things that they might not or probably would not otherwise do. And you're most often coercing them through threats of violence or through the destabilization of their reality, right? We see this in the Trump administration. We see this.

I think we all saw this in that famous meeting of Zalel. in the Oval Office where J.D. Vance just belittles him and tells him, you know, you're showing no gratitude. And I also think, and I don't know how this, if this has a parallel to authoritarianism or not, but certainly in the States, we have this glorification of what I would call gendered violence, of male violence. You know, Senator John McCain's whole identity was based around his own experience as a victim of violence during the Vietnam War. And then you have, on the other hand, somebody like Senator Jody Ernst, who is, I don't know how many years into being a senator before she talks about her own experience as a domestic violence survivor and sexual assault survivor, rape survivor. So I think male violence in this country is not something to be ashamed of, but domestic violence carries. this real shame to it and this public failure to, like, hold or acknowledge those victims of violence. I mean, do you see any connections there?

I do, as a matter of fact. You know, and obviously you pointed out that this isn't new, but I think it's kind of unsteroids under this administration, this glorification of male violence, and this posturing, this violent posturing, including, like, think of something like J.D. Vance saying that the Pope should be careful when talking about religion, you know, or Pete Higgs had the other day saying to Congress members, be careful what you say, or how dare you challenge me, the secretary of what they're now calling war, not defense, right? That's right. That's right. The sort of be careful what you say and directed at a totally inappropriate person is a display of that, you know, bullying violence.

And totalitarian societies, which were not yet one by any means, but that's what they want to create, right? The totalitarian societies are mobilized societies. There are societies united by having enemies and by being ready to, act violently together. That's what you see in Russia, where Putin mobilized the entire country against Ukraine, and that's really when Russia

became totalitarian, not just autocratic. And I think that that's the glorification of what you're calling male violence is serving that purpose. So let me bring this to what nobody listening expects, which is a somewhat hopeful conclusion. It's so out of character

I know, I know, it's crazy. But I actually think that the conversation we just had offers a little bit of a way to think about what we're living through in this country right now and maybe some recipes for action. So tell me what works in the domestic violence field. Yeah, yeah. It's so hard for me to be positive. It's not my natural state.

I mean, I do think conversations like this are so important because at the same time as our administration and our leaders might be normalizing violence, we can actually normalize conversations around caring and community outreach. I think one of the things I think about so often is in all of my interviews, and this is going 20 years now or something, domestic violence victim interviews. I have never once done an interview where a victim of domestic violence hasn't said some version of, I'm not your typical victim to me. Nobody sees themselves as, I don't even know what that means, a typical victim of domestic violence. And so one thing I think is to just talk about it, to talk about coercive control, financial control, emotional control, right? To allow people to recognize their own victimization. One of the people I consider one of my personal heroes, Judith Herman, the great intellectual thinker, Judith Herman, who says, I'm sort of paraphrasing her here, but she says, to speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life is to invite public humiliation, to invite ridicule and disbelief. The silence of women gives license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation. Now, that may not sound positive to you, but what it says to me is the recipe is that. very simple. We have to talk about it, and we have to allow each other the space to recognize

what it is. And I would add to this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that having connections outside of the abusive situation, having community support, having meaningful social connections is essential for somebody being able to get out from under the abuse, right? Absolutely essential, yeah. So that makes me think of Minneapolis. Minneapolis is the best example we have so far of people actually being able to resist the Trump administration's actions,

and it was a resistance effort that changed things in the city and even changed policy it appears in the administration. So it is by far the most successful resistance effort. Yeah, yeah. And what I would focus on in that effort is a language, that city named what was happening. They called it an occupation. They weren't calling it ice raids.

They saw what was happening to them as a very specific thing that called forth a collective effort of resistance. And the other thing that was super important to that effort were the mutual aid networks that had existed since COVID and since the George Floyd protest. So they had a long history.

They were well established. They were bonds of trust. that were well-established. And so people were able to work together, help one another, and also use the language that helped them act. Yeah. Yeah, and it seemed like it grew organically from those established communities.

And you're right, it is powerful. And also shout out to my fellow Midwesterners there because we are corn-fed strong people. But, yeah, Minneapolis, it makes me think of the, you know, the Gloria Steinem, like, awareness talks that she would hold in her living room throughout the, you know, 70s, 80s, and how we need to bring those back.

Like, we need to bring back. Consciousness raising. Consciousness raising. That's what it was called. You know, I'm so young that I didn't remember the... I know. I'm here to tell you. It was called consciousness raising.

Exactly, yes, yes. CR for sure. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. So, yeah, here's the recipe. Talk to one another. Call things by their proper names. Call them by their names, yeah.

Call them by their names and help one another. Yeah. Kind of like what you and I do for each other. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Masha. If you like this show, follow it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaka, Darba, Victoria Chamberlain and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Jillian Weinberger, Jasmine Romero, and Kari Pitkin. Mixing by Carol Sabro

Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, Epheme Shapiro, and Ammon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samuelski.

The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser. I don't know.