MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: One year

With the first quarter of the second Donald Trump presidency behind us, what is the state of the nation?

In today’s letter: The speed and scale of the second Trump term’s attempt to transform America make it hard to assess what’s happened to the country, and to us. We try to take stock.

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It’s January 20, 2026, a quarter of the way through Donald Trump’s second presidency, and life has changed in these United States — so quickly, and so much that Americans find themselves struggling to understand what’s happened.

Six months in (and six months ago), we made a list:

Six months. It may not be long enough to grow a baby or build a house or land a liquor license, but it is enough time to break a country. To disembowel its institutions, to lay waste to its ideals, to darken its spirit, to make it crueler and harder and more fearful than before.

As Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches the half-year mark, I wanted to consider this turbulent period as a whole, instead of in the daily, death-by-a-182-cuts way I had been. So I spent a few days looking at every New York Times front page since January 20, noting down phrases, fragments, lines that struck me — some about the chaos in Washington, others about the broader world. I ended up with nearly 800 shards of news.

Revisiting that “document of who we have been” is sobering enough. But in the six months since, the country has changed even more. And, perhaps, so have the people.