A recent New York Times piece bemoaned the “credibility crisis” at the Trump Justice Department. As is typical of the Times, the article acted as though history began in 2016, took a break from 2021-2025, and restarted following the inauguration of Trump 2.0.
While the Trump DOJ is a cruel joke—as we’ve covered—if the Times cared to take its head out of the Mar-a-Lago sand, it would notice that trust in all US institutions has been falling for years and are at levels worthy of a failed state status. This is not simply a Trump phenomenon.
Corbin Trent at America’s Undoing dove into why, which is no mystery to regular NC readers:
We’re living through a total collapse of institutional legitimacy. Every single institution that’s supposed to serve the public has been caught lying through their teeth about shit that actually matters – your job, your health, your kids’ future, your safety.
And it’s not just the lying; it’s the active undermining of all of the above, usually for profit.
Is there any pathway back from the abyss? Well, of course, but it would involve flipping the country on its head and would take a lot of time, work, sacrifice, and messy trade offs.
Are there any examples in history we can look to for guidance? Perhaps there are others that readers can share, but one immediately leaps to mind. RUSSIA!
The 1990s shock therapy in Russia when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country produced devastating results. The number of Russians living in poverty jumped from two million to sixty million in just a few years as workers were crushed:
Run by chance into some of my old data. These are real earnings of workers’ households in Russia 1987-96. Much worse than the Great Depression in the US. pic.twitter.com/JZddHnKOT9
— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) April 30, 2024
Life expectancy plummeted:
Even in 2006, once Russian President Vladimir Putin had stabilized the country, trust in government institutions in Russia was among the lowest in the world. It wasn’t hard to see why. Here’s Marat Khairullin describing those years in order to explain why Russians are so supportive of the war against NATO (please excuse the long quote, but this helps illustrate Russia’s turnaround, explain why many Russians would rather die than bend the knee to “The West,” and offers a preview of where the US is headed):
Because if Ukraine and the West standing behind it win and come here to our land, it’s us—you and me—they’ll be killing next. Believe me, it will all come flooding back, all that horror which we, having sunk into our comfortable oblivion, dared to forget.
Oh yes, we forgot how in the Russia of the 90s a million human beings died from samogon[3] and causes directly linked to alcohol—overwhelmingly men, somebody’s precious sons, fathers, husbands, brothers. We forgot that every single year 30 to 50 thousand perished in car crashes, and the majority of drivers—the ones actually causing the accidents—faced no legal consequences whatsoever.
Starting, it seems, from 1997 onward, a special report dedicated to torture within police stations (“militia at the time) regularly emerged under UN auspices—naturally, an unfriendly act by the USA, yet still, it spoke volumes about the true state of Russia’s law enforcement system, in whose capital during certain years over a thousand citizens were gunned down by hired killers right out on the streets of the capital city of my struggling country.
In the very year Putin became prime minister (1999), yet another monstrous study was published, coldly stating that every third girl in our vast country before reaching 18 years of age had experience with so-called “commercial sex.” Thus did polite Western researchers term prostitution in our country.
By the twilight of the century, the black-market transplantology trade in Russia was valued at a figure monstrous for those times—a full billion US dollars. Approximately 20 thousand Russians were “dismantled for spare parts” annually; everything was harvested for use, even lymphatic fluid—snapped up eagerly by Western perfume giants. And again that chillingly polite formulation—”without donor consent.”
And then too in Russia there existed an actual slave market—about 15 thousand Russians sold annually—and a parallel market for sexual slavery: in foreign brothels across the globe, by various expert estimates, held strictly “against their will” were up to half a million of our young girls. There was also the Chechen war, which I could endlessly write about.
Whatever one thinks about Putin, it’s difficult not to admit how incredible the Russian turnaround is in a few decades, and it also makes the task in the US look comparatively easy.
Let’s look at some recent polls to see how Russians are feeling about institutions in their country today. Here’s Gallup:
Here’s the Levada Center showing how Russians feel about the direction of the country:
As the most trusted figure in a country with growing trust and increasing quality of life, it’s really not a major surprise that Putin enjoys high favorability ratings:
JUST IN: 🇷🇺 Russian President Putin’s approval rating is 86%, according Western polling agency Statista. pic.twitter.com/3SP1kzYYgs
— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) July 30, 2025
Perhaps some of this might be attributed to the rally-around-the-flag effect, which can sometimes boost societal wellbeing indicators and overall optimism, but it’s also true that trust was rising for years ahead of the SMO. You can find accounts like Karl Sanchez that argue Putin is building a Russia that is focused on people-centered development. Consider just the following contrast. In February, Putin “tasked the government with providing homeless people across Russia with free medical assistance, regardless of whether they have documents confirming their identity or registered address.”
Trump on the other hand is looking to imprison the homeless for the crime of being homeless as a likely boost to his oligarch buddies in the private prison industry.
Others argue that Russia just has its own flavor to neoliberalism. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But no doubt it is night and day between the 1990s and now.
Let’s do some comparisons, remembering that Russia had an enormous hole to dig out of and has faced constant obstructions from the West.
Income Inequality. Narrowing in Russia. Widening in the US.
Although Russian inequality began to tick back up since the start of the Ukraine war, the trend for the past two decades is one of greater equality, and there are arguments that is set to continue.
Here, on the other hand, is the Gini Index for the US with the Trump “Big Beautiful Bill” set to make society even more unequal:
Deaths of despair continue to increase in the US while they fall in Russia.
Direction of Country
We showed above how Russians increasingly believe their country is headed in the right direction. In the US, it’s the opposite:
How did the diabolical “dictator” Putin do it?
At the top of the list, he eventually brought the Russian oligarchs under his control and stopped the looting of the country. Or as Chatham House puts it, “Putin is using de-privatization to create a new generation of loyal oligarchs.”
What’s wrong with that? Could we not use (the threat of) some of this here in the US? If the choice is between transnational capital being in charge or the state having authority over the oligarchs, we’ve seen how option A plays out, and option B certainly seems preferable to Russian citizens.
It’s a low bar to clear. Oligarchs can still be rich; they just can’t be diabolically evil and sell out the country in their quest for billions.
In contrast, the US is emulating 1990s Russia—as Yves pointed out at the beginning of the DOGE shock therapy—as well as pursuing “shock therapy on a civilizational scale” through Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs scheme that is less about American industry than extorting better deals for US-based oligarchs in the neoliberal trade model.
Stephen Bezruchka, the author of Inequality Kills Us All: Covid-19’s Health Lessons for the World, writes that the US is condemning its citizens to the same fate that Russians experienced in the 1990s and 2000s:
The latest United Nations Human Development Report, issued last September, shows that for 2021 American length of life was behind that of 43 countries. These included all the rich ones and some not, such as Chile, Slovenia and Thailand. If we eradicated our three leading killers: heart disease, cancer and COVID-19, we would still not be the healthiest nation. It may come as a surprise to some of us that the oldest person is never found in the U.S. We are also the only rich country to have seen continued drops in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021. What is going on?
We can find clues by looking to the former Soviet Union, where life expectancy fell after the 1991 breakup…The already soaring rates of American income and wealth inequality gained steam with the pandemic and our poor response to it, which encouraged profiteering over sound public health policy. Expected increases in length of life began faltering around 2015 and are now in free fall. Will the United States follow the Russian example of continued health declines?
Americans report some of the world’s highest levels of stress. We consume about three-quarters of the world’s opioids to treat our stress-induced social pain. This leads to staggering overdose deaths in addition to the causes of death listed above.
Consider stress as the 21st-century tobacco. By creating awareness of the harms of second-hand cigarette smoke, most smokers were discouraged from their habit. Today only poorer people smoke, mostly to treat the social pain of poverty. Deaths of despair are clearly not limited to Russia and its former satellites. Can we expect to follow their pattern of continued decline? This seems likely unless we deploy the parachute of decreasing our record income and wealth gaps.
If Trump were serious about MAGA, not only would he have used the Alaska Summit to speed toward the off ramp out of the corrupt hole of death that is Ukraine, but he would have also humbly asked Putin for some advice.
Unfortunately, that’s one exchange I trust did not take place in Alaska.
Trump policies are MORE (Make Oligarchs Richer and Entitled) than MAGA.
Note that Russia’s shift was top to bottom, not the other way around. That seems nearly impossible in current US.
Russia was lucky in that Putin and his people had an intelligence background. And it has been said that real intelligence people are the ultimate realists as that is what their job demands due to the stakes involved. Not people like John Ratcliffe as they are political appointees with no intelligence background but people who worked their way up the ranks. So I would guess that Putin and his people looked at the dire situation of Russia way back then, understood the root causes of the problem, prioritized what had to be done and in what order and set to work. It sounds like a mechanical approach but the results speak for themselves. They put a leash on the oligarchs to stop the country being sold out, got rid of the foreigners embedded in the government itself, started to get out of all the onerous contracts they were forced to sign and many other measures. They did have to downgrade the military to pay for what they had to do but kept up their nuclear forces as that was vitally needed. I just do not know where the US would find an equivalent group of people and certainly you could not find them in the CIA as they are one group that needs to be leashed. So maybe in the US it will have to be a bottom up approach.