A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on February 2, 2026. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto.

The unjust and brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good—a middle-class white woman—by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis in early January occurred less than a mile away from where George Floyd—a poor black man—was unjustly and brutally murdered by a local police officer five years earlier. I wonder if the horrible parallel that connects them, in terms of geography and civic violence, is just a coincidence or whether the physical proximity of the murders betrays a fundamental shift toward a rupture in the collective fabric occurring between May 25, 2020 (during Trump’s first term) and January 8, 2026 (during his second term), in a residential neighborhood south of Minneapolis, between 3757 Chicago Avenue (where Floyd was killed) and 3331 Portland Avenue (where Good was killed). 

I’m talking about the rupture of a civilizing thread—historic events, like the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by pro-Trump rioters.

I’m not saying there is some obvious pattern in the link between these two parallel events. But ever since Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I’ve been making comparisons to the past, wondering if we’re experiencing the worst years of our life as a nation. Have the pervasive resentment and social demoralization that characterize our cursed era—embodied by the grotesque reign of our mad king—reached the point of surpassing the worst upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, when we experienced one shock after another, with bodies piling up at the four corners of the continent, not to mention those amassing in Vietnam?

Will the rise of Trump and the Minneapolis martyrs bring about a similar shift? The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is often cited as a national turning point that marked the precipitous fall of the sacred American experiment—a kind of end of innocence. The young king turned away from paradise and cast into an uncivilized abyss. I have always considered this idea absurd. If America can still consider itself “innocent” after World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima, then there is no such thing as historical meaning.

On the other hand, four events in 1968 might have acted as decisive turns for the worst. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the riots it triggered. The assassination of JFK’s younger brother, Robert. And the police attack against anti-war protesters in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. I remember the demoralization—dread, even—that shook segments of the population. The general sense of despair and national depression was reinforced by numerous deaths and hateful rhetoric from political figures like the racist governor George Wallace.

More than 2,600 American soldiers were killed within two days in the North Vietnamese army’s ambush during the Tet holiday. King and Kennedy were gunned down and at least forty-three people died in the riots that erupted after King’s death in Memphis. And then came the order from the then mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail,” and “to shoot anyone looting stores in our city.” 

I’ll never forget the devastating retort to this pro-Trump rhetoric from “the boss” of the second city. As Chicago police clubbed anti-war protesters in a public park, in full view of television networks, in the hall where the Democrats were choosing their next presidential candidate, senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley, standing in front of Ribicoff, rebuked him, but Ribicoff persisted, saying, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”

This did not keep much of America from continuing to deny the truth about Vietnam. Ribicoff and others who supported peace were outnumbered by the Democratic party bigwigs (with Lyndon Johnson insisting on nominating Hubert Humphrey to the presidency). Unsurprisingly, his choice led to the election of Richard Nixon (a hidden hawk) in November 1968. Also unsurprisingly, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four young people protesting Nixon’s order to invade Cambodia. 

Of course, the Nixon-Johnson era caused far more American injuries and deaths (not even counting the millions of victims abroad) than the Trump era so far. In that sense, it’s easy to say that those days were the “worst.”

But the cynical politics of my youth—the enormous lie that was the war in Vietnam foremost among them—were counterbalanced by a genuinely moral, honest, and ethical movement (Ribicoff spoke on behalf of the famous antiwar senators, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy). Today, Democratic party leaders parade their opposition to some new Trump indictment and deliver bland, inarticulate speeches in the face of the president’s immorality and illegal conduct. Ironically, Joe Rogan, the usually pro-Trump right-wing podcaster, was the one who took up Ribicoff’s voice and spirit after Renee Good was killed protesting the arbitrary arrest of undocumented immigrants, saying, “Are we really going to be the Gestapo?”

Both Johnson and Nixon eventually paid the price for their cynicism. But Trump seems to be getting away with murder every day he remains in power. And that is why we may feel that we are indeed experiencing the worst years of our life as a republic.