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Is American Democracy Dying?
Trump 1:0 and Trump 2.0 are very different--and not in a good way.
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Friends,
In conversations centering on politics these days, people wonder whether American democracy will survive another four years of Donald Trump. They even talk about moving to, say, Canada or Portugal. Some of you may have participated in alarm-filled discussions like these. I have. They may be over-the-top: I have no basis to judge—yet. What I do find striking is that they are occurring at all. I doubt that anyone who is reading this post and has followed American politics closely for many years ever imagined that questions like this would come up in serious conversations among well-informed people. And yet, here we are.
How did things get to this point, and where are we headed? The immediate, not unreasonable, impulse might be dwell on Trump’s reelection. It has certainly made a big difference, and in ways more far-reaching than during his first term (more on this comparison later). Still, blaming Trump alone is too easy. It doesn’t explain how someone like him got elected—twice—to begin with. Trump’s rise to power isn’t akin to the immaculate conception; his two electoral victories reflect political and economic dissatisfaction—in various forms—that has been brewing for years.
Consider two examples. First, voters have complained for years now that the American system of government isn’t working as it should and that, to the extent that it does work, the main beneficiaries are the rich and powerful. A moving average of polls in a recent Pew Research Center reportreveals a steady decline in the public’s trust in government between 2000 and 2024—from 54% to 22%. (The latter figure was the lowest on record since 1960.) According to another Pew study, in 2020, 70% of adults opined that the economic system “unfairly favors the powerful interests.” The lower the household income, the stronger this sentiment.
Whatever one’s view of Trump, he crafted a narrative that addressed this discontent head-on. He provided simple, even if simplistic and often false, explanations for why things are as bad as they are—and why he alone could set them right, or, as he proclaimed, “I alone can fix it.” His success is all the more remarkable because he has convinced millions of working-class voters, who had reliably voted for Democrats for decades, that they could trust him to be their savior, never mind that he, one of the nation’s super-rich (net worth: $5.1 billion), personifies the elite-rigged status quo people bemoan in polls.
What’s more, Trump has expressed disdain for poor people and, as a New York real estate mogul, was infamous for refusing to pay contractors for the work they’d done. As for Trump’s populism, his 2017 tax law, which included $1.9 trillion in personal and corporate income tax cuts over 10 years, overwhelming favored the country’s wealthiest 5%. His current plan to extend those cuts—they expire this year—would deepen inequity. The tax reductions favored by Trump and the GOP could add $9 trillion to the budget deficit by 2034. It’s a safe bet that any spending cuts and tax increases enacted to reduce the deficit won’t come at the expense of the wealthiest Americans: albeit indirectly, they helped write our loophole-laden tax code.
Seen thus, Trump—the plutocrat in populist clothing—has been a masterful politician, and it’s a big mistake to dismiss him as a dunce, as many tend to do. He sensed intuitively the depth of public disaffection, knew which buttons to push to mobilize it, scripted a storyline that explained the roots of the problems that have made people so dissatisfied, and offered solutions, using social media adeptly. Though Trump’s record shows that he hasn’t delivered substantial economic gains to his base, he has compensated for that with rhetoric laced with red-blooded nationalism, tough-guy talk, and promises to return the country to a mythic past and retake it back from those who’ve ruined it. The MAGA mantra was chosen with care.
It won’t do to explain Trump’s success by dismissing his supporters as know-nothings, something that’s common. They’re justifiably angry at a political system that they believe is beyond their control and has failed them. And along comes Trump, a self-proclaimed system breaker—one with short list of those responsible for betraying average Americans.
Two other things worked to Trump’s advantage. First, a glance at any map depicting the red-blue divide will show that the rules of the Electoral College helped him—a lot. He lost the popular vote by 2.1% in 2016 and won by only 1.5% in 2024, but in the former and latter year he won the Electoral College vote, handily. Second, liberals’ wholesale embrace of identity politics and rejection of (Bernie Sanders-style) class-based politics provided Trump a punching bag because globalization, especially competition from cheaper imports the “outsourcing” of production, had taken a big toll on traditional working class jobs. Much of Trump’s fulminations against DEI—to take an example—were racist dog whistles designed to stoke the anger of white voters, notably working-class men; but his rhetoric hit home. More generally, Trump took aim what he depicted as a deracinated, unpatriotic, out-of-touch elite, focusing in particular on the media and academia. His “they” don’t care about you refrain rang true to millions of voters, something that conversations with Trump supporters make clear. The 2024 election results showed that Trump’s populism didn’t resonate with white voters alone. He did substantially better with African-Americans and Latinos, as well as women and voters under 30, than he had in 2016. (This said, Trump has his own, more toxic, version of identity politics.)
This quick sketch of how we got to the present sets the stage for discussing the degree to which our democracy is now at risk. The threat seems much greater than it was in Trump’s first term. Trump 1.0 and 2.0 are qualitatively different in several respects:
· THE NO GUARDRAILS PRESIDENCY: This time around, Trump and those in his inner circle believe that presidential power is all but unlimited. As the President put it, “He who saves his country does not violate and Law.” This view of politics explains Trump’s avalanche of Executive Orders (100 so far: about one each day and more twice as many as Biden had signed two months into his presidency), his move to invalidate, or at least radically redefine, birthright citizenship (the 14th Amendment) by fiat, and his repeated statements that there are ways to skirt the constitutional ban (the 22nd Amendment) on a third presidential term. Add to this list the masked government agents who now arrive in unmarked vehicles, refuse to identify themselves, snatch up of people who have not charged with any wrongdoing, and whisk them away to distant detention centers—all of which New York Times columnist Masha Gessen finds eerily similar to the Soviet Union of her youth, a country I studied (and visited) from the mid-1970s until its collapse in 1991.
This belief that the President’s power is essentially boundless doesn’t stem solely from Trump’s outsize ego. It reflects a theory of the law. Vice-President JD Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, mind you, has offered a legal justification for unbridled executive power, citing none other than the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, famous for his assertion that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” meaning that the supreme leader can rightly claim exemption from the rule of law—or, as Vance put it, before he’d been picked as Trump’s running mate, “[T]here’s no law, just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.” No president has ever claimed such political leeway. We are in uncharted waters.
· TRUMP OWNS THE GOP: Trump’s view of presidential power is all the more dangerous because the Republican Party has been reduced to a cult that does the leader’s bidding, no matter what he asks, and without question. This is not your parents’, and certainly not your grandparents’, GOP. Here’s an example of how radically the party has changed. During the Watergate hearings—Nixon’s misdeeds were a traffic ticket compared to what Trump is now doing—a Senator posed a question to White House counsel John Dean: “What did the President know, and when did he know it.” It was asked by Howard Baker, a Republican from Tennessee and proved to be a turning point. Baker he was by no means the only GOP Senator to break with Nixon. Back then, and until quite recently, the Republican Party had other Senators, like Mark Hatfield, Edward Brooke, and Nelson Rockefeller, who worked with conservatives Democrats in a spirit of bipartisanship. The same was true in the House. Today’s GOP lacks any such people, and those who might have fit the bill have either left politics or would never be able to run for any office as Republicans. Unsurprisingly, nothing Trump has done so far has produced even mild criticism from any Republican in Congress. We have never seen anything remotely resembling the GOP as it is today. Here, too, we are in uncharted waters.
· BLIND OBEDIENCE TRUMPS COMPETENCE: The Trump 2.0 administration, unlike its predecessor, lacks top-level officials who have the experience and competence needed for the positions to which they have been appointed—with fulsome GOP support during the Senate’s confirmation process. They have gotten their jobs because of their reflexive loyalty to Trump: Pete Hegseth (Defense Secretary), Kash Patel (FBI Director), Pam Bondi (Attorney-General) and Steve Witkoff (nominally Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East as well as to Russia and Putin, in practice arguably more influential than Secretary of State Marco Rubio). Some were once critics of Trump—notably Vance who in bygone days calledhim “America’s Hitler,” “a moral disaster,” and “a cynical asshole”—but they having been working overtime to prove that they are unsurpassed as Trump loyalists and admirers. Consequently, there will be no shortage of incompetence during Trump 2.0, an early sign being the Signal snafu involving sensitive national security information. Worse, the ceaseless competition to flatter Trump ensures that no one in his cabinet will question steps he’s contemplating, even if they could prove illegal or, on the foreign policy front, even perilous.
· THE COURTS MAY NOT SAVE US: Trump, along with senior administration officials, has vilified judges who dare to raise legal objections to his Executive Orders. He called one of them “a Radical Left Lunatic” who deserved to be impeached. This hitherto unimaginable attack from a president earned Trump a (delicate) rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Speaking of the Supreme Court, the Trump Justice Department has been urging it to overrule lower-court judges’ decisions against Trump’s decrees—and well before a SCOTUS review was even due. Trump is quite capable of ignoring lower courts’ rulings, and indeed already has. For example, the administration ignored a federal judge’s order to stop the deportation of Venezuelans migrants to El Salvador—whose prisons are notorious for their cruelty—without due process. And it relied on an outlandishreading of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act (which can be used only when the United States faces “a declared war” or “an invasion or predatory incursion”) to justify summary deportations. The big question is whether Trump will disregard SCOTUS decisions as well. Here, too, we are in unchartered waters.
· POWERFUL PARTS OF CIVIL SOCIETY HAVE GONE WOBBLY: In the face of Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, important parts of American civil society have proved pusillanimous. Take universities. They have not banded together to mount legal challenges to the President’s improper application of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and violation of the First Amendment) to deny them federal research funds, for supposedly allowing anti-Semitism to run amok. Instead, acting individually, they have bent the knee, none more cravenly than Columbia, allowing the Trump to pick them off one-by-one.
Many of the nation’s biggest law firms, including Kirland Ellis, Paul Weiss, and Wilkie Farr acceded to Trump’s demand for free legal representation to advance the MAGA agenda. They in effect ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars for fear that a refusal or court challenge would result in their wealthiest clients losing federal contracts—and, in anticipation of such punishment, defecting to other law firms. When one leading firm, Perkins Coie, struck a defiant note, not one of Big Law’s top 20 rallied to its support, and only three of the largest 100 offered unqualified backing.
Likewise, the biggest corporations—Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Ford, and General Motors, among others curried favor by making massive donations to the President’s inauguration. The total take: over $200 million. Compared that to Biden’s $62 million and the $107 million Trump received in 2017. Plus, corporations that had prided themselves on their diversity programs lost no time cutting, even ditching, them to appease Trump.
The media, by contrast, has proven stronger. Paramount, owner of CBS, seemed ready to settle the $20 billion lawsuit Trump filed claiming that the program “60 Minutes” had unfairly edited its interview with Kamala Harris, but then decide to resist. The Associated Press has been banned for more than 40 days now from White House press briefings for refusing to comply with Trump’s January 20 Executive Order requiring that the Gulf of Mexico be referred to henceforth as the Gulf of America. The AP hasn’t budged; it has appealed to the courts for redress. By contrast, the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, ordered the paper to break its decades-long tradition by not endorsing a presidential candidate in 2024.
So, are we witnessing American democracy’s demise? I don’t know, and I doubt that anyone can say yes or no with credible confidence. But my gut instinct is that we will eventually—and during Trump’s current term—see countervailing political forces emerge and gain strength. Already, voters in red districts that Trump won overwhelmingly have been yelling at their Congressional representatives. Trump’s poll numbers on the economy are at 40% or below. Vance’s approval ratings are lower than any Vice-President’s since polling became common.
Among Trump’s strongest supporters are working-class voters, people of modest means, so his poll numbers will likely drop if unemployment rises, and especially if prices do as well, producing “stagflation.” The slashing of the federal government’s workforce by Elon Musk’s DOGE could disrupt basic services, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In the abstract, the Trump-Musk demonizing of “big government” may appeal to MAGA voters, but things will be different when the spending cuts and personnel reductions delay or diminish benefits they rely on—for instance Medicaid, which serves 72 million people, all of whom have household incomes less than $50,000 a year. In 2024, Trump did especially well with voters who earn less than that amount. Half of them voted for him, a much higher proportion than did in 2016—but only 35% support cutting Medicaid spending.
These same voters will be hit the hardest by the huge tariff hikes Trump announced on April 2. For example, a tariff increase that averages out to 20% and provokes retaliation from the countries hit by it would reduce the income of households in the bottom 20% by 5.5% compared to 2.1% for those in the top decile. That’s hardly surprising. People at the lower rungs of the ladder spend more on day-to-day needs, as proportion of total income, than those at or near the top.