Trump white-ants US democracy and opens a values gap with allies
Published: 06 April 2025-
Liam Gammon
The Australian National University
The United States is moving dangerously close to authoritarianism as the second Trump administration shows no regard for law, democratic processes or political freedoms. The slow erosion of democratic norms and institutions indicates the United States is undergoing a process known as 'democratic backsliding'. In response, US relations with liberal democracies are being reshaped with a shift from relations based on shared values to shared interests.
Alarm about the prospects of the United States going authoritarian over the course of Trump’s second term is escalating as his administration defies laws, court rulings and the US constitution itself to enact its radical right-wing policy agenda, while undermining and intimidating institutional bases of opposition in academia, the press and the legal fraternity.
What Trump is doing to US democracy is shocking and historically unprecedented — but there is nothing novel in how he is doing it.
The United States is an unlikely participant in a global trend of ‘democratic backsliding’ — the gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions by elected incumbents. In a worst-case scenario, this process terminates in the effective collapse of democracy and the rise of ‘competitive authoritarianism’, a regime in which contested elections and tolerance of dissent belies the fact that oppositions are effectively locked out of power by an incumbent manipulating the playing field in their own favour.
The substantial diminishment or the end of US democracy would be a world-historical event — no democracy as wealthy or previously well-consolidated has ever collapsed.
It is a sobering reality that every rich, well-consolidated liberal democracy is home to substantial minorities of voters who are open to authoritarian or illiberal politics. The United States is not unique in this regard, and leaders in other democracies need to be clear-eyed about the fact that the norms that sustain liberal democracy are not universally embraced among their electorates.
But the political implications of these pockets of illiberalism are not uniform across countries — institutional set-ups have a huge role in determining whether populist authoritarians are incentivised to appeal to their constituency for illiberal rule, and whether they have viable pathways to capturing authoritarian control of government.
The United States is in its present crisis in no small part because its political institutions make it more structurally susceptible to populist capture of government than other Western democracies. Its parties, thanks to their free-for-all presidential primaries and weak organisational wings, are on paper (and in the case of the Republicans, in reality) prone to being hijacked by charismatic outsiders. A rigid two-party system created by an unrepresentative, winner-take-all electoral system reinforces partisan and ideological polarisation. That in turn helps to lock in a mainstream party’s supporter base behind those outsiders once a general election rolls around.
So while nobody can yet declare US democracy obsolescent, nobody can say for sure that the country will be a democracy by the time Trump’s term is up. Opponents may be reassured that his administration’s incompetence and corruption, and the economic harm done by his trade policies, will continue to weigh on his unpopularity and tee up a victory for the Democrats first in the 2026 congressional midterm elections, or in the 2028 presidential elections (which Trump now muses about contesting).
That outcome would not restore US democracy to the pre-Trump status quo ante. Assuming that MAGA-style populism is now the Republican Party’s stock in trade, and elections remain competitive, we could see the entrenchment of what is called ‘democratic careening’ — an unstable cycle in which alternation in power between liberals and populists allows neither liberal democracy nor outright autocracy to decisively prevail.
What does, or should, the present crisis of US democracy change about how the liberal democracies in our region relate to the United States, and how they manage their relationships with Washington?
This question will weigh heavily on governments like those in Australia and Japan that have increasingly leaned into the language of ‘shared values’ as being the underpinnings of their alliances with the United States.
Amid the incipient crisis of US liberal democracy, and the Trump administration’s sabotage of the liberal international order it once led, that kind of rhetoric is becoming less and less tenable in Asia, just as it has in Europe or Canada. In any case, the autocratic and illiberal-democratic regimes that predominate in our region have always seen such talk as disingenuous window-dressing for cooperation among loose coalitions of states who share a common interest in diluting Chinese military and economic power.
There are signs of a newly pragmatic note in Japan–US rhetoric. The Trump–Ishiba bilateral meeting in February 2025 yielded a statement that made no mention of democracy, human rights or the rule of law — prominent refrains in previous Japan–US rhetoric. In Australia, politicians from the incumbent Labor Party have for some time recognised the need for an update along similar lines.
The retirement of the rhetoric of shared values, and its replacement by a language of interests, fulfils two goals. First, it conveys the reality that US–China competition, and the rest of Asia’s stake in it, is inevitably dictated more by differing visions for international politics than the domestic political colour of the protagonists. Second, framing the relationship with Washington in terms of interests sets a better framework for an overdue conversation about the extent to which those interests are still aligned, on critical questions of international order and economics, as the post-‘Liberation Day’ world comes into focus.
Liam Gammon is a Research Fellow of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research at The Australian National University.
EAF | United States | Trump white-ants US democracy and opens a values gap with allies