In November, the British newspaper the Guardian compared what H.L. Mencken wrote about Warren G. Harding with a contemporary portrait of Trump:
Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate who — despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together, being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs — would go on to not only win election but become one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history.
The core of Harding’s support, according to Mencken, was “small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”
Harding, however, was no Trump: The newly re-elected president has a mean, if not sadistic, streak, an exorbitant taste for revenge, a charismatic persona and, to put it mildly, a flair for publicity.
Now the question — after a frenzied week of pardons, executive orders, threatening phone calls and emergency declarations — is: Where is this man taking America?
Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard, argued in an email that Trump has returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at a time when the country’s political system is particularly vulnerable:
In its formal institutions, America remains an electoral democracy. The constitutional checks and balances on President Trump, which proved resilient during the first term in office, have obviously greatly eroded today.
This includes the weakened constraints on executive aggrandizement arising from Republican control of both houses of Congress and the majority of statehouses, the rudderless and demoralized Democratic Party, the right wing skew on the Supreme Court, the diminishing audience for legacy news media and the disarray of liberal opposition movements and institutions in civic society. Strongman leaders often erode democracy far more in their second term of office, compared with their first, when they are learning the ropes.
As a result, Norris argued, “America faces clear risks of accelerated institutional backsliding from electoral democracy into an electoral autocracy.”
Weakened institutions, democratic backsliding and a demoralized left are, for Trump, an ideal combination, giving him a kind of home-field advantage.
As Norris put it, Trump joins those politicians who
follow authoritarian beliefs and values emphasizing the importance of threats to security (the “invasion of migrants”), aggressive hostility punishing outsiders (Us-Them) who do not share group norms and moral values (the “woke” brigade), and the importance of loyalty toward the leader or leaders defending the group (‘I alone can fix it’).
In this regard, American democracy faces an existential risk from the second term of President Trump. The Trump 2.0 effect is most likely to come from accelerating changes to the cultural “vibes,” legitimating authoritarian values, norms and practices.
Trump has resumed office fully equipped to push the national government in a radically new direction. In order to get a sense of how far this might go, I asked a range of scholars to evaluate the early developments in the new administration.
Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale, wrote by email in answer to my query: “I do see this as a particularly dangerous moment for developments over previous decades that have unbridled the presidency and hollowed out the capacity of other institutions to resist it.”
Skowronek argued that in the case of Trump, “No president has come into office with more fully elaborated plans for assaulting and dislodging the institutional arrangements that anchor the old order.”
“The government Trump has taken charge of,” Skowronek continued, “has already given itself over to presidentialism. Its other actors are now woefully ill-equipped to claw back the authority needed to parry his assaults, tame his designs, and instill confidence in any new ordering.”
Skowronek’s conclusion?
We stand today doubly exposed. We are vulnerable to an office that has been puffed up by the very institutions we depend on to circumscribe it. And for that, we are vulnerable to a rhetorical construction of our circumstance that otherwise bears little resemblance to reality. Navigating this moment and negotiating a safe reset is likely to prove harder than ever before.
Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford who has written extensively about American politics, shares many of Skowronek’s concerns, describing “the mass pardoning and sentence commutation for participants in the Jan. 6 storming of Capitol Hill as most worrying.”
“The pardons and commutations,” King wrote by email,
are historically and constitutionally consistent with how the U.S. federal state has operated since the Civil War but it weakens the perception of penalties for such actions.
This certainly encourages future activists to anticipate in such presidential pardons for federal crimes and may embolden some to engage in political violence — whether Republican or Democrat.
In addition, King pointed out, that
America’s civil rights state has endured some sharp hits since Jan. 20, 2025, particularly in reversing the 1965 order by L.B.J. to end discrimination in government contracting and setting in train affirmative action programs but including a weakening of anti-discrimination actions and investigations by the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Trump begins his second term with four advantages he lacked in 2017, King wrote:
First, he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College and is therefore in a position to cite a mandate (as he did in his inaugural address) to implement his manifesto. This gives him legitimacy to govern.
Second, many of his transformative measures — tougher trade, deportations of migrants with criminal records and undocumented migrants, the cancellation of D.E.I. programs, the pardoning program, halting of foreign aid, U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and WHO, the reversion to a more politicized federal civil service, political reorientation of the Justice Department and enhancement of fossil over green energy — were signaled during his campaign, so consistent with his mandate.
Third, his institutional and political base is formidably strong. He has an ardent and devoted electoral base which will mobilize at rallies and turn out in support of his measures; a primed ideational infrastructure of funded thinkers and organizations; and institutionally the alignment of the Senate, House of Representatives and U.S. Supreme Court creates an ideal setting for the development and exercise of unitary executive power
Last, the infrastructure of intellectual forums and ideas diffusion is rapidly evolving as deeply funded social media sorts information in new ways but — so far — consistently with America’s capacious First Amendment.
As Trump made clear throughout his first week back in the Oval Office, he relishes this moment.
By their very nature, democracies are fragile and vulnerable, a point Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, elaborated on in an email focused in part on Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to justify sending military troops to the border:
One of the perilous aspects of the fact that even liberal democracies carry within them the capacity to activate a state of emergency and, with it, a temporary hypertrophy of the executive into dictatorship, is that it puts a great deal of trust in the executive to relinquish those powers when the threat has passed.
There are, Slobodian continued,
worrying indications that Trump does not see himself as bound by conventional laws or courts. A sense of total impunity and the concentration of state power in one person certainly creates the conditions for the usual push-and-pull between branches of government to harden into something more like dictatorship.
The lack of coherent opposition to Trump makes his agenda all the more threatening.
Sidney Milkis, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, wrote by email:
Trump is a legitimate threat — and so far there has indeed been tepid outcry — nothing like the strong resistance that arose in 2017. I think there are two reasons for this.
First, Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote this time — and is doing precisely what he said he would do if elected. The signs at Trump rallies — Mass Deportation Now — have a lot of support, at least in theory, including from those who are skeptical or do not like Trump but are concerned about the historical border surge that occurred during the Biden presidency.
Second, and more systematically, many Americans think the system is broken and unaccountable — they think, somewhat unfairly, that Biden was a weak president in the wake of a porous border, high inflation and high interest rates. The claim of Kamala Harris that Democrats would protect institutions in the midst of this antinomianism did not resonate. Not only the MAGA base, but many independents (including young men of color), are attracted to the idea of a strong man who promises to cut through the Gordian knot, and get things done. This view has given Trump the honeymoon he did not have in 2017.
How should Democrats deal with Trump? James Carville, the Democratic strategist, suggested one possible strategy. “He’s just going to keep plowing through,” he told MSNBC viewers. “And what we have to learn as Democrats, just let him punch himself out.”
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, did not mince words in her emailed comments:
We do not have an authoritarian form of government but we do have an emerging dictator. Many of his actions, such as eliminating birthright citizenship, firing inspector generals, and taking advantage of his election to personally cash in on his position, seem to me to be legally indefensible.
Sawhill added.
I read constantly that Trump is ignoring long-established norms. But it’s worse than that; he’s creating new ones. How can I suggest that? Because so far his norm breaking is not leading to his being sanctioned for his actions. By the time a court or a new election turns the tide, it may be too late.
Trump, Sawhill continued,
told us he would become a dictator but only on Day 1, and only on two issues. The first was the deportation of immigrants and the second was drilling for oil. What he didn’t tell us is that he would pardon all the Jan. 6 perpetrators, including those who have been convicted of violent crimes against the police.
What, to me, is most horrifying is Trump’s success in cowing most Republicans and a large and important part of the business community into accepting his actions. If our most important institutions fail to stop Trump’s dictatorial actions, the only recourse will be if the public turns against him, beginning with the midterm elections. But Trump’s almost unique ability to manipulate public opinion, and threats of retribution against those who oppose him, may make a public backlash a weak weapon in the fight for democracy.
Matthew Dallek, professor at the graduate school of political management at George Washington University, described Trump’s second presidency this way: “Donald Trump’s head-spinning first days in office bear some hallmarks of authoritarian rule, but ‘dictatorial’ seems a stretch.”
“The president has taken a maximalist approach bearing some authoritarian hallmarks,” Dalled added:
He issued a likely unconstitutional order ending birthright citizenship, commanded civil servants to report on their colleagues’ D.E.I.-related infractions, dispatched U.S. troops to patrol the southern border, fired potentially bumptious inspectors general, pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters (many of whom were convicted of beating police), and ordered investigations into alleged criminality in the Biden Justice Department.
The autocratic character of Trump’s approach, Dallek argued, is reflected in
his creation of a meme crypto coin bearing his name and netting him billions of dollars on paper and is the clearest reminder yet that his White House return will pad his wallet — using his power and status to enrich himself like authoritarians are prone to do.
The billionaire tech moguls seated on the inaugural platform also suggest that social media platforms from X to Facebook are likely to privilege Trump’s conspiracy theories and disinformation over facts and truth — another authoritarian win.
I asked Dallek what he thinks the most dangerous thing Trump has done is.
The pardons of the most violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists top the list. By freeing from jail cop-beating convicted rioters out to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, Trump condoned mob violence in the first hours of his second term. He sent a signal to supporters that, in essence, if they commit violence in Trump’s name, he is tempted to use his power to spare them punishment. Trump’s pardons outstrip any damage to the rule of law that Joe Biden’s pardons may have done.
Despite his concerns, Dallek argued that “Trump’s potential to hammer at the pillars of American democracy is real. But predictions that Trump will destroy it are premature.”
Why there has been so relatively little opposition to Trump so far?
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out that
Opposition is muted thus far because Trump is more popular than at any point in his first term. He is getting something of a honeymoon in public approval, at least by the standards of his historical polling.
In addition, many of his specific executive actions are themselves popular. Polls show that most approve of his immigration actions, his “two sexes” order and reining in D.E.I in federal agencies.
Trump, Lee wrote,
fits the mode of populist chief executives around the world. A common pattern is that they seek to concentrate executive power, undermine checks and balances, and threaten press freedoms. Trump is pushing on all these fronts.
His lawsuits against media organizations and his efforts to expand libel law are typical for populist chief executives elsewhere. His pardons of violent Jan. 6 convicts are especially disturbing. So observers are right to be vigilant against democratic erosion.
The scope of Trump’s flood tide of proposals during the first week of his administration is also, at least in part, a byproduct of polarization.
Sarah Kreps, a political scientist at Cornell, wrote by email that
What we’re seeing is the consequence of a polarized electorate for leaders who are democratically-elected but come into office and represent just the coalition that elected them.
This last week is part of a pattern that we’ve now seen over the last couple of administrations: the president comes into office and starts by revoking the predecessor’s executive orders. In Biden’s first 100 days, he revoked 31 of Trump’s 220 E.O.s, issuing his own E.O.s to override and undermine the legacy of the previous administration.
I asked Kreps the same question I posed to Lee: Why so little outcry? Kreps replied:
Compared to the first time he was elected, Trump’s election victory this time around was much broader, drawing support from a far more diverse coalition of the electorate than before. So I think there may be a sense that with a broader mandate, his actions are representing the will of a larger part of the electorate.
The re-election of Donald Trump and his aggressive assertion of executive power now that he’s back in office have left many election and public policy experts stunned, struggling to figure out what has happened to American politics.
In an email, Gordon Abner, a professor at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas, captured this discomfiting uncertainty in the face of Trump’s shock-and-awe presidency:
I think many of us are experiencing a sense of cognitive dissonance. People on both sides of the aisle at times have called him petty, unfit for office, vengeful, a danger to democracy, and a con man. His vice president, JD Vance, has referred to him as America’s Hitler in the past. Yet, JD Vance decided to be his running mate, and President Trump is our duly elected president.
Furthermore, I think we are grappling with what terms like authoritarian and dictatorial mean when that’s the governance style he ran on without using the language and he won a free and fair election. While Trump will likely get some things right during his presidency the question is will it come at the cost of our democracy and our basic civility as a nation?
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