Capitalizing on Democratic weakness, President Trump is winning his battle to undermine democracy in this country.
But he has not won the war.
A host of factors could blunt his aggression: recession, debt, corruption, inflation, epidemics, the Epstein files, anger over cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, to name just a few. Much of what Trump has done could be undone if a Democrat is elected president in 2028.
But for federal workers, for medical and scientific researchers, lawyers in politically active firms, prominent critics of Trump — thousands of whom have felt the sting of arbitrary firings, vanished paychecks and retracted grants, criminal inquiries and threatened bankruptcies — the 2028 election may prove too late to repair the damage.
And that’s before we even begin to talk about the anti-immigration crackdown.
Trump’s assaults are aimed at targets large and small, some based on personal resentments, others guided by a more coherent ideological agenda.
The brutality of Trump’s anti-democratic policies are part of a larger goal, a reflection of an administration determined to transfer trillions of dollars to the wealthy by imposing immense costs on the poor and the working class in lost access to medical care and food support, an administration that treats hungry children with the same disdain that it treats core principles of democracy.
Trump has succeeded in devastating due process protections for universities, immigrants and law firms. He has cowed the Supreme Court, which has largely failed to block Trump’s violations of the Constitution. He has bypassed Congress, ruling by executive order and emergency declaration. He is using the regulatory power of government to force the media to make humiliating concessions. He has ordered criminal investigations of political adversaries. He has fired innumerable government employees who pursued past investigations — and on and on.
He has moved with determination toward the destabilization of American democracy.
“Our institutions are not acting as if American democracy is under threat,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, contended in an email. It has become routine, Moynihan wrote,
for Trump to fire people in independent agencies or civil servants, or to impound funds and even close agencies. All of these things were widely assumed to be illegal. While the courts are not making definitive rulings on such powers, they are allowing Trump to exercise them. Maybe they will clip Trump’s wings later, but in the meantime enormous damage will be done and undoing that damage will be extraordinarily difficult. For example, ending USAID without Congressional action is illegal, but it is happening, and millions will die as a result.
Many Democrats and liberals have been banking on economic forces to press Trump to back down, but the administration is not paying the price many on the left and center expected to emerge in response to his tariffs and the immense expansion of the national debt resulting from his “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Instead, the economy remains strong: unemployment is at 4.1 percent; the stock market has reached record highs; the rate of inflation increased by a modest 0.1 percent from April to May for an annual 2.4 percent rate.
“I am worried Trump is seemingly wearing down the opposition,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email in response to my queries about Trump’s successes and failures. “His political position is objectively weaker — he’s a lame duck who is more unpopular than he was at this point in his first term — but he’s using the powers of the presidency more effectively in pursuit of his authoritarian goals.”
Trump, Nyhan argued,
is pushing the boundaries of his institutional powers in ways that are less likely to catalyze opposition, especially as they become more familiar. I am most concerned about the direction of the Supreme Court. The lower courts have held up well in challenging the administration, but the nationwide injunction decision (among others) suggests that SCOTUS is becoming a key enabler.
Nyhan is one of four directors of the Bright Line Watch report, which tracks support for democracy using surveys of both 760 political scientists as well as of 2,000 voters. The most recent report, “Threats to Democracy and Academic Freedom After Trump’s Second First 100 Days,” is based on data collected in late April 2025. It found that from late 2024 to April 2025, “overall ratings of American democracy dropped significantly among every group surveyed — academic experts, the public overall, and Republican and Democratic members of the public.”
From September 2024, two months before the election, to April 2025, with Trump in the White House for three months, the Bright Line surveys showed an 8-point drop, 57 to 49, in the public ratings of democracy in the United States and a sharper, 17-point decline, 70 to 53, among the political scientists.
Instead of authoritarianism, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, has coined two phrases to describe the Trump agenda:
Trump’s immediate goal is better described as creating a governing system I call “competitive sycophancy” where all power centers inside and beyond the federal government are run by competing sets of people vying to flatter him and manipulate resources and rules to his personal and family advantage. They do one extreme thing after another, try to outdo each other, and he chooses who to back, with shifts and chaos and unpredictability week after week.
“Patrimonial corruption” is the only through-line result, along with sheer inefficiency and incompetence at key institutional and public-regarding tasks.
Trump, in Skocpol’s assessment, has so far been successful:
Thanks to the fawning of the G.O.P. and of most elite-run U.S. institutions, he already basically has this system in place. One part of it that is a possible route to pure coercive authoritarianism is the new ICE-centered private army run without limits by Stephen Miller — and there will be constant efforts to push that into a centralizing and terrifying threat against all political opposition.
But, Skocpol contended, “we are not there yet”:
We need to stop proclaiming how smart and victorious Trump has proved to be. The real issue is how ineffective and opportunist U.S. elites in general are proving to be, each sector and institution trying to protect its own narrow interests to the detriment of any longer terms interests, their own or the nation’s.
If Trump’s “sheer incompetence and corruption” result in economic or natural disaster, the one advantage Trump critics have, Skocpol wrote, is that
Trump owns it all now, that is the silver lining in all of this. Let him get all the blame for the messes that will unfold, let his childish efforts to shift blame look more and more desperate, silly and weak. Weak is the key.
There are a number of experts on the study of democracy who argue that Trump has succeeded in turning the United States into what they call a “competitive authoritarian” state.
Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, wrote by email:
When Trump was elected in 2024, I was confident that the United States would become competitive authoritarian. But I did not expect this transition to occur so quickly or easily or with this little resistance by those with the power to fight back.
The strength of American democracy has been revealed to be something akin to the power of the Wizard of Oz: seemingly all powerful but in fact much weaker than almost anyone imagined.
In an essay in the Opinion section of The Times written with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both political scientists at Harvard, Way asks and answers the question: “How can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government.”
These costs can run the gamut:
Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.
When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.
By that standard, Way, who is an American citizen, wrote,
We no longer live in a liberal democracy. We live in a competitive authoritarian regime. Yes, there are elections and yes, the constitutional order has not been explicitly overthrown. However, the costs of opposing the government have increased.
Ziblatt, Way’s coauthor, was more outspoken in an email:
There is no question that American democracy faces its most severe test in my lifetime. The scale, scope and speed of the onslaught within the first year (of Trump’s second term in office) is like nothing I have seen among the similar recent cases of democratic backsliding that I have researched — Hungary, Turkey, Poland or India. The degree of lawlessness of America’s current democratic decay is particularly striking.
Ziblatt argued, however, that all is not lost:
American civil society possess the civic resources to confront this challenge. America’s vast civic infrastructure includes labor unions, religious organizations, business, universities, the nonprofit sector, not to mention an opposition party that is better organized and more well-financed than opposition parties in other 21st century cases of democratic backsliding.
Yet, I worry. The question is not whether these groups exist but rather whether civic leaders will develop the courage to work collaboratively and effectively to reverse America’s authoritarian turn.
In a reflection of the uncertainty surrounding the future of American democracy, Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton, wrote: “Trump is already far along toward establishing an autocracy in America, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is totally lost.”
Scheppele voiced particular concern over
the militarization of immigration controls, which also includes militarization of responses to protest, and is another very serious indicator of democracy in danger. So is the universal surveillance regime growing out of the DOGE access to personal data that is already becoming entrenched.
Scheppele concluded her email: “Yes, the U.S. is barreling toward autocracy. But democracy isn’t done yet.”
In an essay in The New Republic, “What if the Pendulum Doesn’t Swing Back?” Michael Brenes, a lecturer in history at Yale, suggests that the election of Trump last year and the aggressive policies he has adopted in office signal that “a new age of conservative ideology is here, and it is not just illiberal and revanchist but repressive and hostile to the idea of natural rights drawn from the Enlightenment.”
In the past, Brenes writes, “cutting federal programs to the predominant benefit of the rich” had “dire political consequences,” often restoring liberals to power. But, Brenes asks, “what happens when large numbers of Americans are indifferent to that suffering? Or seek to exacerbate it?”
In an email, Brenes warned that “Trump is winning” by profiting
from the Democrats’ inability to put their house in order. They have no party leader, their coalition is fractured, and they have no long-term strategy. Even if Democrats win the Senate and the House in 2026, Trump is unlikely to let that stop him from continuing his policies.
Trump will enact executive orders, claiming executive privilege or national security concerns, particularly on immigration. Donald Trump has proved that he is willing to invoke wartime measures to justify executive power in peacetime. Invoking the Insurrection Act, claiming that the U.S. is being invaded on its southern border, his interest in suspending habeas corpus, are just a few examples.
Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, agreed that “there has been significant democratic backsliding under Trump,” but argued that “Trump is still far from establishing autocratic governance, and the declarations of Levitsky & Co. that the United States has already descended into competitive authoritarianism are premature, exaggerated and arguably counterproductive.”
Trump, Weyland contended,
has brought reductions in the quality of U.S. democracy. But U.S. democracy has survived, in my view; it is not about to sink into authoritarianism, far from it. There has been a corrosion of the rule of law, but the core of democracy — freedom of political action, electoral competitiveness, free and fair elections — have clearly persisted.
Weyland voiced his faith in the Supreme Court which, he contended, “will defend the rule of law, the constitutions, etc., against Trump’s arbitrariness.“
Others do not share Weyland’s confidence in the court. The evidence so far suggests that the court is more on Trump’s side than arrayed in opposition.
In a July 10 Substack posting, Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described “The Appeasement Thesis,” the dangerous logic some are using to legitimate Supreme Court decisions to grant the Trump administration 16 “straight requests for emergency relief.”
One group of legal scholars, Vladeck writes, argues “that the court is letting the president win these ‘small’ fights in the hope that it will either moot the need for big fights down the road or, at the very least, arm the court with a larger reservoir of good will and capital to spend when those big fights come.”
Vladeck sees three problems with this line of reasoning:
First, these aren’t one-off disputes; they’re a flood of cases. As opposed to letting the president or Congress get away with one maneuver in one case, the net effect of the Court’s 16 interventions in favor of Trump to date has been to greenlight a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch.
Second, and as a result, the Court’s interventions are causing an enormous amount of real-world harm — whether with respect to over a million individuals losing their previous immigration status; countless migrants being removed to third countries; federal employees being fired; grants being canceled; or otherwise.
Third, and most importantly, whereas the Court’s appeasement in prior episodes helped to defuse constitutional crises, the behavior here only enables continued bad behavior by the executive branch — both at the policy level and with regard to defying adverse lower-court rulings.
Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford, goes further than Vladeck, making the case in “How to Dismantle a Democracy, Legally,” posted July 9 on his Substack, that the Supreme Court has become a crucial enabler of Trump’s autocratic agenda.
According to Bonica, there are two key elements in the Supreme Court’s empowerment of the Trump administration.
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The conservative majority’s support of the unitary executive theory of presidential power which, Bonica writes, “asserts that the Constitution’s Article II gives the president total, unchallengeable control over the entire executive branch.”
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And the 2024 decision in Trump v. United States granting the president “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
The most dangerous step, Bonica writes,
is the fusion of the unitary executive theory (U.E.T.) with presidential immunity. This creates a toxic, autocratic feedback loop. U.E.T. gives the president the sword: total control over the Justice Department. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling provides the shield: defining any use of that control — such as ordering the DOJ to prosecute a rival or drop a case against an ally — as an “official act” protected from criminal prosecution.
There is one clear consequence of Trump’s second term in the White House, one that will have real consequences for millions of Americans: He will leave behind a legacy of wreckage. Trump will have demonstrated the weaknesses of American democracy when it is confronted by a malignant, amoral chief executive.
The possible Republican successors — including, among many others, JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Glenn Youngkin — have been Trump cheerleaders, showing no signs of dissent or criticism of his approach to governing. All are likely, if not certain, to campaign on the promise of continuing Trump’s agenda.
“Talented and ambitious presidents,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, writes in “Presidential Government,” which published in 2016, before Trump beat Hillary Clinton and took office, “have pushed the boundaries of the office, adding new powers that were seldom surrendered by their successors,” adding that “every time Congress legislates, it empowers the president to do something, thereby contributing, albeit inadvertently, to the onward march of executive authority.”
If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, there is no guarantee he or she will fully abandon Trump’s approach. In the case of executive authority, a broken precedent is hard to repair. For politicians of all stripes, power is habit-forming and the appeal of exercising it will be very strong.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
The post When It Comes to Undermining America, We Have a Winner appeared first on New York Times.
