Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump placed his hand on the Bible and completed an extraordinary return to power, many historians, scholars and experts say his presidency has pushed American democracy to the brink – or beyond it.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, the democratically elected US president has moved with startling speed to consolidate authority: dismantling federal agencies, purging the civil service, firing independent watchdogs, sidelining Congress, challenging judicial rulings, deploying federal force in blue cities, stifling dissent, persecuting political enemies, targeting immigrants, scapegoating marginalized groups, ordering the capture of a foreign leader, leveraging the presidency for profit, trampling academic freedom and escalating attacks on the news media.
The scale and velocity of what he has been able to accomplish in just a year have stunned even longtime observers of authoritarian regimes, pushing the debate among academics and Americans from whether the world’s oldest continuous democracy is backsliding to whether it can still faithfully claim that distinction.
“In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the prominent Harvard political scientists and authors of How Democracies Die, and the University of Toronto professor Lucan Way, wrote in Foreign Affairs last month. They argued that the US under Trump had “descended into competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections are held but the ruling party abuses power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favor.
It’s a throw back to 2014 and the BLM protests.
Easy to forget the time two journalists working for the WaPo were covering a protest in Ferguson, shooting footage from the inside of a McDonalds. The police saw the cameras and sent in officers in full riot gear to tackle the reporters and arrest them. No reason for it save that these were liberal reports filming a gestapo raid on civil rights marchers.
This was under Obama in a city with a Democratic Mayor that was fully in the thrall of a police-instigated terror campaign. The events surrounding Ferguson opened up a whole pocket of inquiry into why this branch off of the Greater St. Louis area with an enormous minority population was operating as some kind of colonized satrap of St. Louis proper - no control of their own police, no control of their own budget, an absurd rate of citations and arrests per capita, abysmal voter turnout in large part thanks to felony disenfranchisement, bad education, poor civil maintenance, and endemic inter-generational poverty.
If you want to talk about the state of American Democracy, you have to start talking about Ferguson, MO and how it is increasingly the benchmark for how civil society operates in this country.
You also have to start talking about The Network State and the Silicon Valley vision for American anarcho-capitalism.
Democrats don’t identify with “the left,” or with reform. They are the establishment, they are also generally crooked in ways that would make local officials vulnerable to police if they checked them, even if they wanted to, their corruption could be exposed. All blue cities have pretty fascistic police leadership. Ie portland was sharing intelligence and covering for the proud boys and their ilk in the first term of doh fuhrer there. Berkely had a rw crazy stab a handful of protesters, the cops arrested the stabbed and not the staber. It’s not a one off.
We need all new leadership, these democrats are cynical rich, aristocrats, and they would be republicans if that was the party in power. They clearly are not doing an acceptable job unless one listens to and trusts the suits on tv, in which case one would be a fucking moron.
That is not really unusual for the US, things like that have been going on long before 2014.
How many women got shot dead in broad daylight, by a thug who was immediately declared innocent of all wrongdoing, in the BLM protests? This time is different.
29-Year-Old Protest Leader Found Dead in Burning Car in St. Louis
On November 22, 2014, Tamir E. Rice, a twelve year old African-American boy, was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old white patrolman with the Cleveland Division of Police (CDP).
Sandra Annette Bland was a 28-year-old African-American woman who was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, on July 13, 2015, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop.
Vanishingly few people are allowed to remember this. I wonder if Renee Good will also fall down the mental rabbit hole.
It’s worse because it has been 11 years since Ferguson. This is how civil rights and government standards are eroded. You have a chip (two journalists being arrested and brutalized in 2014 filming a protest) and when it goes unpunished, it gets repeated across the nation until it becomes the norm.
Similar chips happened during the BLM protests, which were themselves a crackdown to the murder of black citizens in broad daylight by police. I recall watching a news reporter shot while broadcasting on TV at night during a 2021 BLM protest. The same happened to reporters in Los Angeles in 2025. Then we saw bystanders in LA being shot in the head. Then Renee Good was shot in the head her car.
It all builds on itself, as government gets increasingly confident in their strength and the passivity of its population. None of this is new; it’s just expanding.