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.
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.