By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Can Reverse Democratic Decline?

When Donald Trump won reelection in November 2024, much of the American establishment responded with a shrug. After all, Trump had been democratically elected, even winning the popular vote. And democracy had survived the chaos of his first term, including the shocking events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Surely, then, it would survive a second Trump presidency.

That was not the case. In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism, a system in which parties compete in elections, but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.

The game, however, is far from up. The fact that the United States has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism does not mean that its democratic decline has reached a point of no return. Trump’s authoritarian offensive is now unmistakable, but it is reversible.

Two things can be true at once. First, Americans face an authoritarian government. In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies. Second, as the Democratic Party’s success in the November 2025 elections shows, multiple channels remain through which opposition forces can contest, and potentially defeat, Trump’s increasingly authoritarian government. Indeed, the existence of avenues for contestation is in the very nature of competitive authoritarianism.

Reversing the United States’ slide into authoritarianism will require democracy’s defenders to recognize the twin dangers of complacency and fatalism. On the one hand, underestimating the threat posed to democracy, believing that the Trump administration’s behavior is simply politics as usual, enables authoritarianism by encouraging inaction in the face of systematic abuse of power. On the other hand, overestimating the impact of authoritarianism—believing the country has reached a point of no return- discourages the citizen actions required to defeat autocrats at the ballot box. Here are 

1. Putting the military on US soil

If there’s one Trump inclination that most concerned top military and defense officials in his first term, it might have been his desire to dispatch troops on US soil.

2. Tariffs

The courts are still sorting through whether he’s exceeded his authority, with the US Court of International Trade initially ruling that he had. But perhaps more than any other issue, this is the one on which Trump has neutered Congress and run the country like an all-powerful executive.

3. Investigations of his opponents

The Trump administration has already launched investigations or taken investigative steps against key figures in four high-profile efforts to scrutinize Trump: the Russia investigation, his first impeachment, the January 6, 2021, investigations, and his personal criminal and civil cases.

The retributive nature of these efforts is only reinforced by the fact that Trump has personally pushed for many of these probes – a break with longstanding practice.

4. MAGA-fying the government’s independent functions

While it might seem relatively small-bore, Trump’s maneuvers with BLS could have large-scale implications.

Again, it’s about the message it sends to others who might deliver bad news for Trump. And by nominating a loyalist in Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni for the new BLS commissioner, Trump is further eroding the expectation of independence from such officials. (Indeed, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick just this week called the notion of the independence of federal statistics “nonsense.”)

5. His coercion of the media, universities, and law firms

These institutions, which have made remarkable concessions to his administration, seem to be calculating that it’s simply best not to be on Trump’s bad side. That can’t help but set new precedents that could impact other institutions and embolden him.

And the president has been happy to gloat.

“You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it,’” he said at the White House in March. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that, nobody would believe this, just saying, ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?”

6. Ignoring Congress/TikTok

Congress passed a bill with huge bipartisan majorities requiring the social media platform to divest from its Chinese ownership or be banned, with lawmakers citing urgent national security concerns. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld that law. But Trump just keeps ignoring that and giving TikTok extensions, even as it’s pretty evident he doesn’t have the authority under the law.

It’s a president effectively choosing to disregard the law, because he can. And he’s doing so despite those supposedly very urgent national security concerns about the Chinese government mining Americans’ sensitive data, concerns Trump once expressed.

7. Skirting due process and the rule of law on deportations

Trump invoked what has traditionally been a wartime authority, the Alien Enemies Act, to try and quickly deport undocumented immigrants. His efforts have led to several wrongful deportations and attempted deportations that have been blocked by the courts. At one point, the administration clearly ignored a court order to turn around airplanes holding migrants.

Protesting Trump’s policies, Los Angeles, October 2025

 

Operation Warp Speed

Ominously, the Trump administration has also sought to politicize the armed forces. To prevent the weaponization of the military for partisan ends, the United States and other established democracies have developed professionalized security forces and elaborate laws and regulations to shield them from political influence. Autocrats often seek to break down those institutional barriers and weaponize the security forces. They do so by either creating new security agencies or radically transforming existing ones to evade established legal frameworks and oversight mechanisms. The Trump administration’s expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its transformation of the agency into a poorly regulated paramilitary force is a clear example.

At the same time, Trump has crossed red lines with the regular armed forces. In a June 2025 speech at Fort Bragg, he goaded a crowd of army soldiers in uniform to jeer at elected Democratic officials. Moreover, the deployment of the National Guard in U.S. cities (on flimsy pretexts and, in some cases, against the will of elected local and state governments) has raised a serious concern that the administration will intimidate citizens and crack down on peaceful protests. Then, in September 2025, Trump told top U.S. military officials to prepare to deploy in U.S. cities and fight a “war from within” against an “enemy from within.” This is language reminiscent of the military dictatorships that ruled Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in the 1970s.

One form of authoritarian behavior that we did not anticipate a year ago was the Trump administration’s routine subversion of the law and even the U.S. Constitution. Although the Constitution gives Congress, not the executive branch, the authority to appropriate funds and set tariffs, Trump has usurped that authority, freezing or canceling spending appropriated by legislators and dismantling entire agencies established by Congress. He has also repeatedly imposed tariffs without legislative approval, usually by declaring national emergencies that did not exist (neither Canada nor Brazil posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. security). Indeed, most of the administration’s signature policy initiatives in 2025, including the establishment of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the imposition of sweeping tariffs, and military assaults off the coast of Venezuela, were all carried out illegally, undermining Congress’s authority.

 

Turning Back the Tide

None of these developments, however alarming, should be cause for fatalism or despair. The United States has entered an authoritarian moment. But there are multiple legal and peaceful ways out. Indeed, a defining feature of competitive authoritarianism is the existence of institutional arenas through which the opposition can seriously contest power. The playing field might be uneven, but the game is still played. The opposing team remains on the field, and sometimes it wins.

The most important arena for contestation in competitive authoritarian regimes is elections. Although they may be unfair, elections are not mere window-dressing. Competition is real, and outcomes are uncertain. Take India. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of an emergency in 1975 brought widespread repression. Within 24 hours, 676 opposition politicians were in jail. Her government imposed strict media censorship and ultimately arrested more than 110,000 critics and civil society activists over the course of 1975 and 1976. When Gandhi called elections in January 1977, many opposition leaders were still in prison. Yet the opposition Janata Party, a hastily formed coalition of Hindu nationalists, liberals, and leftists, managed to win the March vote, remove Gandhi from power, and restore Indian democracy.

In Malaysia, the long-ruling coalition Barisan Nasional controlled virtually all traditional media, maintained a massive advantage in resources (few businesses dared donate to the opposition), and used gerrymandering and manipulation of voter rolls to tilt the electoral playing field. Opposition forces nevertheless managed to win a parliamentary majority in 2018, putting an end to more than half a century of authoritarian rule.

After 2015, Poland descended into competitive authoritarianism as the governing Law and Justice party weaponized the state by packing the courts, the electoral commissions, and publicly owned media with loyalists. Nevertheless, left and center-right opposition parties forged a broad coalition and won back power in the 2023 elections.

The governments of competitive authoritarian regimes often rig elections, but these efforts can backfire. In Serbia, egregious fraud in the 2000 presidential election triggered a massive protest movement that toppled the country’s autocratic president, Slobodan Milosevic. In Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in 2004 after Viktor Yanukovych used large-scale ballot stuffing to steal the presidential election. The protests forced a new election, which the opposition won.

The U.S. opposition, moreover, enjoys several advantages over its counterparts in other competitive authoritarian regimes. First, although American institutions have weakened, the United States retains powerful institutional bulwarks against authoritarian consolidation. The judiciary is more independent, and the rule of law is generally stricter than in any other competitive authoritarian regime. Likewise, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize the military, the U.S. armed forces remain highly professionalized and thus difficult to weaponize. Federalism in the United States remains robust and continues to generate and protect alternative centers of authority; ambitious and powerful governors are already pushing back against Trump’s efforts. Finally, despite worrisome signs of media self-censorship, the United States retains a more vibrant media landscape than Hungary, Turkey, and other similar regimes do. Even though the Trump administration has tilted the playing field, the persistence of these institutional constraints will likely enable the opposition to continue to contest seriously for power. The Democratic Party’s big victories in the 2025 off-year elections showed that U.S. elections remain highly competitive.

The United States also possesses a well-organized and resource-rich civil society. The country’s enormous private sector has hundreds of billionaires, millions of millionaires, and dozens of law firms that generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue. The United States is home to more than 1,700 private universities and colleges and a vast infrastructure of churches, labor unions, private foundations, and nonprofit organizations. This endows U.S. citizens with vast financial and organizational resources for pushing back against authoritarian governments. Such countervailing power greatly exceeds anything available to oppositions in Hungary, India, or Turkey, let alone in El Salvador, Venezuela, Russia, and other autocracies.

The U.S. pro-democracy movement also benefits from a strong and unified opposition party. Most oppositions in competitive authoritarian regimes are fragmented and disorganized: in Hungary, for example, the opposition to Orban was split between the weak and discredited Socialist Party and the far-right Jobbik, which allowed Orban’s Fidesz party to coast to victories in 2014 and 2018. In Venezuela, the main opposition parties were so discredited and weakened that they could not even field their own presidential candidates when Hugo Chávez ran for reelection in 2000 and 2006. By contrast, the U.S. opposition is united behind the Democratic Party, which, for all its flaws, remains well organized, well financed, and electorally viable.

 

Withdrawal Syndrome

Trump’s second term has put this dynamic to an even sterner test. The president’s disdain for U.S. allies and partners is much greater this time around. He has talked about annexing Canada and Greenland, bombing Mexico, retaking the Panama Canal, and giving up on Ukraine and Taiwan, to name just a few.

The Trump administration’s authoritarian offensive has transformed American political life, perhaps even more than many of its critics realize. Fearing government retribution, individuals and organizations across the United States have changed their behavior, cooperating with or quietly acquiescing to authoritarian demands that they once would have rejected or spoken out against. As Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, put it, “We are all afraid. . . . We’re in a time and place where I have not been. . . . I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.”

Fear of retribution has begun to tilt the political playing field. Consider how the U.S. media landscape has changed. Numerous outlets have engaged in political realignment or self-censorship: The Washington Post has altered its editorial line, shifting markedly to the right, and Condé Nast gutted Teen Vogue’s influential political reporting. CBS canceled the Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s prominent late-night comedy show and imposed tighter controls on its most influential news program, 60 Minutes; its parent company, Paramount, then restructured CBS to bring in a more conservative editorial staff. According to a May 2025 report in The Daily Beast, the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, and the president of ABC News, Almin Karamehmedovic, told the hosts of the country’s leading daytime talk show, The View, to tone down their rhetoric about the president.

What makes self-censorship so insidious is that it is virtually impossible to ascertain its full impact. Although the public can observe firings and the cancellation of programming, it can never know how many editors have softened headlines or opted not to run certain news items, or how many journalists have chosen not to pursue stories out of fear of government retribution.

As in other competitive authoritarian regimes, changes in media coverage have also been driven by government measures to ensure that key media outlets are controlled by supporters. In Hungary, the Orban government took a series of steps to push independent media outlets into the hands of political allies: for example, it leveraged its control over licensing and lucrative government contracts to persuade Magyar Telekom, the parent company of the country’s most-read news website, Origo, to fire the site’s editor and later put it up for sale. Flush with cash from government-allied banks, a private company with ties to Orban easily outbid competitors and gained control of Origo. Like the more than 500 other Hungarian news outlets now owned by Orban loyalists, Origo ceased critical coverage of the government.

A similar process is underway in the United States as Trump’s allies move to take over major news outlets with assistance from the administration. Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount, greenlighted by an FCC that until recently tended to disapprove of big media mergers, gave the pro-Trump Ellison family control of CBS, which subsequently shifted its programming to the right. The Ellisons have sought to acquire a newly formulated U.S. version of TikTok in addition to Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Given that Fox News and X are already owned by wealthy right-wing figures, these moves have the potential to place a considerable share of legacy and social media platforms in the hands of pro-Trump billionaires.

Fear of retaliation has also affected political donors’ behavior in ways that could tilt the electoral playing field against the opposition. Faced with a government that has explicitly declared its intent to use the Justice Department, the IRS, and other agencies to investigate people who finance the Democratic Party and other progressive causes, many wealthy donors have retreated to the sidelines. One of the Democrats’ largest donors, Reid Hoffman, has scaled back his political contributions as well as his public criticism of Trump since the president began his second term, saying he fears retribution. Other major donors have similarly held back funds from the Democratic Party, helping to generate a marked fundraising advantage for Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Business leaders, foundations, and other wealthy donors have quietly distanced themselves from progressive causes they once supported, including civil rights, immigrant rights, and LGBT rights, to stay out of the federal government’s crosshairs. According to The New York Times, the Ford Foundation is now scrutinizing grants it has distributed that officials “fear could be criticized” as partisan. The Gates Foundation, meanwhile, has halted grants administered by a major consulting firm with ties to the Democratic Party.

For individual donors, steering clear of certain causes to avoid a costly confrontation with the government is an act of prudence. But such inadvertent collaboration with an authoritarian administration can have a devastating impact on civic and opposition groups as they are simultaneously targeted by the government and shunned by erstwhile supporters.

Donald Trump’s rise was supposed to have upended the liberal international order. In his first term, Trump openly disparaged longtime European allies, pulled out of international treaties such as the Paris climate agreement, and decried how the United States was subsidizing its allies through military support and trade deficits.

Fear of direct government retribution, in turn, has led major law firms, universities, and other influential institutions to pull back, weakening the United States’ civic defenses. Major Washington law firms have hesitated to hire former Biden administration officials and have limited or ceased their pro bono work for causes that the Trump administration opposes. According to The Washington Post, plaintiffs in roughly 75 percent of the lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders during his first term were represented by large top-tier law firms. Only 15 percent of such plaintiffs were represented by top firms in 2025. With the most powerful law firms on the sidelines, opponents of the administration have struggled to find legal representation, turning to smaller firms that lack the personnel and deep pockets to effectively challenge the administration in the courts.

 

 

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