As Trump implements Project 2025 at pace, can Americans and the rest of the world count on the USA remaining a democracy in other than name?
Many people have grave reservations about Donald Trump’s policies – for example the Budget, which the US Congressional Budget Office says will cost the poorest families around $1,600 per year over the years 20245-29 while boosting those on the highest incomes by around $12,000; or launching strikes against Iran without Congressional approval; or Project 2025 in general.
But many US Presidents have passed unpopular Budgets and taken unilateral decisions to attack foreign countries – and yet the USA has remained a functional democracy in the sense that the rule of law has applied, basic rights have generally been upheld domestically, and elections have been able to remove unpopular leaders.
Trump could be a very unpopular President and yet the USA could remain a functioning democracy. But will it?
How democracies fail
In his paper, Is the US Moving Toward Autocracy? A Critical Assessment, Daniel Stockemer wrote,
“Democracies can fall in two ways: through a sudden coup, which involves sweeping changes that lead to a sudden democratic breakdown, and through a slow degeneration of democratic laws and procedures. What we are currently witnessing in several longstanding democracies, such as India or Hungary, as well as the US, is this more incremental form of democratic erosion.”
The diagram below is based on Stockemer’s work.
As a pre-condition, Stockemer suggests that the state of society must provide fertile ground, for example many people feeling left behind, widespread dissatisfaction with the government, cultural grievances etc. Then it is possible for the right (wrong) kind of person to subvert democracy.
To succeed electorally, a would-be autocrat needs a plurality of voters. To create a winning coalition: the leader needs to appear powerful, resourceful, and charismatic enough to rally a large proportion of the population behind his/her cause. Once elected, the leader can then engage in three further steps to consolidate and secure his/her power. The most immediate step after the elections consists of the reconfiguration of the balance of power and the neutralisation of any checks and balances. According to Stockemer, the next step consists of securing continued power, and the final step involves the restriction of civil rights and liberties. Our diagram, and the reality on the ground in the US, suggests that this process is less strictly sequential than Stockemer’s paper suggests.
Using this model, we can see that in the USA, having won the 2024 election, Trump is already taking steps in all three of the remaining areas:
- He is actively neutralising checks and balances by undermining the rule of law;
- He is removing rights and liberties that might hinder his progress by attacking freedom of speech and making it harder for journalists, lawyers or academics to call out his actions and even more fundamental rights to liberty; and
- He is already beginning to take steps to secure continued power.
Neutralise checks and balances
The most powerful checks on a President’s power should be the two Houses of Congress and the legal system. The two Houses are both under Republican (Trump’s) control, and the Republican party, if it has reservations about Trump’s actions, has been largely silent about them. Congress has so far not proved an obstacle to Trump.
That leaves the legal system. The American Bar Association felt moved to point out that,
“Most Americans recognize that newly elected leaders bring change. That is expected. But most Americans also expect that changes will take place in accordance with the rule of law and in an orderly manner that respects the lives of affected individuals and the work they have been asked to perform. Instead, we see wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.”
The Trump administration has carried out numerous illegal deportations to Venezuela without due process and, in defiance of multiple court orders, well over 100 deportees remain wrongfully detained.
And Trump’s administration has gone further than simply ignoring court orders: Trump has been aggressively attacking law firms who support cases against hm or his administration. For example, Trump ordered the federal government to stop working with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP (WilmerHale), suspending the law firm’s security clearances, directing federal agencies to terminate contracts they have with the firm, and limiting WilmerHale employees’ access to government buildings because the firm had hired special counsel Robert Mueller who led the special investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties with Russia. Trump took similar action against Jenner & Block who had hired Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s deputies and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP where Mark Pomerantz used to work. Pomerantz investigated Trump for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office from 2021, throwing light on Trump’s finances and his links to adult film star Stormy Daniels. It is a brave lawyer who stands up against the Trump regime in today’s America.
If Congress and the legal system cannot stop Trump’s assault on democracy, what about the fourth estate (the media) and academia?
Trump’s administration has been attacking journalists who uncover wrong-doing by his administration, like the Wall Street Journal writers who uncovered racist Tweets by DOGE employee, The Atlantic journalist who revealed the that classified information was being shared in Signal chats. And even physical attack have started: LAPD officers fired rubber bullets at journalists reporting on police behaviour. Perhaps most high-profile are his threats to remove the broadcast licenses of ABC, NBC and CBS.
Academic freedom is also under serious threat as Frank Fernandez and Neal Hutchens wrote in Nature,
“… under the Trump administration, coordinated attacks on academic freedom are being carried out at the national level and are targeting both public and private universities. The administration has targeted institutional autonomy by threatening large-scale federal funding freezes to specific universities, such as Columbia University, Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. These attacks on universities and federally funded research undermine the arrangements (such as having university faculty members rather than political appointees review proposals for federal grants) that make the USA a globally competitive producer of scholarly scientific publications.”
And of course, the rule of law requires that it apply to everyone, from the poorest to the President. But in the US, a Supreme Court Trump had stacked with his loyalists, granted him immunity for official acts carried out as President.
Removing rights and liberties
These attacks on law firms, journalists and academic institutions constitute a grave assault on the freedom of speech. But even more fundamental freedoms – to go about one’s life without fear of illegal detention by the state, or by criminals masquerading as the state – are also under threat.
Many people were shocked by the images of peaceful protesters against the cuts in Medicaid being arrested and many of them, including those in wheelchairs, zip-tied as they tried to make the case that their lives were at risk from the planned cuts.
But at least the police who did that were wearing uniforms. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE) routinely operates with masked agents, wearing plain clothes and without visible identity who seize people off the streets or from their workplaces. They recently arrested New York City Comptroller Brad Lander who was detained outside a New York courtroom as he pressed immigration officers to present an arrest warrant for a man they were taking into custody.
Being identifiable as officers and presenting a warrant before detaining people is not a high bar for a civilised country to ask its officers to clear.
The local on-line newspaper, the Santanero, reported on another case in which it is hard to tell whether the perpetrators were officers of the state or not:
“Narciso Barranco of Tustin (pictured in orange on the far left) … the man violently detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents Saturday in Santa Ana. Barranco was at his landscaping job at the IHOP off Edinger and Ritchey when the incident occurred. Barranco also has two sons actively serving in the Marine Corps. … The Santanero asked about the appalling footage circulating online, showing his father bloodied and being punched repeatedly by what appear to be unconfirmed CBP agents.”
This blurring of the lines means that stochastic terrorism is an increasingly worrying trend: the constitutional lawyer David Allen Green, wrote recently,
“This appears to have been what happened in various recent acts of political violence in the US and the UK. The murders, and attempted murders and kidnappings, of politicians by radicalised individuals is part of what seems to be a turn in political discourse and culture. … And the law is almost powerless in the face of stochastic terrorism. Of course it can deal with the back-end products: the acts of violence themselves. But those politicians and pundits and social media users at the front end, encouraging this violence, are generally safe.”
We made the same point in 2023 in relation to the storming of the Capitol. We cited Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric but noted,
“… even within all of this, he maintained a fig-leaf of plausible deniability: buried in the early part of his speech is this sentence, ‘I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.’”
And chilling to those who study dictatorships is the rewriting of history and the banning of books. The Trump regime is working hard to erase the contributions of black Americans and women as part of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade. And American libraries are even being forced to ban books including classics like The Handmaid’s Tale and the Color Purple.
Securing power
With the help of Putin and Musk, Trump has won two elections, but he has not yet secured continued power. He is working on it, though. The biggest barrier is that he is not currently allowed to serve three terms. But he is exploring ways to circumvent or lift that restriction.
He also has to worry about the mid-term elections, and has (as others have done in the past as a means of voter suppression) used unsubstantiated claims of rampant voter fraud to make voting more difficult for certain types of voter. He signed an executive order claiming that previous elections have not been reliable because voters are not obliged to provide proof of nationality at the voting booth and states count postal ballots received after polling day. This order has been blocked by judges who pointed out that this is an issue on which Congress should decide,
“The issue here is whether the president can require documentary proof of citizenship where the authority for election requirements is in the hands of Congress, its statutes … do not require it, and the statutorily created [Election Assistance Commission] is required to go through a notice and comment period and consult with the states before implementing any changes to the federal forms for voter registration.”
Nic Cheesman and Brian Klaas have spelled out how authoritarian leaders have learned to rig elections in ways that are becoming ever harder to detect. As Jennifer Victor wrote,
“The risk, of course, is that a ruling authoritarian-leaning party abuses its power to ensure that the opposition can never again win. This has happened in recent decades in Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela, to name a few.”
Trump has, during and after previous elections, claimed that they were rigged against him; and most importantly, he instigated an insurrection in 2021 rather than hand over power. It seems likely that he will again use every tactic at his disposal to defeat any attempts to remove him through the ballot box.
We cannot be certain that he will find a way to cling onto power personally, or through a proxy as Putin did with Medvedev, but it would be extremely foolish to assume that he will not.
What are the lessons for the UK?
There are of course many short-term lessons to learn about how to deal with the Trump regime – and the EU, Canada and the UK (and the rest of the world) are adapting fast.
But there is an indirect, and very important lesson for these countries: if it can happen in the US, which has a constitution designed to prevent tyranny, it can happen here.
One of our key projects, Defensive Constitutional Reform, will set out what the UK government can do while there is still time, to prevent the UK going the way of the US.
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