Is America Headed Towards Dictatorship?

Ten years ago, Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator. Here’s my attempt to predict where that ride will end.

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The moment it all began. (Photo by Christopher Gregory/Getty Images.)

Ten years ago today, a real estate developer and star of reality television by the name of Donald J. Trump descended a golden-hued escalator in a landmark tower carrying his own name. In front of a modest crowd of onlookers rumored to consist mostly of paid actors, he announced his entry into electoral politics. He was, Trump claimed, running for the Republican nomination to become President of the United States.

The announcement was widely met with derision. Political scientists explained that party insiders have the ability to shape primary contests, making it much more likely that longtime members of the conservative establishment like Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz would ultimately win. Commentators speculated that Trump simply wanted to attract some free publicity, or perhaps write a bestselling book. The Huffington Post announced that it would cover Trump’s presidential bid in its entertainment section.

But Trump turned out to know the country better than the self-appointed experts. He quickly surged ahead in the Republican presidential primary, leaving the establishment candidates in the dust. He struggled in polls for the general election, with experts once again predicting that this Icarus was destined to crash down to earth, but eked out a narrow victory in the electoral college. American politics and society have never been the same since.

Today, the country bears the hallmark of the deep polarization that Trump—admittedly, with a considerable contribution by progressives—has courted. The last seven days, in particular, have shown just how close the country now is to a nervous breakdown. A week ago, ICE raids on illegal immigrants in Los Angeles provoked fierce protests by a mix of ordinary people, immigrant rights advocates and radical left-wing groups. Trump sent the National Guard to quell the protests despite the objections of local officials when Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, and Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, proved slow to get them under control. Clashes between protesters and security forces quickly escalated, with Los Angeles eventually declaring an 8pm curfew, and tensions spreading to other cities.

The weekend brought more sources of friction. Trump finally realized his longstanding ambition to stage a military parade, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army (and, perhaps not coincidentally, his 79th birthday). Across the nation, tens of thousands of Americans took to the street to protest this break with (small-r) republican tradition under the motto “No Kings.” Meanwhile, political violence continues to loom over the country ever more menacingly.

At least three people lost their lives to political violence over the last few days. In Utah, a bystander was under hazy circumstances killed at a No Kings day protest. Arturo Gamboa allegedly separated from the crowd, pulled out a rifle, and was about to shoot at protesters. An unnamed member of the protest’s security team spotted Gamboa, produced a handgun, and took a number of shots. Tragically, one of these bullets struck and killed a bystander: Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, a fashion designer who later died of his injuries.

Across the country, in Minnesota, another dangerous instance of political violence took the lives of innocents. Vance Boelter dressed up as a policeman and went to the home of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, murdering both. Then he attempted—yet thankfully failed—to take the life of John A. Hoffman, a state senator, and his wife Yvette. In a notebook he abandoned alongside his car, Boelter had apparently included the names of 70 potential targets, including Democratic politicians and a number of local abortion providers.

As we mark the tenth anniversary of Trump’s entry into American politics in a society riven with tension, many questions suggest themselves. How much longer will Trump remain the single most dominant figure in the country? Is there a real risk that these growing instances of political violence will escalate into ever more deadly conflict? And of course: How big a danger does Trump pose to the survival of the American Republic?

Over the last days, I’ve been pondering this final question with a bit of geographic distance. I am currently traveling in China, and was asked to give an informal talk to a group of about 100 locals and expats in Shanghai. The opportunity allowed me to look beyond the daily onslaught of news events, thinking about the state of American democracy from a height of 10,000 feet (or, rather, a distance of 10,000 kilometers). Here is a lightly edited and slightly expanded transcript of my spontaneous remarks.

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Is America Headed Towards Dictatorship?

When looking at the United States these days, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily headlines—the protests in Los Angeles, rulings by the Supreme Court, a military parade—and lose sight of the bigger picture. So when I was invited to give this informal talk about an impossibly ambitious question, I thought it would be a great opportunity to put what’s happening in a broader, more systematic context.

It strikes me that there are four key questions we need to ask to develop a sense of where we stand today. These are:

1. What explains Trump’s rise? Why was he able to win office for a second time?

2. How is Trump actually governing? What characterizes his administration so far, and what might we expect from the rest of his term?

3. How does the international context help us understand what’s happening in the United States? More specifically, what can we learn from the experience of other countries whose democracies have come under attack from authoritarian populists?

4. Taking all of that into account, what is likely to happen in America? What could the country look like in five or ten years?

Let’s begin with the first question.

1. Why did Trump win?

There are two ways to approach this question. One focuses on the long-term trends which explain why citizens in countries around the world seem to be losing trust in democratic institutions and growing more willing to vote for radical alternatives. I have extensively written about these reasons. In The People Versus Democracy, my 2018 book, I argued that three structural drivers are especially important: the stagnation of living standards for ordinary people; disquiet about rapid cultural and demographic change that has diminished the social status of key groups; and the way in which the internet and social media has transformed the public sphere.

I believe that these explanations still hold water. But I would now add a fourth factor: Many citizens have lost faith in the establishment because of the concrete failings and ideological excesses of elite institutions, from universities to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But today I want to focus on a set of more proximate causes, which help to explain how Trump succeeded in getting reelected in 2024 despite losing the 2020 election and earning widespread condemnation for his encouragement of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And these proximate reasons have as much to do with the weakness of the Democrats as they do with the strength of the MAGA movement.

The American left, from progressive activists to mainstream Democrats, has gone out of its way to earn the country’s hostility over the last few years. Some of the reasons for its unpopularity are rooted in bread-and-butter issues like the economy. Like many other countries, the U.S. experienced high inflation in the wake of the pandemic. As Jason Furman recently explained on my podcast, the Biden administration, ignoring the advice of top economists like Larry Summers, worsened the problem through large-scale spending at a time when the economy was already running hot.

Then there was the issue of Joe Biden’s mental constitution. By the end of his term, the 46th president was clearly in steep cognitive decline. Most voters recognized that. But as Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson chronicled in excruciating detail in their recent book, many leaders of the Democratic Party covered for him in extraordinary ways likely to breed lasting mistrust. When Biden was finally forced out, and Kamala Harris anointed as the Democratic nominee, she had little time left to win over skeptics.

That dovetailed with a deeper mistrust of mainstream institutions, and of the Democratic Party in particular, which many voters now see as captured by left-identitarian ideology. The widespread embrace of “wokeness” didn’t just alienate white working-class voters; it also eroded support for the Democratic Party among many minority groups on whom Democrats had long counted for their supposedly inevitable victories: African Americans, Asian Americans, and especially Latinos.

Harris, in particular, was hampered by her record. She had run a very woke campaign when she first sought the Democratic nomination in 2019 and 2020. In 2024, she quietly ditched many of those talking points. But she never explicitly distanced herself from most of them. What voters were looking for was a costly signal: some sign that she was willing to stand up to pressure from the activist wing of her party and advocate for mainstream positions even—perhaps especially—when that might make someone angry. She never mustered the courage to send that costly signal.

One fascinating poll conducted shortly after Trump’s re-election asked swing voters why they had flipped from Biden to Trump in 2024. The top answer was not inflation or immigration. It was: “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues [than on] helping the middle class.”

Now, of course it’s also necessary to look at this from the other direction: What made Trump such a strong electoral force in 2024? Back in 2016, he was often perceived as the candidate of the past—a throwback appealing to rural, white, older voters clinging to a vanished America. Many political scientists predicted that Trump was a blip; as his core voters aged out of the electorate, they insisted, his brand of politics was sure to fade. And yet, in 2024, Trump nearly matched Kamala Harris among voters below the age of 30. He did much better than expected among women. He even made serious gains among minority groups. How?

Part of the answer has to do with what I have called “aspirational populism.” Democrats today are largely a party of highly educated, high-earning professionals in wealthy urban areas. When they address working-class voters, their promises often revolve around maintaining the social safety net: raising the minimum wage, protecting Medicaid, and so on. They’re speaking to people at the bottom of the ladder, and telling them that they’ll stop their lives from getting worse.

Trump, by contrast, promises upward mobility. He talks about starting businesses, working extra shifts, keeping more of what you earn, reducing taxes on tips. He tells working-class voters: You can do better. You can move up. That’s a much more appealing message for people who already feel that they’re on an upward trajectory.

Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk was an important part of “aspirational populism.” In his First Inaugural, back in 2017, Trump focused on “American carnage,” describing the supposed decline of the nation in drastic terms. In his Second Inaugural, earlier this year, he talked a big game about colonizing Mars. That’s a dramatic shift in tone, one that gives the promise to Make America Great Again a much more aspirational connotation—and helps explain the broad coalition which earned him a plurality of the popular vote.

But it is one thing to build a broad coalition. It is quite another to hold onto it once you enter government. And that brings us to the second big question I want to address.

2. How has Trump governed during the first five months of his second term?

There is one major continuity with his first term.

Trump still sees himself as the singular representative of the people, insisting that he—and he alone—expresses their true will. That’s the hallmark of what political scientists call populism. And as I’ve increasingly come to think, the best way to understand populism is not as an outright or self-conscious rejection of democracy; rather, it is as a rejection of any institutional constraints on the power of the leader who claims to speak for the people, ostensibly in the interests of instituting true democracy. The core claim shared by populists who otherwise have big political differences from one another is: I was elected. I alone speak for the people. So why should courts or bureaucrats or local officials be able to tell me what I can and can’t do?

Nothing about this is new. Trump hasn’t changed. He is not, as some suggest, more erratic or unhinged than before. He is the same man he was ten—or, for that matter, thirty—years ago. But what has clearly changed is his capacity to act on his instincts.

Back in 2016, Trump was a political outsider. He had spent little time in Washington. He didn’t know how the federal bureaucracy worked. Most senior Republicans were suspicious of him, some outright hostile. He had few loyalists to fill the 4,000 or so political appointments in the executive branch and the independent agencies. Far from being ideological allies, many of the people who served under him were longstanding members of the conservative movement, and some were outright technocrats. Having lost the popular vote, Trump also lacked a sense of deep legitimacy.

All of that has changed this time around. Trump has successfully remade the Republican Party in his own image. Many who once resisted him have either left politics or, like Lindsey Graham, reinvented themselves as his most devoted followers. The MAGA movement has built a pipeline of committed ideologues who have quickly taken up key positions in government. And in 2024, Trump won the popular vote, giving him a much more powerful mandate.

Trump has used that mandate aggressively. In his first 100 days, he signed a barrage of executive orders that reshaped important parts of the American state. Though many have so far been stalled in the courts, they represent a serious effort to centralize power in the office of the president—one which is likely to succeed at least to some extent.

(Incidentally, it seems to me that, with the benefit of hindsight, we owe an apology to the much-maligned “adults in the room.” During Trump’s first term, cabinet secretaries, generals and senior advisors tried to contain his most unconstitutional instincts. They were widely mocked for doing his bidding while wanting to claim credit as heroes of the resistance. But given how much more radical Trump’s actions have been in the first months of his second term, it seems that they may well have prevented more extreme outcomes at the time. Today, few such constraints remain.)

There’s another striking thing about the first months of Trump’s second term. While he has been much more effective at exercising his power, he has also struggled to hold together the broader coalition that put him back in the White House. The idea of using aspirational populism to forge a multi-ethnic, working-class coalition is compelling in theory; but it turns out to be hard to sustain in practice.

Take the current budget bill. Beyond a popular and much-publicized tax exemption on tips, it contains very little for aspirational working-class voters. Meanwhile, it hands out lots of presents to traditional Republican constituencies: the wealthy, big business, entrenched interests.

Or look at immigration. Democrats often assume that identity determines views on immigration—that Latinos, for example, want much more generous immigration policies. The reality is more complex. Like most Americans, many Latinos want a secure border. They support a fair immigration system whose rules are enforced with determination. But, also like most Americans, they do not support indiscriminate raids, arbitrary cruelty from enforcement agencies, or innocents being thrown into mass jails in El Salvador because of far-fetched suspicions that they may have ties to violent cartels.

Trump’s coalition with Silicon Valley is also breaking apart. The alliance he once enjoyed with top tech leaders is fraying. The most obvious reasons for his breakup with Musk lies in the inevitable clash between their outsized personalities. But their split is also rooted in deeper tensions within the MAGA movement.

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On one side of this split, there is the America First wing, led by ideologues like Stephen Miller. They want sweeping restrictions on immigration and have evidently decided to take the fight to elite institutions like Ivy League universities in any way they can. On the other side there are tech leaders who feel that their former allies in the Democratic Party have betrayed them by turning them into scapegoats for all of the world’s problems; are increasingly frustrated with regulations that hinder technological progress; and deeply dislike the woke excesses that were particularly palpable in Silicon Valley for the past decade. While these resentments drove them into the arms of the MAGA movement, they want to keep hiring top talent and care deeply about building a dynamic country that is open to trade with the world.

Faced with a choice between these two factions, Trump has increasingly chosen to side with the America Firsters. And while this has helped him to retain his strong bond with his older base, it is increasingly driving away the younger, more diverse, and more aspirational voters who helped him win in 2024.

Since Trump has once again proven incapable of pursuing a coherent policy vision designed to capture the lasting support of a clear majority of the electorate, he is increasingly falling into the same pattern we saw in his first term. His first months in office are characterized by escalating attacks on institutions, a striking disregard for legal norms, and a growing willingness to push constitutional boundaries. The key difference is that, this time around, he is pursuing these goals in a much more efficient manner.

In his first months in office, Trump has already flirted with defying court rulings. He has pushed the limits of executive authority by attempting to abolish agencies like USAID. He has violated the First Amendment by attacking universities in ways that clearly entailed what free speech lawyers call “viewpoint discrimination.” He is now testing the limits of federalism by calling on the National Guard to break up local protests. And he has, despite a constitutional amendment that clearly prohibits such a course of action, repeatedly mused about running for a third term.

For now, some of these steps and most of these words are best understood as trial balloons. But taken together, they signal both a fundamental disregard for the basic rules of American democracy and a growing willingness to act upon his convictions. So we face a dangerous moment: a populist president with fewer internal constraints and a stronger command of the levers of power than at any previous time in his political life. It may be tempting to dismiss the idea that American democracy could be in serious danger during Trump’s second term by pointing out that he did not concentrate power in his own hands the first time around; but in politics as on Wall Street, it is always dangerous to assume that past performance guarantees future results.

So to understand what the next years might have in store for the United States, I think it’s necessary to look abroad.

3. What can we learn from the experience of other democracies that have come under populist rule?

The best way to gain a hunch about what the future may hold is to look at what happened to other countries when they faced similar assaults on their democratic institutions. And while the United States is unlike any other democracy, we can reach into the toolbox of political scientists to adjust for some of these differences. If the United States has strengths which certain other democracies lack—for example because its institutions are of longer standing—then this suggests that its institutions should prove comparatively more robust than they did in these other cases.

So let’s look at the trajectory of some countries in which other populist leaders, who also claimed that they alone truly represent the people, have been elected over the course of the past decades. Notably, these include places like Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński,¹ Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, and India under Narendra Modi. What lessons might they offer?

First, these cases suggest that democracy is far less secure than political scientists used to assume. Until quite recently, the conventional wisdom held that, once countries had become wealthy and had experienced multiple transfers of power through free and fair elections, their democratic institutions were basically safe. But that’s no longer credible. Countries like Hungary, which ticked all those boxes, have seen real deterioration. Today, Hungary is at best an illiberal democracy—and arguably no longer a democracy at all.

Second, democratic backsliding typically doesn’t happen in a single term. It is very rare for a populist to concentrate power in their own hands over the course of four years. Even in cases in which leaders had a clear aspiration to entrench their power, it took a decade or longer for them to refashion the system in their own image.

Consider Venezuela. Chávez first came to power in 1999. For the next decade, there was genuine political contestation. The opposition remained viable. Elections continued to provide real occasion for suspense. But slowly and steadily, Chávez managed to erode checks and balances, concentrate power, and tilt the electoral playing field. Even years after he first assumed high office, the ultimate outcome of this power struggle seemingly remained uncertain; it took a long time to come to the sad conclusion that now sadly applies to Venezuela: that, after two decades of backsliding, the country can no longer be considered a democracy in any meaningful sense.

Third, history doesn’t always move in a straight line. Even in countries in which authoritarian populists seem to have gained the upper hand, democratic forces can rebound. The erosion of democracy often proceeds in zigzags. And in some cases, surprising reversals occur again and again.

Take Poland. Not long ago, most observers considered it a state nearly completely captured by its populist government. The Law and Justice Party was in control of the parliament and the presidency. It had systematically politicized the judiciary, stacking the country’s highest courts with loyalists. It had turned state media into a pure propaganda tool. By most indications, Poland was in danger of sliding into authoritarianism.

And yet, in October 2023, a broad coalition of opposition parties managed to win parliamentary elections. A democratic government led by center-right leader Donald Tusk slowly began to reverse some of the damage to Poland’s democratic institutions. The country seemed to be on the path to a democratic revival that many people had, even a few years earlier, come to think of as all but impossible.

There are signs of similar pressure building elsewhere. In Hungary, for example, Orbán’s popularity is now at a low point; while the democratic opposition still faces long odds, future elections may be more competitive than many predicted. Even Erdoğan, who has long seemed unassailable in Turkey, is now facing mounting resistance. Economic mismanagement is driving public frustration. Massive street protests have broken out. Members of his own party are beginning to question his leadership. These moments don’t guarantee democratic revival—but they show that autocracy can be more brittle than it seems.

But of course, reversals can go the other way, too. The fact that democratic forces win one round doesn’t mean they’re sure to win the next. That is the depressing coda to the Polish story. Yes, the opposition won key parliamentary elections 20 months ago; but at presidential elections held two weeks ago, a candidate supported by the former government won by a narrow margin. Tusk, the moderate prime minister, now faces a hostile president who can veto any attempt to undo damage to democratic institutions.

The lesson from all of this, I believe, is that we should stop thinking of each election as the turning point. At the moment, it often feels as though every cycle is a decisive battle which determines the long-term future of a political system—the proverbial “most important election of our lifetime.” But in truth, we’re in the middle of a political era which pits populist insurgents against more traditional democratic forces, and could last for the next ten or twenty or forty years.

So what does all of this mean for America? Is the country on the path to dictatorship?

4. What could America look like in five years?

There are some important reasons to believe that the United States may prove more resilient than other countries that have faced similar attacks on their democratic institutions.

For one, compared to countries like Poland or Venezuela, America has an older and wealthier democracy. Its civil society institutions are much more numerous and can call upon vastly greater financial reserves. It has strong, independent media organizations which are financially supported by millions of subscribers; unlike in other countries, public financing makes up a small or nonexistent part of their budgets.

America also enjoys unusually robust protections for freedom of speech. The administration has tried to punish institutions it considers hostile, from universities to law firms, in deeply concerning ways; but the protection against jailing citizens for their speech, long since absent in countries like Turkey, remain intact, and continue to provide a vital bulwark against censorship.

Then there’s the unusually federal nature of the American republic. The United States is an extremely decentralized country. Power is distributed across 50 states, each with its own laws, courts, and bureaucracies. That decentralization also applies to the administration of elections. In Hungary, the ruling party could skew the rules of the game in its favor nationwide by capturing one electoral commission located in Budapest; in the United States, decisions about how to administer elections are made in thousands of different states, counties, and municipalities, making it easier to engage in all kinds of low-level shenanigans but much harder to rig results in a coordinated fashion.

Finally, the American system has an unusually high number of so-called “veto points.” In some democracies, such as New Zealand, a party that enjoys a simple majority in parliament can implement sweeping changes with practically no constraints on its power. In the United States, by contrast, anyone who seeks to pass significant legislation will need:

• A majority in the House;

• A filibuster-proof majority, consisting of 60 out of 100 votes, in the Senate;

• The assent of the president;

• And finally, the tacit (or in some cases explicit) approval of the Supreme Court.

This multiplicity of veto points may be part of the reason why Americans have grown to be so dissatisfied with their democratic institutions in the first place. But it does also make it extremely difficult for anybody—even an energetic executive officer determined to expand his powers beyond constitutional limits—to move quickly.

There’s only one problem. Yes, the American political system presents serious obstacles to authoritarian consolidation. But checks-and-balances are mere paper tigers if the people inhabiting these institutions prove unwilling to defend their constitutional prerogatives. So the speed with which democratic backsliding might take place in the United States will ultimately depend on the extent to which the people inhabiting those institutions prove willing to resist illegitimate power grabs.

The news from Congress has, in this respect, so far proven rather bleak. Republican members have not sought to pass legislation that would enable Trump to expand presidential authority. But nor have they shown any appetite to assert their institutional independence. As a result, they have largely failed to uphold the core responsibility with which they are entrusted by the Constitution: to guard their prerogatives jealously, and thereby to provide a key check on executive power.

The courts tell a more subtle, and perhaps a more hopeful, story. Over the last years, the Supreme Court has proven willing to hand down sweeping judgments that advance a conservative cultural agenda. But it is important to distinguish between the court’s role in advancing the longstanding goals of the Federalist Society and its supposed willingness to acquiesce to Trumpian power grabs. There are plenty of reasons to believe that the former is happening. But, thankfully, so far there are surprisingly sparse reasons to believe that the latter is happening.

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Trump’s Assault on Harvard Is an Astonishing Act of National Self-Sabotage

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It is striking how many conservative judges—appointed by Trump himself—have so far ruled against the president in district courts, in federal appeals courts, and even at the Supreme Court. Just last month, the federal government lost 96% of all cases it faced in federal courts, with both Democratic and Republican appointees striking down Trump’s executive actions. (Something similar would be unthinkable in Hungary or India, not to speak of Turkey or Venezuela, today.)

Now, none of that changes the fact that the executive branch is fully under Trump’s control, and that his loyalists are working aggressively to implement his agenda—even when it strains constitutional boundaries. So what will happen if (or perhaps it is more appropriate to say when) the unstoppable force of the Trump administration meets the unmovable object of the separation of powers?

Two scenarios are especially likely to provoke a serious constitutional crisis.

First, the recent chaos in Los Angeles could turn out to be a preview of future clashes. Trump could soon decide to use the military to suppress protests in an even more heavy-handed or blatantly unlawful manner.

If that happens, public opinion will be key. And as the events in Los Angeles also indicate, it’s far from clear whom the public would support in such a confrontation. The most viral images from those protests—especially one showing a masked demonstrator waving a Mexican flag in front of a burning car—pitted Trump on the side of order, with his opponents seemingly fomenting violence and chaos. This is the kind of confrontation that plays to Trump’s strengths. If Americans feel that they need to pick between a president who promises to restore order and an opposition that takes to the streets with foreign flags and Molotov cocktails, most will side with Trump—even if the methods he uses violate the niceties of the Constitution.

It is striking that the most salient causes with which Democrats have so far associated themselves stand in stark contrast to the most successful recent protest movements against authoritarian populists. During mass protests organized by the opposition in Poland, for example, millions of people peacefully took to the street, waving the national flag and chanting a simple slogan: KONSTYTUCJA (constitution). That’s much more likely to be a winning message: for democratic resistance to succeed, it has to frame its dissent in patriotic terms that broadly resonate.

The second scenario is that Trump simply stops obeying the courts. So far, the Trump administration has repeatedly flirted with this idea. A key part of its strategy is clearly to use unconstitutional action to inflict lasting damage on federal agencies like USAID or on universities like Harvard before courts have a chance to step in. In some of the most egregious cases, the administration has even started to ignore court rulings.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for example, was mistakenly sent to El Salvador despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country; for weeks, the administration dragged its feet in the face of a Supreme Court ruling asking it to “facilitate” his return. But despite the administration’s repeated flirtations with outright defiance of the courts, it has so far sidestepped an all-out confrontation. The government ultimately complied with the order, and brought Garcia back to American shores.

The big question is whether that might one day change. What happens if Trump takes to the Rose Garden to announce that he will henceforth ignore all and any court orders that violate the will of the American people: “These criminal judges weren’t elected by nobody,” he might say. “I’m the president. I’m the commander-in-chief. Why should I listen to them?”

We’re not there yet. But such a course of action would trigger the most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil War. And we may be closer to it than many realize.

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In the coming years, we are likely to see ever greater political tension, ever more instances of executive overreach, and ever more strain on the rule of law. Some of these efforts to undermine constitutional checks on the power of the executive may succeed. Others will be blocked by the courts and slowed by public opinion. There are many scenarios for how the next three-and-a-half years could play out. But perhaps the most likely is that we will reach 2028 with the formal trappings of democracy still in place, but with significant erosion underway. Elections will likely remain substantively free, but could by then be less than fully fair—with the next presidential campaign conducted in a country deeply marked, though perhaps not wholly transformed, by executive overreach and intimidation.

One upshot of this is that it is, like in many other democracies around the world, unlikely that one political force will become completely dominant anytime soon. For the next five years, and perhaps for the next thirty, we may see a constant back-and-forth between the forces of populist revolution and the forces of political moderation.

There will be moments of democratic resurgence. There will be moments when populists of one form or another gain control. The pattern will repeat itself, over and over, with each election feeling as though its odds were existential, and yet leading up to another whose stakes look just as vast.

So: Is America about to turn into a dictatorship? Not today. Not tomorrow. But the danger is real. And the ultimate outcome, far from being predetermined, may not be knowable for decades to come.

Ask me again in ten years.

1. Kaczyński never formally took on the role of head of government, but was widely understood to be the dominant force within the governing Law and Justice Party.