The Danger to American Democracy

If Trump wins, an unstoppable force is about to meet an unmovable object.

Donald Trump in North Carolina on October 30, 2024. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

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Nobody knows the outcome of next Tuesday’s presidential election. Anybody who pretends to do so with any degree of certainty is a charlatan. But with Donald Trump now favored to win both according to forecasters like Nate Silver and prediction markets like Polymarket, it is time to grapple seriously with the question of what would happen if he does.

Trump’s re-election would have enormous consequences in a wide variety of fields. He would likely weaken NATO and undermine Western support for Ukraine. He would likely offer tax breaks to billionaires and rich corporations. He would likely institute the largest program of mass deportations in American history. He may try to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and instruct the FBI to prosecute his adversaries.

There are also sure to be second order effects. For example, I argued in 2020 that a victory by Joe Biden would weaken the influence of woke ideas. This has broadly proven correct: The power of these ideas has continued to expand in the administration and in many educational institutions; it is, as Sam Kahn rightly argues, premature to declare that we have reached “peak woke.” But the space for mainstream critiques of these ideas really did open up under Biden, and they are now far from enjoying the unchallenged hegemony they once did. Conversely, it seems likely that a victory by Donald Trump would, as in 2016, lead large parts of the mainstream to reflexively pledge allegiance to the most simplistic version of these ideas.

But in this article, I want to focus on a particular debate in which I have by now been an active participant for nearly a decade: How likely would Trump be to inflict lasting damage on America’s democratic institutions? And how should the years since he first took office amend our assessment of the danger he poses?

The Good News: America’s Institutions Are Comparatively Resilient

Trump is not a fascist but rather an authoritarian populist: somebody who assails the governing elite as corrupt or self-serving, and claims that he alone truly represents the people. It is populists’ rejection of pluralism, not their lambasting of an elite that, in many cases, really is deeply flawed, which sets them on a collision course with democratic institutions.

Populists from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Narendra Modi in India and from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have duly undermined the checks on their political power. But the impact of these assaults on democratic institutions has varied widely. In Hungary, for example, Viktor Orbán has succeeded in capturing core institutions like the electoral commission and all but eradicating the existence of independent media. In nearby Poland, the Law and Justice party (PiS) followed many of the same steps; shortly after his party won power in 2015, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński even met with Orbán for a full-day of consultations about how to emulate the Hungarian model. But Law and Justice ultimately failed to consolidate their power, and were beaten at the ballot box in crucial elections in the fall of 2023.

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There are not yet enough of these cases—and nor has there been enough scholarly research on different outcomes across them—to draw firm conclusions about why some populists do lasting damage while the opposition is able to reassert itself in others. But four factors suggest themselves, and all four have something in common: they suggest that democratic institutions should prove more resilient in America than in many seemingly comparable cases.

1. Longevity of Democratic Institutions

According to a famous political science paper from the 1990s, a democracy is consolidated when it reaches a GDP per capita of at least $14,000 in today’s terms and has changed governments through free-and-fair elections at least twice. That theory is no longer tenable. Hungary, for example, fulfilled those criteria by the mid-2010s, but has since experienced such severe democratic backsliding that many observers now classify it as a competitive authoritarian regime.

But while it was naïve to think that these factors would single-handedly assure the survival of a political system, there is a lot of empirical reason to believe that they do make a democracy’s survival more likely. The age of a democracy does seem to matter. It is simply easier to break a more recent and less frequently enforced norm than it is to break one that is of very long standing and has again and again structured how the political process in some locality plays out.

This is good news for the United States. Whether or not it is the “oldest democracy in the world,” the country has an unusually long (if hardly unbroken) tradition of settling disputes about who should hold political power at the ballot box. The assault on Congress on January 6^th demonstrates that this norm is not enough to prevent everybody from trying to subvert that key democratic norm; but it is also testament to the fact that this norm can persist even when it faces serious attacks.

One of the things that is notable about January 6th, in fact, is the dog that didn’t bark. In many democracies, a politician as desperate to stay in power as Trump would have called on friendly military leaders to lend him support, by the force of arms and tanks if necessary. In the United States, with its long tradition of military officers who take their oath to uphold the constitution very seriously, this option simply wasn’t on the table.

2. Degree of Business Dependence on Government

The other major factor highlighted in that paper from the 1990s was GDP. There are many reasons why a country’s wealth may matter for the stability of its democratic institutions. Wealthier countries are likely to have a more educated citizenry that is likely to have higher expectations of the government and are likely to invest greater resources into ensuring that these expectations are met. But perhaps the most important reason is that, in a rich country, big businesses—including key media outlets—are better set up to resist pressure from the government.

In small and relatively poor countries, businesses tend to be highly dependent on the government. Expenditure from the central government often constitutes a significant part of their revenue. It is much harder for them to escape regulation meant to punish them. This is especially true for media outlets. In a country with a small economy, newspapers and television channels struggle to make ends meet, making them deeply dependent on public subsidies or advertising from state sources. Economies of scale are also a powerful factor, especially in the digital age: once you have produced content, distributing it to an extra subscriber is comparatively costless. (This is why both GDP per capita and the absolute size of an economy matter.)

To be sure, the extent to which businesses depend on the government is influenced by multiple factors, including ones that are unrelated to size or wealth; Chinese businesses, for example, are deeply dependent on the goodwill of the CCP despite the country’s scale. And yet, a comparison between the United States and a country like Hungary or Venezuela makes clear to what extent size and wealth do matter. America’s biggest corporations depend on government revenue to a much smaller extent than do companies located in smaller markets. And outlets like the New York Times have a loyal subscriber base of many millions, allowing them to keep operating even in an adverse political environment.

3. Regional Dispersal of Power

Democracies differ widely in their degree of centralization. Many of the countries in which populists have been able to consolidate their power have an unusually high degree of centralization. Both in Hungary and in Venezuela, for example, a few key national-level institutions held tremendous sway over the country. When antidemocratic rulers managed to give their loyalists a majority in the electoral commission or the constitutional court, this single-handedly went a long way towards entrenching their rule.

Many of the countries in which populists have failed to consolidate their power, by contrast, have deeply decentralized institutions. In Brazil, for example, power is significantly dispersed, with regional governors in a position to resist illegal orders by the authorities in Brasília. A similar dispersion of power may help to explain why Modi, despite great popularity, three consecutive electoral victories, and strongly illiberal instincts, has not yet fully been able to take over the Indian political system.

This is another piece of good news for the United States. Governors hold a lot of power in the country. Neither Gavin Newsom nor Gretchen Whitmer are, even if Trump wins, about to dance to his tune. The regional dispersal of power goes even further than that: there are tens of thousands of judges and sheriffs, of election officials and members of school boards, over whom the president holds precious little sway. This makes it easy to corrupt or subvert American democracy in a variety of concerning ways—but hard for one person to concentrate power in their own hands.

4. Number of Veto Points

Democracies also vary according to how many veto points can potentially impede the passage of a piece of legislation. In some countries, there is effectively only one decision-maker. In the United Kingdom, for example, parliament has virtually undivided sovereignty, with a majority of MPs in the House of Commons able to assert their will to a large extent. The United States is at the other end of the extreme. For a piece of legislation to take effect, it needs to find a simple majority in the House of Representatives, to be supported by three in five Senators, to be signed into law by the president, and not be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The unusually high number of veto points in the United States is a mixed blessing. At many times, it makes it hard or impossible to translate popular views into public policies. It’s the difficulty of passing legislation which explains why some extremely popular legislative proposals have persistently failed to make it onto the statute books. An interesting, if contested, literature in political science even suggests that semi-presidential systems with a high number of veto points are especially prone to democratic breakdown: if voters get sufficiently frustrated with the impossibility of getting anything done by regular mechanisms, the theory goes, they eventually turn to someone who promises to go it alone, if that’s what it takes.

But the high number of veto points also ensures that presidents are deeply constrained in what they can do. Trump may well win the presidency while losing either the Senate or the House, severely limiting his room for maneuver. If he does win the Senate, he is almost certainly going to fall short of the 60 votes he needs to govern. There is a workaround to which he may well resort: abolishing the filibuster. But doing so would require him to persuade virtually every member of the Republican delegation to go along with the plan, something that may not prove easy given how adamantly even rank-and-file members have vowed to protect the norm. (Thom Tillis, the Republican Senator from North Carolina, for example, has recently gone on record to say that “The day that Republicans vote to nuke the filibuster is the day I resign from the U.S. Senate.”) And even if Trump wins the trifecta, manages to abolish the filibuster, and wins legislative majorities for truly anti-democratic legislation, it is far from clear that the Supreme Court—which now has a majority of justices who are deeply conservative but who have repeatedly ruled against Trump’s interests, including in highly consequential matters regarding the 2020 election—would go along.

The Bad News: Trump Is Likely to Test America’s Institutions Much More Severely in a Second Term

There are structural reasons to think that, compared to most other countries, America’s institutions are rather resilient to autocratic takeover. That’s the good news. But it would be a mistake to conclude that they are sure to hold up over the next four years just because they did so when Trump was first in office—especially since Trump is likely to attack them in a more capable and concerted manner the second time around.

In 2016, Trump was a political newbie who lacked executive experience, could not call upon a deep bench of loyalists, and himself appeared taken aback to have won the election. This time around, he is much more experienced, has built a movement of loyalists he can immediately deploy, and is openly chomping at the bit to take revenge on those who opposed or betrayed him. The resilience of American institutions is likely to be tested much more severely during a second Trump term.

Four differences between 2016 and 2024 are especially important.

1. Trump Has Learned How to Wield Power

When Trump was first elected, he had never held elected office. Not as a Congressman or Senator, not even as a councilman or dogcatcher. And while he was used to giving orders in his life as a businessman, he did not understand that the effective exercise of political power requires rather different skills. Trump acknowledged as much during his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast: “I had no experience. I had been 17 times in Washington and I had never stayed over… I didn’t know anybody.”

This has now changed. Trump’s second stint in office may well prove as chaotic as the first. But there’s reason to think that he has learned some of the basic lessons of bureaucratic politics, and will prove much more effective in pushing forward his agenda—whether by legitimate or illegitimate means.

2. Trump Now Has a Deep Bench of Loyalists

It is hard to remember to what extent Trump lacked political troops when he first won office. So it is helpful to recall that his transition team was led by Chris Christie. His original cabinet was composed of orthodox members of the business community like Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary, and Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Jim Mattis was Secretary of Defense and Reince Priebus Chief of Staff. Trump’s political appointees mostly consisted of career conservatives whose political vision was not particularly aligned with his, including many who had previously served in George W Bush’s administration.

None of that is likely to repeat itself. Over the past decade, the MAGA-wing of the Republican Party has invested in building up its troops. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation have aligned themselves with Trump and trained staffers who stand at the ready to parachute into key positions as political appointees. Outfits like the Claremont Institute are trying to lend the movement a degree of intellectual coherence. This time around, there will be no Mattis and no Priebus in the administration—only true believers.

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3. Trump Has Taken Control of the Republican Party

To many Republican office-holders, Trump’s victory in the 2016 primaries felt like a hostile takeover. They could not stand the man who had usurped their banner. Even among those who declined to criticize him publicly, many privately hoped that he would lose the election, and allow the party to return to its ideological roots. Many of these skeptics even held formal leadership roles: during the two years in which Republicans technically held a trifecta, the speaker of the House was Paul Ryan.

That Republican Party is no more. Since 2016, Republicans in Congress have seen unusually high turnover. Especially in the House, a large share of the delegation now consists of candidates who won their primaries by explicitly aligning themselves with Trump. And while a comparatively greater number of Senators predates Trump or continues to have private misgivings about him, many of his former critics—like Lindsey Graham—have transformed themselves into unwavering acolytes.

4. Trump Is Out for Revenge

Like other populists who believe that they and they alone truly represent the people, Trump has always been impatient with limits on his power. But when he was first elected, he did not appreciate to what extent the Constitution curtails his power. And because it took a while for Trump to discover exactly where the limits on his power lay, it also took a while for him to start attacking those limits in a concerted manner.

This time around, Trump will be determined to supersede traditional limits on his power from Day One. His allies have, for example, repeatedly floated the possibility of reclassifying the positions of tens of thousands of federal employees so as to enable Trump to fire those who are suspected of being ideologically disloyal. He has also repeatedly made it clear that he would go after his political enemies. As he recently put it in a remarkable “Cease & Desist” notice published on X, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” (For a strong rundown of the specific ways Trump is likely to test the Constitution, see this excellent overview by Damon Linker.)

A Natural Experiment

In 2017, Francis Fukuyama pointed out that the first Trump term would prove to be a natural experiment of sorts: it would at long last determine the winner in the fight between those who do and those who don’t believe that solid institutions can provide a reliable bulwark against dangerous demagogues.

That first experiment offered some preliminary conclusions—conclusions that should make us cautiously optimistic that defenders of democracy retain powerful tools to protect themselves against authoritarian takeover. But it would be dangerously premature to assume that the Constitution is inviolable; when tested in a more severe manner during a second Trump term, it may yet prove less resilient than it appears.

America’s democratic institutions are a seemingly unmovable object. If Trump wins, they are about to be tested by a seemingly unstoppable force. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Depending on how things go next Tuesday, we may be about to find out.