Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his oath of office 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.
There is no universally accepted definition of democracy. Some argue the US is a “flawed” or “illiberal” democracy, or a democracy facing substantial “autocratization” – a process that began long before Trump came to power a decade ago but which his presidency has rapidly accelerated. Still, others believe the concerns are overblown, or reflect an intense partisan dislike of the current president.
Since Trump’s first term, scholars have warned that it can happen here. But many now say this moment is different – not only because Trump’s approach is more methodical and his desire for vengeance more pronounced, but because he now faces far fewer internal constraints.
The president’s Republican critics have mostly been driven from public office and those who remain say they fear retaliation for speaking out. Trump has repeatedly circumvented the GOP-controlled Congress, on spending, tariffs and war powers. And the US’s European allies are scrambling to respond to Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland, by force if necessary. In an interview with the New York Times earlier this month, Trump declared that the only constraint on his presidential power was “my own morality”.
Quantitive assessments of the country’s democratic health point are bleak.
Ratings of US democracy by scholars – and Americans overall – dropped “significantly” after Trump took office last year, according to data from Bright Line Watch, a non-partisan democracy-monitoring initiative that surveys political scientists and the public on potential threats and erosions. In its September survey, experts rated US democracy 54 on a 100-point scale, placing the country closer to illiberal or hybrid regimes than to the full democracies of G7 peers such as Canada or the United Kingdom.
An assessment by the Century Foundation’s new democracy indexing project found that the US had recorded a staggering 28% “collapse” in democratic health over the past year – from 79/100 in 2024 to 57/100 in 2025, the kind of sudden decline more typically associated with coup or other major shock.
Nate Schenkkan, the report’s lead author and a former research director at Freedom House, hoped to help Americans distinguish between the “push-pull” of partisan politics and the “authoritarian behavior” of the current administration.
“When a major change happens in a political system, it’s very unevenly distributed,” Schenkkan said. “Certain people will feel it first. Certain communities will feel it harder and faster. And it is really important to recognize that just because it hasn’t come to you doesn’t mean that it won’t.”
The sense of alarm is especially acute among those who witnessed democratic backsliding elsewhere. Last year, a network of former intelligence and national security professionals applied the same analytical methods they once used to assess the fragility of democracies abroad to the United States. In October, they published an intelligence-style report, concluding with “moderate to high confidence” that the country was “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule.
The White House has repeatedly rejected claims that the president’s actions amount to authoritarianism, dismissing such criticism as “deeply unserious” and rooted in what the president calls “Trump derangement syndrome”. When pressed, the president has said he was handed a broad mandate to restore “law and order”, secure elections and dismantle what he has described as a corrupt federal bureaucracy.
“Here’s the reality: President Trump was resoundingly re-elected by the American people based on his America First agenda,” White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement. “Now, he’s delivering on all his campaign promises – that’s democracy in action.”
Not all scholars agree that American democracy is in imminent peril. Some are wary that democracy indices rely too heavily on subjective indicators, which can amplify pessimism and media alarm over objective markers of democratic breakdown.
“I think we should be a little cautious – not that the experts are necessarily wrong,” said Andrew Little, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, whose research has found that scholars who rate democratic threats tend toward pessimism. He favors a “minimalist” approach to measuring the health of a democracy: “Is the country having free elections, and are people following the results of those elections?”
Especially worrying for scholars of contemporary authoritarianism is the president’s close relationship with tech billionaires, or the so-called “broligarchy”, many of whom donated to and were front and center at his inauguration ceremony a year ago. At the start of his presidency, Trump appointed the Tesla and SpaceX head, Elon Musk, to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.
Oligarchs typically exert influence from the outside, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a prominent historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. But with Doge, the “oligarch of oligarchs was allowed to come inside the government and was basically given the key to access our treasury, the payment systems and data systems of a superpower”, she said. “So we are innovating the autocratic playbook.”
While at the White House, Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government, firing thousands of workers in sweeping, indiscriminate cuts that were quickly challenged in court. Estimates suggest more than 300,000 federal workers left in the Trump-era exodus, draining the government of top scientists, researchers and analysts.
Traditionally autocratic regimes expand social services for supporters as a way to buy loyalty, while stripping away their political rights, Ben-Ghiat said: “That’s how they get so many people to go along and look the other way.” But Trump, she said, has diverged from that model: rather than shoring up the social safety net, his administration, abetted by congressional Republicans, has moved to “kneecap” public health and social programs, including childcare benefits – cuts Democrats plan to foreground in this year’s midterm elections.
Even the most grim assessments stress that democratic decline is not irreversible – and warn that fatalism itself can accelerate backsliding.
“History suggests that it is possible to recover from democratic erosion – but far from a guarantee,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and a co-director of Bright Line Watch, said by email.
Staying engaged, protesting, voting and supporting Republicans who dissent were all ways to contest Trump’s power, he said, adding: “The survival of democracy depends on people believing in its continued viability and fighting to defend it.”
Last year, millions joined No Kings rallies to denounce a president they say has wielded power like a monarch.
At the ballot box, Democrats won a series of victories in the 2025 off-year elections, and are well positioned to retake the House – and possibly the Senate – in the 2026 midterms. Trump, meanwhile, remains unpopular nationally – a vulnerability for his party heading into this year’s elections. A CNN poll found that a majority of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, and 58% call his first year a failure.
Trump’s fragile political standing is one indication that the administration’s narrative is increasingly at “odds with what people see – their lived experience”, Ben-Ghiat said. The more that gap widens, she said, “the more people will wake up”.
She pointed to Minneapolis, where Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act as a response to protests against the killing of a 37-year-old US citizen by a federal immigration officer. Instead of retreating, hundreds of Minnesotans registered for training to become “observers” of enforcement activity.
In the courts, Trump’s executive actions have been met with robust legal resistance. The ACLU, which has filed over 200 legal challenges against the Trump administration in the past year, touted a nearly 65% success rate in “defeating, delaying, or diluting federal policies”.
“We judge the moment we’re in not by examining the president’s actions alone, but by evaluating the system’s response to those provocations as well,” Ben Wizner, deputy legal director at the ACLU, said.
Despite the supreme court’s conservative supermajority – cemented by Trump in his first term – and the president’s sustained campaign to delegitimize judges, Wizner retained a measured optimism: “I am confident that we will emerge from this latest stress test to our democracy with our fundamental rights intact.”
Looking ahead, many scholars predict Trump’s assault on democratic norms and the rule of law is likely to worsen in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms – an erosion that could become entrenched if Democrats fail to secure a check on his presidency by winning back a chamber of Congress.
The most recent Bright Line survey found experts increasingly worried about political violence following the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Concerns also focused on the administration’s aggressive response to peaceful protest, the weaponization of government agencies to punish political opponents, and the president’s unprecedented push to gerrymander congressional districts in Republican states.
Elsewhere, Democrats and political observers have raised fears that Trump could dispatch the national guard to polling places as an intimidation tactic, while others worry about the expansion of ICE operations in Democratic-run cities.
In an interview with Reuters last week, Trump mused that he had accomplished so much in 2025, “we shouldn’t even have an election” in 2026. The White House said he was “simply joking”. Though the federal government cannot unilaterally cancel the midterms, Trump has already taken extraordinary steps to try to change how elections are conducted.
“Autocrats try to convince us that we’re hopeless and helpless. That they’re always going to be there, and there’s no point in resisting,” Ben-Ghiat said. But political dissidents of repressive regimes know better, she said, recalling a conversation with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony.
She had asked Navalnaya how she viewed the US after Trump’s return to power. “You still have elections,” she replied. “And you can use them.”
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