Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump placed his hand on the Bible 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.
Experts are saying a lot of obvious things lately.
I’m up for the ‘experts do shit’ phase.
is the US in democratic peril?
Maybe ask the people of Minneapolis.
It’s a throw back to 2014 and the BLM protests.
Easy to forget the time two journalists working for the WaPo were covering a protest in Ferguson, shooting footage from the inside of a McDonalds. The police saw the cameras and sent in officers in full riot gear to tackle the reporters and arrest them. No reason for it save that these were liberal reports filming a gestapo raid on civil rights marchers.
This was under Obama in a city with a Democratic Mayor that was fully in the thrall of a police-instigated terror campaign. The events surrounding Ferguson opened up a whole pocket of inquiry into why this branch off of the Greater St. Louis area with an enormous minority population was operating as some kind of colonized satrap of St. Louis proper - no control of their own police, no control of their own budget, an absurd rate of citations and arrests per capita, abysmal voter turnout in large part thanks to felony disenfranchisement, bad education, poor civil maintenance, and endemic inter-generational poverty.
If you want to talk about the state of American Democracy, you have to start talking about Ferguson, MO and how it is increasingly the benchmark for how civil society operates in this country.
You also have to start talking about The Network State and the Silicon Valley vision for American anarcho-capitalism.
Democrats don’t identify with “the left,” or with reform. They are the establishment, they are also generally crooked in ways that would make local officials vulnerable to police if they checked them, even if they wanted to, their corruption could be exposed. All blue cities have pretty fascistic police leadership. Ie portland was sharing intelligence and covering for the proud boys and their ilk in the first term of doh fuhrer there. Berkely had a rw crazy stab a handful of protesters, the cops arrested the stabbed and not the staber. It’s not a one off.
We need all new leadership, these democrats are cynical rich, aristocrats, and they would be republicans if that was the party in power. They clearly are not doing an acceptable job unless one listens to and trusts the suits on tv, in which case one would be a fucking moron.
That is not really unusual for the US, things like that have been going on long before 2014.
How many women got shot dead in broad daylight, by a thug who was immediately declared innocent of all wrongdoing, in the BLM protests? This time is different.
It’s worse because it has been 11 years since Ferguson. This is how civil rights and government standards are eroded. You have a chip (two journalists being arrested and brutalized in 2014 filming a protest) and when it goes unpunished, it gets repeated across the nation until it becomes the norm.
Similar chips happened during the BLM protests, which were themselves a crackdown to the murder of black citizens in broad daylight by police. I recall watching a news reporter shot while broadcasting on TV at night during a 2021 BLM protest. The same happened to reporters in Los Angeles in 2025. Then we saw bystanders in LA being shot in the head. Then Renee Good was shot in the head her car.
It all builds on itself, as government gets increasingly confident in their strength and the passivity of its population. None of this is new; it’s just expanding.
29-Year-Old Protest Leader Found Dead in Burning Car in St. Louis
On November 22, 2014, Tamir E. Rice, a twelve year old African-American boy, was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old white patrolman with the Cleveland Division of Police (CDP).
Sandra Annette Bland was a 28-year-old African-American woman who was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, on July 13, 2015, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop.
Vanishingly few people are allowed to remember this. I wonder if Renee Good will also fall down the mental rabbit hole.
One of the greatest sources for the end of US democracy is the complete and total lack of journalistic integrity by all of the most major news outlets.
If they aren’t 100% compliant to Trump, they are 99% compliant because they rather pretend anything that asshole does might not be that bad so they don’t alienate his dipshit base from their audience. They’re also too chicken-shit to go against their sponsors, most of who donated massive bribes to Trump to do their bidding.
And don’t get me started on Israel’s control over US media, and alliance with the GOP and establishment Dems.
Seems like Snowden and Assange exposed the lack of journalistic integrity a long time ago, and Pulitzer and Hearst before then.
see also: Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent
I’ve been recommended Parenti’s Inventing Reality, but haven’t had a chance to get it yet. I really want it hardcopy because it’s just easier for me.
Eta: here’s an audio copy *of Parenti discussing themes in the book, I believe, if anyone is interested https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-inventing-reality-recorded-1993
I still hate how almost every normal person I talk to outside of the internet still thinks it’s all fake news.
Unless it’s actively happening in their city, in front of them, it doesn’t exist.
If it does happen in front of them, people like that will think the victim must have deserved it because “they’re only going after the criminals.” And they’ll stick with this until it happens to them, whereupon they’ll think they’re the unique and first example of injustice and mistreatment of someone who didn’t deserve it.
I tried to ask Renee Nicole Good, but she wouldn’t answer her phone.
Not from Minneapolis but I did just read this article So how’s the occupation going for you?
Dear People of Minneapolis,
Is the US in democratic peril?
Love, FenderStratocaster
When Americans willingly gave up their democracy for an 80 year old felon rapist pedophile traitor.
Truly the most pathetic ending to a democracy.
deleted by creator
A demented, senile, pedophile felon has taken over America and is planning to extend its parasitic presence in the world too.
Oh wait, same disgusting sack of filth.
Don’t give him too much credit. Assholes like Miller and Thiel are also behind this bullshit.
American democracy is dead in the water. Insurrection + Trump happening twice proves it. There is no checks or balances. It is an authoritarian state. The people are divided, the house has fallen.
Everything since Reagan has been set up for this moment. It just took a truly evil, narcissistic piece of shit surrounded by sycophants and monsters to seize the opportunity that was created.
Of course it is and MAGA fucks are following Project 2025.
Speedrunning for Supply-Side Jesus.
Are they as deranged as Trump? After the disaster of his first term, people were like: yeah, we want that again! So they voted him back into office even though he clearly said what his plans were, which are totally dictator level. Within the first 100 days of his second term, he already did as much as Orban did in 8 years, you know, the guy known to be Europe’s last dictator.
The US isn’t a democracy, as it’s voting system is corrupt (think of gerrymandering for example). It’s a sham democracy, where the country is run by corporations, for corporations, and where it’s citizens are just consuming drones for those corporations. It’s capitalism, but so fucked up into the extremes that it’s on a dystopian level.
So the US isn’t a real democracy and what Trump has done, already ended whatever the US was before him within those first 100 days of his second term.
Agreed but Trump won the popular vote, he’d be in there regardless. The American people can’t make excuses that they are oppressed. They chose this, more than half of them anyway
Incorrect. Not only did less than half of people vote, but Trump received less than half of all votes cast.
On the brink suggests it’s not already proper fucked, which it is. Past the point of no return, only a wild card chance of taking it back in 2028, soon to be squandered under the leadership of the aristocrats in the democratic establishment, as well intentioned people will be shitty to anyone wanting winnable candidates pushing popular reform because they trust the people that have brought us the last three presidential candidates to be the safe choice. America wants to be fucked by the rich, with gay marriage and crumbs to the deserving fucked!
It’s not your fault well intentioned america, you are, let’s call it misguided. Or less charitably we could say you are collectively fucking stupid. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery america!
You mean the same thing we were warning the MAGA fucks about before the election are actually happening? You don’t say? Man, this is a shitty time to be right.
It’s what they wanted and democracy won.
What failed is the completely lack of accountability and systamitic lack of boundries.
- Tracking and arresting people because of their appearance - check
- Prosecuting independent reporting - check
- Creating a de facto monopoly on information - check
- Prosecuting political opponents amd people who resist authoritarianism - check
- Prosecuting magistrates for following the law - check
- Killing protesters - check
- Military expansionism - check
- Personality cult - check
I think you pass
Extra point for changing the meaning of words and inventing a novlang
… and a covfefe.
The first sentence is wrong. Trump never touched that Bible. He was probably afraid it would burn him
Its wild the things you forget, when your flooded with so much BS. If Obama didn’t touch the bible they would probably still be talking about it on Fox News.
I might try to use this next time I have to talk to someone conservative. Just wave away whatever they are saying and just say “Yeah but Trump never touched the bible when he took his oath so he isn’t actually the president. Fake President!”
Yeah. The Guardian changed it after I posted it because of that.
It now reads:
Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his oath of office and completed an extraordinary return to power
Trump is such a vile human being.
The obese imbecile knows he’s dying and thinks/wants to be remembered as a hardman president. And he will be by a few idiots in the back woods of stupidville.
However he will only truly be remembered as the guy who raped many children with his best mate Jeffery Epstein …and then did increasingly idiotic things go try to cover it all up.
That is the legacy that will be left behind when the fat cunt finally does the world a favour and croaks it. Die, piggy, DIE.
This ship has sailed. Now everybody has to deal with this shit. Fascism doesn’t know trade barriers
Interesting how, if the OP’s text is indictive of the original version of the article, The Guardian had to change their first sentence from saying Trump placed his hand on the bible to saying just him taking his oath of office since he didnt place his hand on a bible.
To be fair, they make his skin sizzle.
Good catch! Thanks for the head’s up.
Should I cross it out and change it to the updated version or just leave it alone?
