By Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post, November 6, 2024
Donald Trump’s return to the White House signals a significant breakdown of an already battered democracy, experts say. Almost as dangerous, they contend, much of the electorate sees him as democracy’s savior.
“We’ve already been in a process over the last 10 years of democratic decay,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” among other books on the subject. “This election will just hasten that decline.”
Trump — who was impeached twice, convicted of some crimes and charged with others, judged liable for sexual abuse and fined hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil fraud trial — campaigned on instituting sweeping changes to the country, including mass deportations of immigrants, broad-based tariffs, dramatically pared-back climate regulations, and a purge of “deep state” bureaucrats.
But it is not Trump’s individual policy proposals that worry history and democracy scholars as much as his continued denial of reality that he lost the 2020 presidential election and his role in encouraging his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol. The failure of the courts and Congress to hold him accountable for those actions signals an unofficial takeover of the levers of government by a charismatic, strongman figure who has remade the Republican Party in his image, these democracy scholars say. He is poised to start a second term with broad legal immunity, granted by a reshaped Supreme Court upon which he has exerted significant influence.
It will be months before post-election autopsies are complete, but initial signs point to Trump’s success in creating a coalition of the disaffected — people who want to simply “throw the bums out,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University whose intellectual interests include the intersection of social crises and political transformation. Significantly, some polling suggests that Trump subverted the idea that he was a threat to democracy by making his Democratic opponents out to be the real threat. He painted himself as a victim of Democratic lawfare, asserted that Vice President Kamala Harris seized power without a single primary vote, and routinely alleged that the country’s election system, among the most secure in the world, was manipulated against him.
“Trump continually tries to create a false equivalence,” said Ziblatt, “which is pretty standard fare, actually, by authoritarians.”
The democratic erosion in the United States is not limited to Trump’s leadership. Yes, his refusal to acknowledge his 2020 loss did grave damage to democracy, but so have efforts to politicize election administration, gerrymander districts, and disenfranchise voters’ access to the ballot, according to a 2023 Brookings Institution study.
“The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive,” Ziblatt said. “People still vote, and elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.”
