Donald Trump cares little about democracy, except in the most utilitarian sense. For Trump, democracy is a ladder that he can use to ascend to power. He is not interested in promoting democracy abroad or strengthening democracy at home. He cares only about power: corporate, presidential, national.
Before Trump, presidents frequently promoted U.S. democracy overseas, despite its obvious design flaws: elections won by candidates who lost the popular vote, wealthy people buying seats in Congress, redistricting to favor a particular party, a system dominated by two parties.
There won’t be any democracy promotion under Donald Trump. In his second inaugural, Trump promised to promote American power, not American principles. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he trumpeted. He promised to push American cars and promote the U.S. military, not least of which to retake the Panama Canal.
It’s no great loss perhaps that the United States will be suspending its official democracy promotion. Other countries are better positioned to that kind of work. The South Korean people, for instance, impeached their leader Yoon Suk-yeol when he declared martial law, something the U.S. Congress failed to do twice with Donald Trump when he overstepped the law. A number of European countries have achieved a much higher level of civic participation and a lower amount of economic inequality than you’ll find in the United States.
The problem for the foreseeable future lies not with the exported version of U.S. democracy. It’s what Trump will do to American democracy at home.
Trump is a convicted felon who attempted to remain in power even after he lost the 2020 election. The case against him for breaking the law to stay in the White House was likely strong enough to result in a conviction. Avoiding prison was perhaps the chief motivation for Trump to win the 2024 elections. His victory led to the dismissal of the case.
To avoid a prison sentence, Trump resorted to lies, distortions, and threats to win the 2024 election. He also relied on the deep pockets of billionaire Elon Musk to sponsor deceptive ads and buy votes in swing states.
If he had lost the 2024 election, Trump was fully prepared to tear the country apart in an effort to prove that the election had been “stolen.” He did win, of course, though with only 49.9 percent of the vote, the smallest margin of victory in nearly 60 years.
Day One Dictator
Trump promised to be a dictator for his first day in office. It’s no surprise, then, that he issued the most executive orders of any president on inauguration day. Executive action is nothing new. Both Democrats and Republicans have collaborated in expanding the powers of the presidency. But Trump has gone beyond what other presidents have done, or instance to challenge the U.S. Constitution itself by declaring an end to birthright citizenship. He also pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists, which sends a disturbing message to the citizenry about the lack of consequences for those who attack the federal government.
Trump will also take a chainsaw to government—cutting the regulatory agencies that implement policy and keep Americans safe. Democracy, in the modern world, requires state power. By cutting back on federal authority, Trump will empower instead conservative states, corporations, and religious institutions.
The MAGA revolution is all about destroying public institutions, like government-mandated health insurance. Eliminating the Department of Education will only further undermine what religious institutions and hardline conservatives have been pushing for years: the expansion of private schools at the expense of public education.
Although Trump pitched himself as the hero of the “working man,” he has on the contrary created a Kremlin-like oligarchy around himself. Elon Musk is only the richest and most prominent of the dozen billionaires that Trump has selected for his cabinet. Other oligarchs, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have scrambled to curry favor with the returning president, turning such sycophancy into an astute investment decision.
America’s richest people expect to grow their wealth exponentially under Trump. After all, Musk himself made $170 billion just since Election Day, a few short months ago.
U.S. democracy has long been deformed by the influence of the wealthy. But now the playing field, under Trump, will tilt so dramatically that all but the richest will simply tumble off the edge.
Democracy in America has been around for over 200 years. Surely one man, no matter how many super-wealthy people he gathers in his circle, cannot unravel such an august institution. Democracy survived Trump’s first term. Surely, it will survive the abuses of his second.
Or will it?
Coup vs Civil War
The challenge that Trump poses lies not just in the policies he promotes, the public institutions he defunds and delegitimizes, or the wealth he redistributes upward. The new president threatens the very fabric of the country.
The handover of power went smoothly after the last election because the losing party respects the rule of law.
But the erosion of democratic norms under Trump suggests that the next presidential election in 2028 will not go as smoothly. An even more elderly Trump might defy the U.S. constitution—and its two-term limit for presidents—and stay in office under some contrived state of emergency. Or he might usher his hand-picked successor into the White House in a similarly autocratic fashion.
The best-case scenario, of course, would be a democratic election in 2028. But let’s say Trump’s successor loses. Trump has effectively said that any election that doesn’t go his way is illegitimate. Should a Trump-inspired uprising take place in 2028 to challenge a “stolen election,” it will be much better planned and executed than the one on January 6, 2021, just as Trump’s second term is much more organized than the first. Such a nation-wide insurrection following any disputed election outcome could unravel an already divided United States.
So, the worst-case scenario for the United States is a coup and the best-case scenario is a civil war? That does not bode well for American democracy.
What to Do?
The only way to avoid these scenarios of coup or civil war is to strengthen democratic institutions even as Trump tries to destroy them. This is no easy feat.
The obvious strategy is to bolster democracy at a state or local level, particularly in areas that did not vote for Trump. This makes a lot of sense, but it will, inevitably, deepen the divide between red and blue states and encourage the very civil-war dynamic it’s urgent to forestall.
Building up the capacity of California or Chicago to fend off authoritarian power grabs from a federal bureaucracy commandeered by Trump will necessarily absorb a lot of the time and energy of the mainstream resistance. It will also put anti-MAGA forces on the defensive as they scramble to file lawsuits to stop Trump’s actions.
But the only sustainable way to strengthen U.S. democracy is to build a movement that includes a lot of the voters who supported Trump. They voted for the current president because they wanted change. They didn’t vote for rule by the rich.
It’s often said that American democracy is being undermined by the wealthy and their capacity to buy elections. Now, paradoxically, it’s the presence of a dozen billionaires in Trump’s inner circle that may save democracy—by fueling the wrath of the disenfranchised and prompting them to support an alternative to MAGA.
Anger over a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich will make it more likely that any future lies about a “strong leader” and a “stolen election” will fall on deaf ears. It’s just a question of what political entity will mobilize that anger and turn it into an electoral force.
This post was originally published on here
