this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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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.

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[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago

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.