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.
There’s no democracy when a shitstain is running everything like a dictator and his sycophants are too busy wallowing in money after sucking greasy toes. If they weren’t such greedy spineless assclowns then maybe they’d have done something. But they are, so here we are.
The stupidest ugly nasty moronic weak pathetic narcissistic loser is running this country into the ground and they’re happy about it because, after they wash the taste of toes from their mouth, they have a ton of money.
Of course it is and MAGA fucks are following Project 2025.
Speedrunning for Supply-Side Jesus.
haha crazy how predictable some things are when they quite literally tell you what’s going to happen
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.
If his re-election was legitimate, that’s a pretty good argument for just letting it die.
No shit Sherlock.
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.
It’s NOT illegal to say “with a mortar launcher” because it’s an incomplete sentence.
The first sentence is wrong. Trump never touched that Bible. He was probably afraid it would burn him
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
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!”
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.
“To the brink…”
Yeah, that’s how brinksmanship works.
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.
- 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.
This ship has sailed. Now everybody has to deal with this shit. Fascism doesn’t know trade barriers
