Three major reports out this month say President Trump has done serious damage to American democracy at remarkable speed since his return to the White House.
An annual report from V-Dem, an institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, concluded democracy had deteriorated so much in the U.S. that it lowered the country’s democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.
The U.S. landed between Slovakia and Greece.
Meanwhile, Bright Line Watch, which surveys more than 500 U.S. scholars, concluded that the U.S. system now falls nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. The newest survey comes out next week. Bright Line Watch’s co-directors spoke to NPR exclusively ahead of publication.
Yet another report out Thursday from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based democracy think-tank, said that among free countries, the U.S. joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year.
“The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid,” said Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S. “It’s the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.”
V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 scholars contributed data to the report, which is the largest of its kind.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales dismissed V-Dem’s analysis as “a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization.”
She called Trump a champion for freedom and democracy and the most transparent and accessible president ever.
“His return to the White House saved the legacy media from going out of business,” Wales said.
Trump has rejected criticism that he tries to rule as an autocrat.
“A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office last August. “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.”
Lindberg said V-Dem downgraded America’s rating based on the Trump administration concentrating executive power, overstepping laws, circumventing the Republican-led Congress as well as attacks on the news media and freedom of speech. Lindberg, a political scientist, is struck by the speed with which Trump has acted.
“Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orban in Hungary four years,” said Lindberg, referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
All three of those leaders came to power through democratic elections, but scholars say they have since undermined checks and balances on executive power to try to ensure they remain in office.
Trump is a big fan of Orbán’s and has praised him as a “strongman” and a “tough person.” Orbán faces election next month — the first real challenge to his rule in a decade and a half.
Scholars are alarmed by Trump’s blitz on the U.S. system of governance, but John Carey, a co-director of Bright Line Watch, says the United States’ democracy rating might have slid even further in recent months if not for the courts pushing back.
Carey says autocrats try to co-opt or pressure government institutions that serve as referees but notes that didn’t work last month as the Supreme Court ruled against the president on tariffs.
“One of the things that the tariff decision suggested [is] he has not fully captured that set of referees,” said Carey, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, “and that’s the most important set.”
Brendan Nyhan, a fellow Dartmouth professor and Bright Line co-director, adds that just because Trump has undermined democracy, doesn’t mean the effects are permanent.
“There’s just no question that what we’re seeing is the authoritarian playbook,” said Nyhan, “but there’s no guarantee that Trump will be able to operate this way after the midterms, let alone a successor after 2028.”
Yana Gorokhovskaia, director for strategy and design for Freedom House, says some of Trump’s policies abroad also are undermining the country’s democratic standing overseas.
For instance, the State Department often used to call out election fraud in other countries, but under Trump, it has said it will only comment on foreign elections when the U.S. has a clear and compelling interest.
“What we’re losing is democratic solidarity globally,” Gorokhovskaia said. “We’re no longer emphasizing … a distinction between democracies and autocracies in the world.”
That doesn’t mean the U.S. doesn’t take sides in foreign elections. Just last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly endorsed Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic leader, for a fifth term.
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