The 2024 presidential election is over — and Donald Trump is the winner. The legitimacy of the election is in no doubt: Trump is on track to win the Electoral College by a wide margin and potentially win the popular vote for the first time.
Yet while the election was clearly in the offing, what followed might not. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to execute his long-proposed plan to hollow out American democracy from within.
Trump and his team have detailed plans to turn the federal government into an extension of his will: a tool to carry out his oft-promised “retaliation” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and anyone else who opposes him. Trump’s inner circle, free of almost anyone who might challenge him, is ready to carry out his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, gave him broad immunity from his acts in office.
In almost every conceivable way, the second Trump administration will likely be more dangerous than the first, a tenure that ended with more than 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and riots at the Capitol. A predictable crisis — a president consolidating power into his own hands and using it to punish his enemies — looms on the horizon, with many unexpected crises waiting in the wings.
Yet no matter how dire the situation, America has the reserves it needs to withstand an impending attack. Throughout the country’s long democratic history, it has developed strong mechanisms to check abuse of power.
America’s federal structure gives blue states control over key powers such as election administration. Its independent judiciary was strong during Trump’s first term. Its professional, apolitical military would likely push back against illegal orders. Its politically active citizens have proven ability to take to the streets. And America’s world-leading media will fiercely resist any attempt to compromise its independence.
No country has ever fallen into authoritarianism at America’s stage of political-economic development. There are some reasonably close modern analogues, most worryingly modern Hungary, but even they differ in important respects.
This is not to make an argument for complacency or naïve optimism. Quite the contrary: the next four years would be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War; If it survives them, it must be bruised, battered and battle-scarred.
But this reality should not cause us to succumb to despair. As serious as things seem now, it’s possible that – if people take the gravity of the threat seriously – the Republic could come out on the other side intact.
Trump’s scary second term agenda explained
We don’t know why, exactly, America’s voters chose to return Trump to high office. The data is not complete, let’s analyze it in detail. But as murky as the electoral picture is, some elements of future policy are clear. Trump’s own comments, his campaign statements and supporting documents like Project 2025 give us a relatively coherent picture of what the agenda will be in the next Trump administration.
Much of it resembles what you’d expect to see from any other Republican president. Trump will appoint corporate allies to lead federal agencies, where they will work to reduce regulations on a range of issues. Workplace safety standards from pollution. He has already proposed Regressive tax cuts Without off-setting increases, that would increase the federal deficit, just like George W. Bush’s fiscal policies. He will likely take steps to reduce access to abortion, end federal police efforts to rein in abusive cops, and crack down on them. Federal protections for trans people — all examples of how his agenda will hurt certain groups, usually already vulnerable, more than others.
Trump’s biggest break with his party on traditional policy will likely come on trade, immigration and foreign policy. Trump has proposed “universal” tariffs on imported goods, a mass deportation campaign that detains suspected “illegals” in camps and Undermining America’s commitment to the NATO alliance. Together these policies would be a recipe for economic collapse, domestic unrest and global chaos – in an already chaotic time.
But perhaps the most dangerous Trump policies will come in an area that traditionally transcends partisan conflict: the nature of the American system of government.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has shown himself obsessed with two ideas: exercising personal control over the federal government and taking “revenge” against Democrats who challenged him and those who accused him. His team, obligingly, provided detailed plans to do both of these things.
The process begins with something called Schedule F, an executive order that Trump issued at the end of his first term but never got around to implementing. Schedule F reclassifies a large part of the professional civil service — presumably Above 50,000 people — as political appointees. Trump can fire these nonpartisan officials and replace them with cronies: people who will follow his orders, no matter how dubious. Trump has promised to revive Schedule F “immediately” after he returns to office, and there’s no reason to doubt him.
Amid a newly loyal bureaucracy and leadership ranks free of first-term dissenting voices like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump faces little resistance as he tries to implement policies that threaten core democratic liberties.
And Trump and his party have already offered many of them. Notable examples include Investigating leading Democrats over dubious allegationsLocal election administrators use the regulatory authority to judge Revenge against corporations that cross himand either shutting down the public broadcaster or Turning them into propaganda broadsheets. Trump and his allies have claimed unilateral executive authority to take all of these actions. (It’s still unclear which party will control the House, but Republicans will be in charge of the Senate for at least the next two years.)
Ultimately, all this executive activity aims to turn the United States into a greater version of Hungary — a country whose leadership and policies are regularly praised by Trump, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts.
Hungary still has the right to elections and nominal freedom of speech; There are no tanks or concentration camps in the streets for regime critics. But it’s also a place where everything — from the national election authority to government industry bodies — has been twisted to punish dissent and spread government propaganda. Every aspect of the government has bent down to ensure that the opposition has no fighting chance in the national elections. It is a form of despotism in disguise, which maintains the system of democracy and hollows it out from within.
This is why a second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy. The governing agenda is clearly a systematic effort by Trump and his allies to craft Turn Washington into Budapest-on-the-PotomacDeliberately and quietly destroying democracy from within.
Democracy is not lost
It is important to remember that, as dire as the situation is, the United States is not Hungary.
When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament – allowing him to pass a new constitution that overturned electoral rules in favor of his party and imposed political control over the judiciary. Trump doesn’t have that much of a majority and amending the US Constitution is nearly impossible.
America’s federal structure creates several checks on the power of the national government. Electoral administration in America is done at the state level, making it very difficult for Trump to wrest control from Washington. A lot of prosecutions are done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and can resist federal bullying.
The American media is much larger and more powerful than its Hungarian counterparts. Orbán has, among other things, brought the press forward by politicizing government ad buying — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, doesn’t depend on.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something that the Hungarians do not: enhanced alertness.
Although the pioneering form of subtle authoritarianism in Hungary in 2010 was novel, it is well understood today. Orbán managed to be known as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office primed to see nearly half of the voting public as a threat to democracy and thus resist it. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans, not only from elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the public.
This is a case against despair.
As dire as things seem now, politics rarely gives a damn — especially not the outcome of a titanic struggle like the one unfolding in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since leaving office, democracy’s defenders also have time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to start deploying them.
Trump won the presidency, which gives him plenty of power to push his anti-democratic dreams into power. But it is not an unlimited power, and there are powerful means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to fight.
