A Trump election victory in 2024 is a threat to democracy to the point of extinction

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing wooden blocks from a rickety tower and then stacking them back on top. With each piece removed, the base becomes shakier; Each block placed back on top unbalances him even more until he finally falls over.

In my opinion, this is essentially how we should think about the risks of the 2024 election to American democracy: an already shaky tower of state would risk total collapse, with catastrophic consequences for the living under its protection.

We live in a time when democracies that were once considered “consolidated” – that is, so secure that they could not fall into authoritarianism – are gradually giving way and even collapsing. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the great democratic success stories of the post-communist world; Today it is considered the only autocracy in the European Union.

Hungarian democracy did not die a natural death. She was assassinated by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who took control of almost every aspect of state power and turned her into tools. Not just the obvious things, like Hungary's public broadcasting and the judiciary, but also other areas – like tax administration and the authorities that regulate higher education.

Bit by bit, bit by bit, Orbán – whose support Trump regularly touts – subtly took one democracy and replaced it with something else.

He was a pioneer in this, creating a plan for the transition from democracy to autocracy that was followed with varying degrees of success by leaders in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Israel and Poland.

The central question of this election is whether voters will give former President Donald Trump the power to resume his efforts to put the United States on that list.

Trump's statements and policy documents such as Project 2025 amount to a systematic program by the Orbánists to transform the government into an extension of his personal will. Their most basic proposal, a revival of Trump's never-implemented Schedule F order, would allow the firing of more than 50,000 career civil servants.

It's easy to dismiss something like this as insider Washington drama, but the stakes are high: In addition to hindering the basic functions of government on which millions of people depend, politicizing public services is a crucial step toward consolidating public service Service power needed to build an autocracy.

Today, democratic collapse is no longer about abolishing elections and declaring oneself a dictator, but about secretly undermining a democratic system so that it becomes increasingly difficult for the opposition to win. This strategy requires complete control of the state and the bureaucracy: that means having the right people in the right places who can use their power to undermine the core functions of democracy.

Trump and his team plan to do just that. They discussed everything from prosecuting local election officials to using regulatory powers to “retaliate” against companies that get in his way – all steps that would depend critically on impartial officials who would defy such orders. to be replaced by loyalists.

How far Washington would go along the Budapest path is very difficult to say. That would depend on a number of hard-to-predict factors, ranging from the competence of Trump's chosen candidates to the level of resistance he faces from the judiciary.

But even if there is a realistic chance that the worst case scenario could be avoided, the danger remains serious. Given the concrete autocratization plans already in place and the immunity from prosecution recently granted by the Supreme Court, there is every reason to view a second Trump term as an extinction-level threat to American democracy.

This attack on democracy did not come out of nowhere. My current book about democracy, The reactionary spiritargues that increasing political antagonism in America is a constant consequence of the defining conflict over race and national identity – with the current round of conflict sparked largely (though not exclusively) by the backlash to Barack Obama's victory in 2008.

The feeling among some Americans that they were losing their country to something new, characterized by a more diverse population and a more equal social hierarchy, made the idea of ​​a strongman who could reverse change very attractive to a significant portion of the American population . These voters now represented a majority, if not an absolute majority, of Republican primary voters – creating the conditions for Trump's rise.

In 2016, Trump capitalized on this reactionary discontent and combined it with a large-scale agenda of backlash against the current political order. His policies and political rhetoric — from immigration to gender issues to trade to foreign policy — were designed to deepen America's divisions and mainstream ideas that were once marginalized.

As effective as this policy was, Trump probably never expected it to lead him to the White House. He had done very little transition work – there was nothing comparable to Project 2025. His team fought from the second the competition was decided in his favor.

The president himself was unfamiliar with the workings of American democracy and largely uninterested in learning the details. Therefore, in his first term, he arbitrarily tore at the foundations, blatantly attacked basic democratic norms of behavior, and installed an incoherent political process that made it very difficult to rely on the expectation of neutral, stable governance.

The results? Increasing tensions between citizens and declining trust in state institutions, in part because the government had rightly lost reliability. There were several near-crises — people forget how close we came to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017 — and then two very real ones: a botched response to the pandemic and a democracy-shaking insurrection at the Capitol.

When critics warn about Trump's threat, they always reply that democracy has already survived four years of Trump's term in office. In fact, democracy did not emerge unscathed from Trump's first term.

And perhaps more importantly, there are many reasons to believe that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first, starting with the level of authoritarian preparation that has already gone into it.

A toddler who grew up to be a saboteur

If Trump's first term was akin to the accidental destruction of a toddler, a second would be more akin to the deliberate destruction of a saboteur. Based on four years of governing experience and four more years of planning, Trump and his team concluded that the problem with their first game of Jenga was that they simply hadn't removed enough roadblocks to democracy.

I don't think Trump could use these plans over the course of four more years to successfully build a fascist state that would imprison critics and put himself in power indefinitely. That's partly because of the size and complexity of the American state, and partly because that's not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in democracies today.

But over the course of those years, he managed to rip out so many of the basic building blocks of American democracy that he was able to truly bring the system to the brink of collapse.

It could well create a political environment that skews electoral battles (even more) in favor of Republicans – thereby accelerating dangerous and destabilizing partisan conflicts over the very rules of the political game. He could compromise media companies, especially those owned by the government or a billionaire. It could destroy the government's ability to carry out basic tasks ranging from fighting pollution to safely storing nuclear weapons.

The damage could be immediately catastrophic, as we saw in the first term: political violence and mass death (from war, a strange public health system, or any number of other things). But even if the very worst-case scenarios were avoided, the structural damage to the tower of American democracy could be long-lasting, undoing the complex and mutually supportive processes that keep democracy alive.

When government delivers its core services reliably and neutrally, people tend to have more confidence in all of its functions – including running fair elections. When they have more confidence in elections, they tend to trust them more as a means of resolving major political disagreements. When they trust the election results, they tend to assign a certain degree of legitimacy to the succeeding government, making it easier for it to deliver its core services reliably and neutrally. The stable house of democracy is created through the combination of these functions.

John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, described this as a long process of trust-building that begins with a fundamental belief in democratic ideals. When people of all political stripes fundamentally believe in the system, he argues, they begin to play by its rules—which gives others more confidence that they, too, can follow the rules without being cheated.

“As political cooperation progresses, citizens gradually gain increasing trust in one another,” Rawls writes in his book Political liberalism.

A second Trump term risks replacing Rawls' virtuous circle with a vicious circle. If Trump debases government and follows the Orbánist playbook with at least some success, much of the public would rightly lose their already frayed trust in the American system of government. And whether it could survive such a catastrophe for long is unclear.