It’s not alarmist: A second Trump term really is an extinction-level threat to democracy

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing wooden blocks from a rickety tower and then stacking them back on the top. Each removed piece makes the base more wobbly; each block put back on top makes it more unbalanced until it eventually topples.  

This, I’d argue, is basically how we should be thinking about the stakes of the 2024 election for American democracy: an already-rickety tower of state would be at risk of falling in on itself entirely, with catastrophic results for those who live under its shelter.

We live in an era where democracies once considered “consolidated” — meaning so secure that that they couldn’t collapse into authoritarianism — have started to buckle and even collapse. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the post-Communist world’s great democratic success stories; today, it is now understood to be the European Union’s only autocracy.

Hungarian democracy did not die of natural causes. It was murdered by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who seized control of nearly every aspect of state power and twisted it into tools. Not just the obvious things, like Hungary’s public broadcaster and judiciary, but other areas — like its tax administration and the offices regulating higher education. 

Bit by bit, piece by piece, Orbán — whose support Trump regularly touts — subtly took a democracy and replaced it with something different.

In this, he was a trailblazer, creating a blueprint of going from democracy to autocracy that has been followed, to 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 grant former President Donald Trump the power to resume his efforts to place the United States on this list.

A predictable crisis

Trump’s statements and policy documents like Project 2025 amount to a systematic Orbánist program for turning the government into an extension of his personal will. Their most fundamental proposal, a revival of Trump’s never-implemented Schedule F order, would permit the firing of upward of 50,000 career civil servants.

This is the kind of thing that’s easy to dismiss as so much insider Washington drama, but the stakes are sky-high: Beyond hindering the basic functions of government that millions of people depend on, politicizing the civil service is a critical step toward consolidating the power needed to build an autocracy.

Democratic collapse nowadays isn’t a matter of abolishing elections and declaring oneself dictator, but rather stealthily hollowing out a democratic system so it’s harder and harder for the opposition to win. This strategy requires full control over the state and the bureaucracy: That means having the right staff in the right places who can use their power to erode democracy’s core functions.

Trump and his team have plans to do just that. They have discussed everything from prosecuting local election administrators to using regulatory authority for “retribution” against corporations that cross him — all steps that would depend, crucially, on replacing nonpartisan civil servants who would resist such orders with loyalists.

How far Washington would travel down the Budapest road is very hard to say. It would depend on a variety of factors that are difficult to foresee, ranging from the competence of Trump’s chosen appointees to the degree of resistance he faces from the judiciary. 

But even if there’s a reasonable chance that the worst case might be avoided, the danger remains serious. With specific plans for autocratization already in place, and a recent grant of criminal immunity from the Supreme Court, there’s every reason to treat a second Trump term as an extinction-level threat to American democracy. 

This assault on democracy didn’t come out of nowhere. My recent book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, argues that rising political antagonism in America is a perennial outgrowth of its defining conflict over race and national identity — with the current round of conflict sparked largely (albeit not entirely) by backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. 

The sense among some Americans that they were losing their country to something new, defined by a more diverse population and a more equal social hierarchy, made the idea of a strongman who could roll back change quite appealing to a significant chunk of the American population. These voters had come to constitute a plurality, if not an outright majority, of Republican primary voters — creating the conditions for Trump to rise.

In 2016, Trump seized on this reactionary discontent and married it to a whole-scale agenda of backlash against the current political order. His policies and political rhetoric — on everything from immigration to gender to trade to foreign policy — were calculated to deepen America’s divisions and mainstream ideas once consigned to the fringes. 

As potent as this politics proved, it’s likely Trump never really expected it to take him all the way to the White House. He had done very little transition work — nothing like Project 2025 existed. His team was scrambling from the second the contest was called in their favor.

The president himself was unfamiliar with how American democracy worked and largely uninterested in learning the details. So in his first term, he haphazardly yanked at its foundations — flagrantly assailing basic democratic norms of conduct and installing an incoherent policy process that made it very difficult to rely on any expectation of neutral, stable governance.

The results? Rising tensions between citizens and declining faith in government institutions, in part because government had become legitimately less reliable. There were several near-miss crises — people forget how close we were to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017 — and then two very real ones: a botched pandemic response and a democracy-shaking riot at the Capitol. 

When critics warn about Trump’s threat, the constant rejoinder is that democracy already survived four years of Trump 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 the first — starting with the degree of authoritarian preparation that’s already gone into it.

A toddler grown into a saboteur

If the first Trump term was akin to the random destruction of a toddler, a second would be more like the deliberate demolition of a saboteur. With the benefit of four years of governing experience and four more years of planning, Trump and his team have concluded that the problem with their first game of Jenga was that they simply did not remove enough of democracy’s blocks.

I do not think that, over the course of four more years, Trump could use these plans to successfully build a fascist state that would jail critics and install himself in power indefinitely. This is in part because of the size and complexity of the American state, and in part because that’s not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in democracies nowadays.

But over the course of those years, he could yank out so many of American democracy’s basic building blocks that the system really could be pushed to the brink of collapse.

He could quite plausibly create a political environment that tilts electoral contests (even more) in the GOP’s favor — accelerating dangerous and destabilizing partisan conflict over the very rules of the political game. He could compromise media outlets, especially government or billionaire-owned ones. He could wreck the government’s ability to perform basic tasks, ranging from managing pollution to safely storing nuclear weapons.

The damage could be immediately catastrophic in ways we saw in the first term: political violence and mass death (from war, a crank-controlled 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 supporting processes that work to keep democracy alive.

When government reliably and neutrally delivers core services, people tend to have more faith in all of its functions — including running fair elections. When they have more faith in elections, they tend to trust them more as a means of resolving major policy disagreements. When they trust election outcomes, they tend to grant a baseline level of legitimacy to the government that follows, making it easier for it to reliably and neutrally deliver core services. The steady house of democracy is built by the gluing together of these functions.

John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, described this as a long process of trust-building that starts with a basic faith in democratic ideals. When people of all political stripes basically believe in the system, he argues, they start acting inside its rules — giving others more confidence that they too can follow the rules without being cheated.

“Gradually, as the success of political cooperation continues, citizens gain increasing trust and confidence in one another,” Rawls writes in his book Political Liberalism.

A second Trump term risks replacing Rawls’s virtuous cycle with a vicious one. As Trump degrades government, following the Orbánist playbook with at least some success, much of the public would justifiably lose their already-battered faith in the American system of government. And whether it could long survive such a disaster is anyone’s guess.