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The 2024 presidential election is over — and Donald Trump is the victor. There is no doubt about the election’s legitimacy: 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 itself was clearly on the level, what comes next may not be. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to enact his long-proposed plans to hollow out American democracy from within.

Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and anyone else who has opposed him. Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.

In nearly every conceivable way, a second Trump administration will likely be more dangerous than the first, a term that ended in over 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and a riot at the Capitol. A predictable crisis — a president consolidating power in his own hands and using it to punish his enemies — looms on the horizon, with many unpredictable crises likely waiting in the wings.

Yet as dire as things are, America has reserves it can draw on to withstand the coming assault. Over the course of the country’s long democratic history, it has built up robust systems for checking abuses of power. 

America’s federal structure gives blue states control over key powers like election administration. Its independent judiciary stood strong during Trump’s first term. Its professional, apolitical military will likely push back against unlawful orders. Its politically active citizenry has a proven capacity to take to the streets. And America’s world-leading media will fiercely resist any effort to compromise its independence.

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No country at America’s level of political-economic development has ever collapsed into authoritarianism. There are some reasonably close modern analogues, most worryingly modern Hungary, but even they are different in crucial respects.

This is not to make an argument for complacency or naive optimism. Quite the opposite: The next four years will be American democracy’s gravest threat since the Civil War; if it survives them, it will surely do so battered, bruised, and battle-scarred.

But this realism should not be cause for succumbing to despair. As grim as things feel now, it’s possible that — if people take the gravity of the threat seriously — the republic may come out intact on the other side.

Trump’s scary second-term agenda, explained

We do not know why, exactly, America’s voters have chosen to return Trump to high office. The data isn’t fully in, let alone analyzed in detail. But as murky as the electoral picture remains, certain elements of the policy future are crystal clear. Trump’s own comments, his campaign’s statements, and allied 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 see from any other Republican president. Trump will appoint corporate allies to lead federal agencies, where they will work to slash regulations on issues ranging from workplace safety standards to pollution. He has already proposed regressive tax cuts without off-setting hikes, which would increase the federal deficit in the same way as George W. Bush’s fiscal policy did. He will likely take steps to curtail abortion access, end federal police efforts to rein in abusive police, and crack down on federal protections for trans people — all examples of how his agenda would hurt certain groups of people, typically already vulnerable ones, more than others.

Trump’s biggest breaks with his party in traditional policy areas will likely come on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Trump has proposed a “universal” tariff on imported goods, a mass deportation campaign that detains suspected “illegals” in camps, and weakening America’s commitment to the NATO alliance. These policies would together be a recipe for economic decline, domestic turmoil, and global chaos — at 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 itself. 

Throughout the campaign, Trump has proven himself obsessed with two ideas: exerting personal control over the federal government, and exacting “retribution” against Democrats who challenged him and the prosecutors who indicted him. His team has, obligingly, provided detailed plans for doing both of these things.

This process begins with something called Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued at the end of his first term but never got to implement. Schedule F reclassifies a large chunk of the professional civil service — likely upward of 50,000 people — as political appointees. Trump could fire these nonpartisan officials and replace them with cronies: people who would follow his orders, no matter how dubious. Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F “immediately” upon returning to office, and there is no reason to doubt him.

Between a newly compliant bureaucracy and leadership ranks purged of first-term dissenting voices like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump will face little resistance as he attempts to implement policies that threaten core democratic freedoms. 

And Trump and his team have already proposed many of them. Notable examples include investigating leading Democrats on questionable charges, prosecuting local election administrators, using regulatory authority for retribution against corporations that cross him, and either shuttering public broadcasters or turning them into propaganda mouthpieces. Trump and his allies have claimed unilateral executive authority to take all of these actions. (It remains 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 is aimed at turning the United States into a larger version of Hungary — a country whose leadership and policies are regularly praised by Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts.

Hungary still has elections and nominal free speech rights; there are no tanks in the streets or concentration camps for regime critics. But it is a place where everything — from the national elections authority down to government art agencies — has been twisted to punish dissent and spread the government’s propaganda. Every aspect of government has been bent to ensure that national elections are contests in which the opposition never has a fighting chance. It is a kind of stealth autocratization, one that maintains the veneer of democracy while hollowing it from within.

This is why the second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy. The governing agenda Trump and his allies explicitly laid out is a systematic attempt to turn Washington into Budapest-on-the-Potomac, to deliberately and quietly destroy democracy from within.

Democracy is not lost

It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, 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 — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.

America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.

The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.

But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.

While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.

This is the case against despair.

As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.

Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into power. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.