A Pivot Point for the American People
The resistance to Donald Trump gives me hope—but it's too soon to relax.
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Over the long arc of our constitutional history, only a few American presidents have been transformational in their impacts on American democracy and its place in the world. One thinks of the early founding presidents, beginning with George Washington, in inaugurating and expanding this unlikely experiment in self-governance; Abraham Lincoln in saving it during the Civil War; and at most a handful of others in reforming or saving American democracy in times of crisis and elevating the United States to a leading global position: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and most recently Ronald Reagan. Most presidents have been, to varying degrees, good, mediocre, or failed stewards of the national interest, and their legacies were not transformational. With the arguable exception of James Buchanan, whose failures accelerated the path to civil war, no American president to date has been destructively transformational, setting the United States on a path of sustained and catastrophic decline.
Until now.
Since Trump took office again on January 20, most of the alarm about his second term has concerned his assaults on American democracy, and with good reason. As I have noted here in a previous essay, this time around Trump is pursuing a much more aggressive and far-reaching authoritarian agenda as he seeks to concentrate federal government power in the presidency, overpower the Congress and the courts, purge and subdue the civil service and independent oversight agencies, shred due process rights, threaten civil liberties, weaponize legal authority to investigate and prosecute opponents, and bully into submission civic actors vital to sustaining liberal democracy and the rule of law, including the media, universities, and private law firms. As a result, the esteemed monitoring project Bright Line Watch has recorded (both among the public and the experts surveyed) a precipitous decline in assessments of the state of American democracy, to levels (around the mid-50’s on a 100-point scale) that are by far “the lowest levels observed since we began tracking this measure in 2017.”
I remain extremely concerned about the current trajectory of American democracy—in particular, the effort to concentrate federal government power in one man and then wield it punitively, arbitrarily, and corruptly for his personal advantage and that of his family, cronies, and political allies. I remain convinced that this will only be stopped if principled countervailing power is mobilized from the Congress, the courts, civil society, and the electoral process. Projects of creeping authoritarianism are only stymied when judicial and legislative authorities defend legal and constitutional boundaries, and when institutional leaders outside of government—in business, law, universities, foundations, the mass media, trade unions, and civic associations—unite within and across sectors to defend democratic norms and collective rights and interests. Given the prevailing levels of fear and rationalizing calculation on many fronts, I am not confident that our elected representatives and political and civic leaders will summon the necessary courage and energy.
But I am now slightly more hopeful than I was three months ago about our chances of preserving American democracy. At the same time, I am more frightened and pessimistic than I was three months ago about the permanent damage Trump’s second presidency may do to our national security, our global standing, and the future of freedom globally. This column explains my grounds for cautious hope on the domestic front, while my next one will explain my escalating fears about our global position.
The glimmers of hope for our democracy come first and foremost from the rising pace of federal court rulings blocking and constraining Trump’s authoritarian actions. Despite the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it is beginning to question or constrain Trump’s violations of law and due process. Its May 16 ruling blocking the administration from using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants was an interim and procedural insistence on due process. But it was nevertheless hailed as “quietly significant” for insisting on that principle, and for drawing support from all three of Trump’s appointees to the Court. Indeed, it was significant enough for Trump to complain on his social media site that the Court is “not allowing me to do what I was elected to do”—which means anything he wants to do.
Some other Supreme Court rulings are giving Trump room on deportations, particularly this week’s distressing decision allowing the president to terminate Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants, despite the obvious risks to their safety in that country. But there has been a string of other federal court injunctions against Trump’s abusive actions. Recently, Reuters reported that “at least 60 judges or appeals courts have slowed or blocked some of [Trump’s] initiatives,” even in the face of threats and intimidation. On Monday, a federal judge declared the administration’s hostile takeover and closure of the U.S. Institute of Peace unlawful and hence null and void. Earlier this month, that same federal judge, Beryl Howell, found the Trump administration’s targeting of the law firm Perkins Coie to be unconstitutional.
Three federal judges have issued nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order to restrict the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, and while the Supreme Court justices expressed (during May 15 oral arguments) some wariness of the rising pace of national injunctions by federal district courts, they also gave voice to the mounting streak of judicial independence. Elena Kagan put it most bluntly when she questioned Trump’s solicitor general on why he was not pursuing an explicit ruling on the substance of the Trump executive order: “If I were in your shoes, there’s no way I would approach the Supreme Court with this case. You just keep on losing in the lower courts. What’s supposed to happen to prevent that?” The website Just Security is currently tracking 246 legal challenges to Trump administration actions, and this does not double-count multiple lawsuits on the same issue (including some 100 suits with 50 federal court restraining orders blocking the administration’s abrupt termination of thousands of foreign student visa registrations, which was reversed on April 25).
One can also discern growing unrest among Congressional Republicans who have to date been nearly completely supine in their unwillingness to challenge the most outrageous of Trump’s nominations and actions. The most recent hint of independence was the recent attempt by a group of Republican fiscal conservatives in the House to block Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill because it added way too much to the deficit. The 1,000-page bill ultimately passed in the House last Thursday morning by a single vote, but it faces closer scrutiny in the Senate. Moreover, the gathering Republican disquiet about the radical and destructive scope of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs may have played a role in Trump scaling those back in what the Wall Street Journal editorial board called on May 12 “a win for economic reality,” albeit a partial one. And that partial retreat speaks to another potent constraint on Trump that may be a recurrent factor in the months and years to come—the markets.
For some time, astute observers of Capitol Hill have looked fruitlessly to the prospect of Utah Senator John Curtis (Mitt Romney’s successor) becoming a dark horse joining Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins as a constraining voice in the upper chamber. To date, Curtis (who has just begun his six-year term) has been circumspect. But in a CNN interview on Sunday, he signaled his independence on such issues as tariffs, suspending habeas corpus, and the Qatari jet deal. As Trump’s corruption and incompetence mount and his public opinion ratings continue to plummet, we will likely see more such expressions, however polite, of autonomy and conviction. One new opinion poll reported by Newsweek shows the public disapproving (typically by wide margins) of Trump’s performance on every single policy issue they were asked about except border security. The New York Times’ daily tracking average of all polls shows public disapproval of Trump’s performance exceeding approval by 6 percentage points, compared to positive balances at similar junctures for Obama (32 points), George W. Bush (25 points) and Biden (15 points). That leaves Trump with 45 percent approval. Some respected polls (like that of the Pew Research Center) place public approval of his job performance at 40 percent.
Citizen protests are also mushrooming. In mid March, the premier scholar of nonviolent protests, Erica Chenoweth, showed that in the two months following the inauguration, “we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.” As The New York Times reported earlier this month, demonstrations are increasing in size and frequency, and in geographic scope. From the grassroots up, a spirit of resistance is supplanting the earlier shock, disorientation, and resignation. In several realms of civic life, institutional leaders are quietly increasing coordination, including plans for lawsuits, lobbying, and advocacy. If the collective public response from universities and law firms has been divided and disappointing, pressure is growing for more forthright stances in defense of both basic principles and these organizations’ own long-term self-interest. Consumer protests appear to be working as well. Tesla’s total sales in the first three months of this year dropped 13% from a year ago, and its European sales are collapsing. This may help to explain why Elon Musk announced last Tuesday that he planned to spend “a lot less” on political campaigns in the coming electoral cycle. While Democrats lack a unified voice of resistance and coordination (which is hard for any party out of power to establish), their tone is becoming more boldly defiant.
None of this should lead us to relax. Trump and his inner circle are pursuing an authoritarian agenda, and they could succeed in their goal of establishing a Hungarian-style autocracy in the United States.
The administration’s revocation last week of visas for all international students and exchange visitors at Harvard University is another chilling indication of how it will weaponize all the levers of federal government power to compel submission. But Harvard immediately sued, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order the very next day.
The struggle to contain Trump’s authoritarian project will be ceaseless and intense. But the recent signs of pushback do more than offer hope and encouragement. They give us space to consider what else we should worry about. There are of course the many dimensions of damage Trump is doing to economic, social, and environmental health in the United States. But he is doing a global form of damage that could be more difficult to reverse. Even if Trump does not wind up wrecking American democracy during his second term, he may well preside over the demolition of the liberal international order of norms, institutions, alliances, and reservoirs of power that have, by and large, preserved global peace and security and enabled the survival and expansion of freedom. This global order is now under dedicated and coordinated assault from a loose network of authoritarian regimes, led by China, that are bent on making the world safe for autocracy. Moreover, Xi Jinping’s China—which has become a post-modern, technology-intensive, neo-totalitarian regime—is now driving hard to displace the United States as the world’s most powerful country, pushing the United States out of Asia and overtaking it technologically, economically, diplomatically, and ultimately militarily.
Rather than making America great again, Trump is rapidly reducing it to a second-rate power. His actions are undermining our alliances, destroying our instruments of soft power (such as public diplomacy and development assistance), and ravaging the research infrastructure and global talent pool we need to innovate and compete with China. This global power shift is now happening very briskly, in real time. It could take much more starkly visible and even irreversible form during these remaining three years and eight months of Trump’s second term. The challenge we now face is made more formidable by the need for Republicans and Democrats to cooperate if we are to mount an effective strategic response.
This will be the subject of my next column.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.
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While I completely agree with Mr. Diamond in terms of what Trump is attempting and what he has already accomplished, I believe he has omitted the greatest threat we face, those millions of Americans who continue to support all that Trump is doing, often without recognizing anywhere near all that Trump is attempting, or worse agreeing to it. Such a level of misunderstanding of or lack of concern for the nation we were designed to be is, to me, far more frightening than the deranged demagogue whom they re-elected and whose every move they applaud. Without them, Trump would still be little more than a noisy NYC real estate ‘mogul’ and TV celebrity.
Thanks for this post, with its combination of cautious optimism on the domestic scene and realism about the damage being done to institutions in the move to follow the model of Orban's Hungary. Resistance from the courts, though important, will not be enough; what is really essential is for Congress to reclaim its legislative role as the primary directing force behind national policy, after many years now of declining effectiveness. The Founders assumed that ambition would counteract ambition, and we have seen too little of that.
I agree that the most severe damage being done is international--harm to our standing in the world, with its consequences for the cause of liberty--and I'm looking forward to the next essay.