Trump has damaged democracy at remarkable speed, reports find : NPR
Before being elected to a second term, former President Donald Trump hugged and kissed the American flag while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, in 2024.
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Three major reports released this month claim that President Trump has caused serious damage to American democracy with remarkable speed since returning to the White House.
An annual report of V-Deman institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, concluded that democracy had deteriorated so much in the United States that it had lowered the country’s democratic ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.
The United States landed between Slovakia and Greece.
In the meantime, Luminous Line Watchwhich surveyed more than 500 American academics, concluded that the American system now lies almost halfway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. The latest survey appears next week. The Bright Line Watch co-directors spoke exclusively with NPR ahead of publication.
Yet another report released Thursday by Freedom Housea Washington-based democracy think tank, said that among free countries, the United States joined Bulgaria and Italy in recording the largest decline in political rights and civil liberties last year.
“The development in the United States is moving toward a dictatorship, which is what the founders wanted to avoid,” said Staffan Lindberg, founding director of the V-Dem Institute, who spent seven years in the United States. “It’s the fastest decline ever recorded in U.S. history and one of the fastest in the world.”
V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 researchers contributed to this report, which is the largest of its kind.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales dismissed V-Dem’s analysis as “a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant and blatantly biased organization.”
She called Trump a champion of freedom and democracy and the most transparent and accessible president ever.
“His return to the White House saved traditional media from bankruptcy,” Wales said.
Trump has rejected criticism that he is trying to rule as an autocrat.
“A lot of people say maybe we like a dictator,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last August. “I don’t like dictators. I’m not a dictator.”
Lindberg said V-Dem lowered America’s rating because of the Trump administration’s concentration of executive power, failure to enforce laws, circumvention of the Republican-led Congress as well as attacks on the media and free speech. Lindberg, a political scientist, is struck by how quickly Trump acted.
“Under the Trump administration, democracy has retreated as much in just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years, and Orban in Hungary four years,” Lindberg said, referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
These three leaders came to power through democratic elections, but experts say they have since undermined the checks and balances of executive power to try to ensure their continued power.
Trump is a big fan of Orbán and has hailed him as a “strong man” and “tough person”. Orbán will be elected next month — the first real challenge to his reign in a decade and a half.
President Trump is a big fan of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, pictured at the White House on November 7, 2025. Political scientists view Orbán as an autocratic leader who has eroded that country’s system of checks and balances.
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Researchers are alarmed by Trump’s blitz on America’s system of governance, but John Carey, co-director of Bright Line Watch, says America’s Democratic rating could have fallen further in recent months if the courts had not responded.
Carey says autocrats try to co-opt or pressure government institutions that serve as arbiters, but notes that didn’t work last month as the Supreme Court. ruled against the president on prices.
“One of the things suggested by the tariff decision [is] he hasn’t fully grasped that set of arbiters,” said Carey, a political science professor at Dartmouth, “and that’s the most important set.”
Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line, adds that just because Trump undermined democracy doesn’t mean the effects are permanent.
“There is no doubt that what we are seeing is an authoritarian strategy,” Nyhan said, “but there is no guarantee that Trump will be able to operate that way after the midterms, much less find a successor after 2028.”
Yana Gorokhovskaia, director of strategy and design at Freedom House, says some of Trump’s policies abroad also damage the country’s democratic standing abroad.
For example, the State Department often used to call out election fraud in other countries, but under Trump it said it would only comment on foreign elections when the United States had a clear and compelling interest.
“What we are losing is democratic solidarity on a global scale,” Gorokhovskaia said. “We no longer insist on the distinction between democracies and autocracies in the world.”
This is not to say that the United States does not take sides in foreign elections. Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly supported Orbánthe autocratic leader of Hungary, for a fifth term.
