Year one of Donald Trump’s second term has been catastrophic for American democracy |
Debra Thompson, associate professor of political science and the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University, is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Nearly a year ago, surrounded by tech billionaires and MAGA loyalists, Donald J. Trump was once again sworn in as President of the United States. To say it’s been a year of upheaval in the American political landscape would be putting it mildly.
I probably pay more attention to American politics than most and even so it has been a struggle to keep track of the volume and velocity of this administration’s actions. Executive orders (229 at last count) have been accompanied by off-script declarations, mixed court rulings, daily belligerence and a steady barrage of personal insults.
Any single episode is easy to dismiss as spectacle. Taken together, however, they point to something more systematic and far more dangerous: a style of governance that circumvents democratic checks and balances, personalizes power, and converts institutions into political weapons.
The best way to assess the shift toward what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism in the United States isn’t through rhetoric alone, but by looking at the concrete actions that reveal who is protected, who is punished, and the growing cost of dissent.
One of his first acts was to pardon nearly 1,600 people facing charges for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including commuting the sentences of 14 members of the far-right militant groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It was an early reminder of the patronage-inflected hallmarks of Trump-style governance: Loyalty and flattery were rewarded; critics were belittled, threatened and punished.
Executive orders immediately became President Trump’s weapon of choice. By the end of January, 2025, he used this power to freeze hiring in the federal public service; terminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government; declare the existence of only two sexes; withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization; create the Department of Government Efficiency to cut spending across federal departments; direct government agencies to end censorship and the “weaponization” of the Justice Department; rename the Gulf of Mexico; end “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schooling, and more.
Two early and enduring targets of the President’s ire were the “administrative state” and the “DEI infrastructure,” both key elements of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that the Trump administration has largely followed. “What we’re trying to do,” Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and Project 2025 architect made clear long before the election, “is identify pockets of independence [in the federal government] and seize them.”
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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began a slash-and-burn campaign to decimate the federal public service, with little consideration of what this would mean for Americans’ access to basic and necessary public services.
Mr. Musk and his team of 20-somethings defied congressional authority, civil-service protections, and the basic tenets of democratic accountability, and gained access to vast amounts of personal data and government financial systems. In his first month in office, President Trump froze foreign-aid spending and DOGE began the process of dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The coming months witnessed mass upheavals across all federal departments where public servants were unceremoniously fired, sometimes only to be rehired weeks later. Those who remained were at one point required to detail their weekly accomplishments in an e-mail to DOGE officials or lose their job.
In March, more than 1,300 federal workers were culled from the Education Department, which Mr. Trump ordered dismantled, followed by nearly 10,000 employees who were laid off in the Department of Health and Human Services. DOGE simultaneously began a process of mass deregulation, compiling thousands of health, safety and environmental regulations in a plan to dramatically shrink what Mr. Vought called the “woke and weaponized” federal government.
The attack on DEI tapped into the long-standing racial resentment of the Republican base and is perhaps the only coherent component of Mr. Trump’s ideological agenda.
All offices, programs and grants in the federal government pertaining to DEI were terminated in short order. The administration also gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, restricted gender-affirming care for minors, banned transgender women in girls’ and women’s sports, attempted to cut billions in funding from schools and colleges with DEI programming, pledged to eradicate “anti-Christian bias,” prioritized federal resources to initiatives that promote “patriotic education” in........