By John Feffer* – Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF)*
Forget about coups and martial law. The latest method of destroying democracy is through death by a thousand cuts.
In military coups, the generals take over from one day to the next. Civilian presidents, when they declare martial law, assume emergency powers and start immediately ruling like dictators.
But the more common method of destroying a democracy these days is through death by a thousand cuts. Elected leaders only gradually undermine democratic institutions and accumulate more executive power. One day, voila, the democracy is fatally compromised, and no one can point to a single act that transformed the elected leader into an autocrat.
That is the way that Vladimir Putin, who was elected to his first term as president in 2000, has become Russia’s leader for life. Viktor Orban became Hungary’s prime minister in 2010 and, by consciously following Putin’s example, has presided over Hungary ever since.
And now Donald Trump is following Orban’s example. The architects of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s return to power, were inspired by the Hungarian’s attacks on higher education, his controls on the press and the judiciary, his rewriting of the constitution, and his emphasis on nationalism, Christianity, and the heteronormative family.
And now Trump is in turn inspiring other right-wing leaders around the world, from Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina to Karol Nawrocki in Poland and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. He has also motivated citizens in countries from Canada to Australia to defeat Trump-like politicians out of fear that they would undermine those democracies.
But the global backlash against Trumpism is, so far, an exception to the rule. The sad truth is that democracy is under siege around the world. Last year marked the nineteenth consecutive year of democratic decline, according to Freedom House, with 60 countries experiencing an erosion of political and civil liberties.
In the Varieties of Democracy report this year out of Sweden, autocracies outnumbered democracies for the first time in two decades. Three-quarters of people around the world live in autocratic states. And project head Staffan Lindberg warns that “If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year’s] data.”
The erosion of democracy has not only continued in the United States. It has accelerated.
Most recently, Trump has attempted to take over Washington, DC. He has called in the National Guard to address the city’s crime, even though the crime rate in the city has been on the decline. He is going after undocumented workers, and he is destroying homeless encampments. The administration refuses to provide details about the people it is arresting on a daily basis.
Washington, DC is not a state, so Trump is taking advantage of the district’s political weakness and dependency on federal dollars. This, however, is a test. Trump has pledged to send the National Guard into other major U.S. cities. All of the cities he has mentioned—Chicago, Baltimore, New York—are controlled by Democrats.
After meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where the Russian leader agreed that the 2020 election had been “stolen” via mail-in ballots, Trump declared that he would eliminate voting by mail along with voting machines. The U.S. president has falsely claimed that Democrats use mail-in ballots to commit election fraud.
Meanwhile, in Texas, the Republican Party has forced through an electoral redistricting plan that will give the party a strong chance to gain another five seats in the House of Representatives. In general, the party in opposition does well in mid-term elections, and the Democrats have been expecting to win back the House in the 2026 elections. Trump, however, is determined to keep Congress in his party’s hands, even if he has to break the rules to do so.
In his dealings with U.S. institutions like universities, media outfits, and law firms, Trump is acting like a mafioso who runs a protection racket. The U.S. president has used threats of legal action and the withholding of federal funds to shake down universities for protection money. The Trump administration has hit universities with huge financial penalties — $200 million against Columbia University, $500 million against Harvard, $1 billion against UCLA. He has launched enormous lawsuits against media companies like ABC, CBS, and the Wall Street Journal. He threatened law firms that had earlier supported suits against Trump with financial penalties unless they agreed to pay up by way of pro bono work for the U.S. government.
With his latest judicial appointments, Trump has decided that the judges he previously elevated are not conservative enough: they have to be hardline MAGA supporters. The Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, was instrumental in helping Trump create the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority. But Trump blasted conservative judges, including those recommended by the Federalist Society, for their opposition to his tariffs and other policies. In his second term, Trump is now focused more on radical judges who will not put any constraints on his administration’s policies.
In other words, Trump has targeted multiple sources of resistance within U.S. society: intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, and even conservative judges who are uncomfortable with Trump’s anti-democratic moves. And he is determined to change the electoral rules to ensure that his party maintains its political dominance at the federal and state levels.
Part of Trump’s motivation is to extract large sums of money for himself and his family—over $3 billion so far, according to a New Yorker estimate. Another rationale is revenge against everyone who has challenged or mocked him over the years. Trump also wants accolades for his performance: the cover of Time magazine isn’t enough, he wants a Nobel Prize.
But Trump also has an ideological agenda: to sanitize America. He wants to get rid of the homeless and the undocumented from cities, whitewash American history and eliminate references to “how bad slavery was,” and heavily police expressions of political dissent. It’s a short step from such efforts at “sanitation” to the assassination of political opponents (as in Russia) and the destruction of entire categories of people (like Israel’s targeting of Palestinians in Gaza).
Democracy is messy, no question about it. But Trump is not “cleaning up” democracy. He is destroying it. It is not happening overnight, which might produce a huge civic backlash. Rather, Trump’s assault on democracy is taking place little by little so that American citizens can gradually acclimate to the new authoritarian environment.
*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.
*Originally published in Hankyoreh.