Credit...Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York TimesBy Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Capitalizing on Democrats’ weakness, President Trump is winning his battle to undermine democracy in this country.
But he has not won the war.
A host of factors could blunt his aggression: recession, debt, corruption, inflation, epidemics, the Epstein files, anger over cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, to name just a few. Much of what Trump has done could be undone if a Democrat is elected president in 2028.
But for federal workers, medical and scientific researchers, lawyers in politically active firms, prominent critics of Trump — thousands of whom have felt the sting of arbitrary firings, vanished paychecks and retracted grants, criminal inquiries and threatened bankruptcies — the 2028 election may prove too late to repair the damage.
And that’s before we even begin to talk about the anti-immigration crackdown.
Trump’s assaults are aimed at targets large and small, some based on personal resentments, others guided by a more coherent ideological agenda.
The brutality of Trump’s anti-democratic policies is part of a larger goal, a reflection of an administration determined to transfer trillions of dollars to the wealthy by imposing immense costs on the poor and the working class in lost access to medical care and food support, an administration that treats hungry children with the same disdain that it treats core principles of democracy.
Trump has succeeded in devastating due-process protections for universities, immigrants and law firms. He has cowed the Supreme Court, which has largely failed to block his violations of the Constitution. He has bypassed Congress, ruling by executive order and emergency declaration. He is using the regulatory power of government to force the media to make humiliating concessions. He has ordered criminal investigations of political adversaries. He has fired innumerable government employees who pursued past investigations — and on and on.
He has moved with determination toward the destabilization of American democracy.
“Our institutions are not acting as if American democracy is under threat,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, contended in an email. It has become routine, Moynihan wrote:
for Trump to fire people in independent agencies or civil servants, or to impound funds and even close agencies. All of these things were widely assumed to be illegal. While the courts are not making definitive rulings on such powers, they are allowing Trump to exercise them. Maybe they will clip Trump’s wings later, but in the meantime enormous damage will be done and undoing that damage will be extraordinarily difficult. For example, ending U.S.A.I.D. without congressional action is illegal, but it is happening, and millions will die as a result.
Many Democrats and liberals have been banking on economic forces to press Trump to back down, but the administration is not paying the price many on the left and center expected to emerge in response to his tariffs and the immense expansion of the national debt resulting from his “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
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Instead, the economy remains strong: Unemployment is at 4.1 percent; the stock market has reached record highs; the rate of inflation increased by a modest 0.1 percent from April to May for an annual 2.4 percent rate.
“I am worried Trump is seemingly wearing down the opposition,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email in response to my queries about Trump’s successes and failures. “His political position is objectively weaker — he’s a lame duck who is more unpopular than he was at this point in his first term — but he’s using the powers of the presidency more effectively in pursuit of his authoritarian goals.”
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Trump, Nyhan argued, is pushing the boundaries of his institutional powers in ways that are less likely to catalyze opposition, especially as they become more familiar. I am most concerned about the direction of the Supreme Court. The lower courts have held up well in challenging the administration, but the nationwide injunction decision (among others) suggests that SCOTUS is becoming a key enabler.