Is American democracy staring death in the face? It’s certainly spluttering up blood, limping around the room and shouting incoherent slurs at everyone nearby. You might link its demise to the 6 January Capitol storming, or the 2010 Supreme Court judgement on campaign financing that enabled corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections. Or you might take Gore Vidal’s position that the American republic died long ago when it shed its republican heritage and became an empire. Or perhaps it’s that a nation with a large crop of porn-addled gambling addicts living under the rise of techno-feudalist overlords is ill-suited to practising a republican form of democracy established 250 years ago.
The rate at which democracy in America is eroding has quickened since Donald Trump took office. There is a sense that the country is barrelling towards some type of crack-up. Just before Trump’s second inauguration there were reports that a firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates’s royal family invested half a billion dollars into the president’s cryptocurrency – an example of a blatant attempt to convert cash into favourable treatment. Then there’s the recent video Trump posted on social media depicting the Obamas as apes (which has now been deleted), and a mainstream liberal commentator calling for a “fumigation” and “exorcism” in order to “remove the cancer that is Trump and the Maga movement”. Nihilistic school shootings and assassinations have become normalised, and oligarchs are transforming the media landscape, pushing editorial positions to the right in order to gain favour with Trump, as Jeff Bezos has done with a shrug at the Washington Post.
The optimist would argue two points. First, racism, gun violence and oligarchs have always held sway over American democracy. Second, they would tell you to look at the polls: Trump’s time in power is winding down. Everything might look a bit coarse at the moment, but things will be back to normal very soon. In November’s midterms, the Democrats are on course to take back the House of Representatives and potentially the Senate. With this, they would have the power to investigate the administration, subpoena democracy’s enemies and reassert the separation of powers. It’s early days, but many Democrats in the party think they’ve got a good chance at taking back the White House in 2028 as well.
It’s always healthy for politicos to escape rat-infested DC, so I spent the weekend in Lansing, the snow-swept capital of Michigan, with the state’s Democratic leadership for a conference about the party’s future. These swing-state politicians seemed pretty sanguine about the whole death-of-democracy thing. Did they think a durable coalition is just going to fall into their lap? Certainly not. They cautioned each other against being complacent about winning in 2028 if they won the midterms. But I didn’t sense any existential dread. In fact, as one congresswoman put it in the opening session, they try to talk about Trump as little as possible.
The problem is that this optimism won’t matter much if Trump tries to overturn November’s results. Democrats winning the midterms will not stop Trump from trying to hold on to power via undemocratic means. That the polls predict he will lose is what provides the motivation for him to cheat.
And Trump seems to be manoeuvring. He has been pitching the idea that the midterms will be illegitimate in recent weeks. Trump has called on Republicans to “nationalise” the voting system and take the power back from the states to run elections. Consider his recent musings: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” His close ally, Steve Bannon, has called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to surround polling stations. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has already gone on federal raids of vote centres in Georgia, supposedly to investigate the 2020 election. But for what reason? It is unclear why she needed to be there, as her official role doesn’t concern domestic matters. But remember that a previous investigation into Trump’s attempt to stay in office in 2020 found that he “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power”.
Trump knew back then to lay the groundwork – by questioning the electoral systems, for instance – before his attempt to overturn the election. It is worth remembering that when the then vice-president Mike Pence was under pressure to cancel the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory, Trump berated him for being “too honest” – a trait often deemed a flaw in Trump’s eyes.
The president is temperamentally conditioned to try to overturn elections. Long before he got into politics, his strategy has been to claim victory even when he loses. The question is not whether he will attempt to change the results of the election, but whether he will be resisted. It is clear that Trump does not want to transfer power – he wants to stay in office. The usual barometers of his grip on power, such as polling, might not be much use here. His falling approval ratings only make him more desperate, and therefore more volatile.
[Further reading: The tragic fate of Jimmy Lai]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
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