Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt
When Donald Trump won reelection in November 2024, much of the American establishment responded with a shrug. After all, Trump had been democratically elected, even winning the popular vote. And democracy had survived the chaos of his first term, including the shocking events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Surely, then, it would survive a second Trump presidency.
That was not the case. In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
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