U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog

A just-released annual report on the global state of democracy makes for depressing reading. But what’s even more depressing is what might appear in next year’s edition.

Or rather, what might not appear in the 2026 volume: an old democracy, by some measures the world’s oldest; a superpower that long circled the globe professing to spread freedom.

“If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year’s] data,” said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

“If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months.” 

His project includes 31 million data points for 202 counties, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 different attributes of democracy.

Lindberg happens to be in the U.S. this week presenting this year’s report — which only includes data through the end of 2024.

Some grim milestones were breached this year.

The number of autocracies (91) has just surpassed democracies (88) on this list for the first time in two decades, and nearly three-quarters of humans now live in an autocracy — where one person has unconstrained power — the highest rate in five decades.

The latest report finds Canada and the U.S. in the “Electoral Democracy” tier, the second-highest.

The report adds an important caveat: this year’s version only includes details through 2024, meaning it does not cover the start of Donald Trump’s latest presidential term.

But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress.

In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones. 

He’s just called his predecessor’s pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it’s still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard.

It’s not just the scope of what Trump’s done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It’s also the speed. 

Like Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi — only faster

Lindberg said Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster.

“It’s the pace,” Lindberg said. “He’s trying to do in a few months what it took them eight to 10 years to achieve.… It’s very dire.”

What could happen next? Watch the courts, he says. Their actions, and Trump’s response, are fundamental. In the countries that halted an authoritarian slide, he said, courts played a key role, citing Poland, Brazil, North Macedonia and Zambia.

Needless to say, a number of Americans might find his assessment controversial — offensive, even. But some of his U.S. peers readily concur.

“This is what electoral autocracy looks like,” said Michael Miller, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in democratic erosion and runs a survey

of experts in the field.

“Electoral autocracy, or a weak democracy.” 

That remains true even if Trump won an election, fair and square. Miller said most autocracies indeed have multi-party elections — approximately three-quarters of them, unlike the remainder in the most stifling category, the closed autocracy. 

What is an ‘electoral autocracy’?

In an electoral autocracy, you can vote, you can protest, you can criticize the government — but at a price.

That price, Miller said, is the fear of retaliation: losing your job, public funding or a contract. Over time, fear takes hold, and people — including powerful media owners — start to self-censor.

Miller sees an almost perfect replica here of moves by other modern strongmen, like Erdoğan and Orbán: “The exact playbook,” he said.

And he, too, sees the judiciary as key. Judges will keep rejecting unconstitutional acts, as they’ve been doing since the first days of Trump’s presidency, starting with his attempt to rewrite citizenship eligibility. 

It’s safe to expect Trump to complain, and perhaps be tempted to ignore a court order, but what matters, according to Miller, is whether he pulls back. “Then maybe you come back from the brink,” Miller said. 

This is why so many eyes were glued to the case of alleged Venezuelan gang members this past weekend as a critical test.

Trump had made unprecedented use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 outside wartime: he’d labelled the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang a terrorist group, making suspected members eligible for immediate deportation, without standard legal proceedings.

Relatives insist some deportees were falsely accused, while the White House insists it acted on solid information, and used the centuries-old law for 137 deportations last weekend.

Why one court case drew so much attention

Over the course of one chaotic Saturday, the constitutional showdown unfolded in a Washington court.

First, the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of five plaintiffs. A judge issued a written order not to deport them, and the Trump administration agreed. But hours later, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, and deported the others.

In an urgent hearing, the judge ordered those deportation flights paused; but the Trump administration said it was too late — two flights were already mid-air.

Importantly, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan later brushed off the courts in a TV interview. “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming,” Homan told Fox News.

The president himself has called for the judge’s impeachment.

This drew a rebuke Tuesday from the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who in a rare public statement called this an improper use of impeachment, a violation of two centuries’ understanding that judicial disagreements should be handled through appeals.

Federal lawyers have also resisted the judge’s request for information in court. But the administration line is: this wasn’t outright defiance; it was just too late to turn the planes around, as they’d already left U.S. airspace.

Echoing that official line, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday: “We are complying with the judge’s orders.”

This starts a high-stakes standoff that can’t last forever. Trump may find new ways to sidestep court orders, but sooner or later, there will be a direct clash with a judge, Miller said.

“They’re saying, ‘We’re obeying the court order’ — wink, wink,” Miller said. “I don’t think they’re ever going to come out and say, ‘We’re ignoring a court order.’… [But] at some point it becomes unsustainable.” 

That’s just one of the guardrails Trump tested in recent days.

He also took the unprecedented step of challenging a predecessor’s pardons: Trump said that because Joe Biden used a mechanical signature for his recent pardons, members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee that probed Trump could still be prosecuted.

And he escalated pressure on universities. 

Trump has now threatened federal funding for more than 50 universities over the suspected use of racial diversity programs in admissions criteria. 

His administration has also made nearly a dozen demands of Columbia University, which has already lost $400 million in federal funding as punishment for unrest related to Gaza protests. 

The demands include putting Columbia’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies under academic receivership; Columbia is also being encouraged to enforce a definition of antisemitism that includes disparaging Israel as a racist project.

Then there was a remarkable speech to the Justice Department, where Trump appeared to be publicly lobbying the legal apparatus to prosecute certain adversaries.

In the epicentre of U.S. law enforcement, with a crowd cheering him on, Trump referred to certain political adversaries as “scum.” 

He demanded accountability for people who investigated him, and referred four times to CNN and MSNBC as “illegal,” accusing them of corrupt behaviour that must stop.

“It was an absolutely extraordinary speech; one of the most extraordinary ever by a sitting president,” Miller said.

Equally stunning, in Miller’s view: the minimal media reaction afterward.

He cited this as an example of Trump’s behaviour being normalized.

It’s become a cliché, Miller said, but just try, as a thought experiment, to imagine another U.S. president giving that speech. Imagine, say, Joe Biden saying those things; then imagine the reaction.

“It would’ve been one of the biggest stories in the last 100 years,” he said. “But it’s Trump.”