The mainstream American news media have failed as an institution to properly confront the country’s worsening democracy crisis in the Age of Trump. He is America’s first elected autocrat. His appetite for unlimited power is growing. It will likely never be satisfied.
In one of the most recent examples, Trump recently told NBC News’ Kristen Welker that he does not know if he is obligated to uphold and obey the United States Constitution. In response to a question about the constitutionally-guaranteed right of due process and the migrants and others deported to the infamous foreign prison in El Salvador, Trump said, “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court say. They have a different interpretation.”
Trump’s statement that he does not know if he is obligated to obey and uphold the Constitution should have dominated the news coverage for the foreseeable future. Moreover, Trump’s repeated hostility and disregard towards America’s democratic norms should be the master narrative frame that structures the news media’s coverage of him and his administration. Instead, Trump’s unprecedented statement — what should be treated as a national emergency — was lost in the churn of the 24/7 news media and the bottomless maw of the attention economy and distraction experience machine.
Conservative legal scholar and former judge Michael Luttig told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace that Trump’s answer is “perhaps the most important words ever spoken by a president of the United States.” Luttig warned that this is “one of the most important stories of our times.” He continued: “I’m quite confident that the president was saying what is on his mind, and that is that he, the president of the United States, doesn’t necessarily believe that he is obligated to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as it is interpreted by the Supreme Court.”
In another escalation in their campaign against American democracy and the rule of law, Trump and his agents are now signaling that the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus may be suspended to facilitate Trump’s mass deportation campaign against “illegal aliens” and other “undesirables.” Such an extreme action must be approved by Congress. The right of habeas corpus has only been suspended four times in American history.
These threats to take away a foundational civil right were mostly treated as a curiosity by the mainstream news media.
As with Trump’s recent statement about disregarding the Constitution, these threats to take away a foundational civil right were mostly treated as a curiosity by the mainstream news media. For example, a basic search of The New York Times and The Washington Post show that the Trump administration’s threat to end habeas corpus did not receive sustained featured coverage.
Donald Trump and his agents have made many such threats against American democracy and its institutions and norms during the 2024 campaign and his second term in office — many of these threats have been fulfilled.
The Democrats and the so-called Resistance are celebrating how the courts and civil society organizations appear to be blunting Trump’s ‘shock and awe” and shock therapy campaign against American democracy and the American people. However, these celebrations are premature and ignore how the Trump administration is disregarding many of these rulings by the courts. There has been grave damage already done by Trump during these first 100 days of his return to power that cannot be easily remedied. In all, too many observers are confusing some selective momentary pauses by Trump and his MAGA forces to consolidate their gains, regroup, resupply, and reassess how to best continue their campaign against democracy and civil society.
Donald Trump’s power and willingness to punish and train the news media to serve his agenda through various means, both legal and extra-legal, has created a state of anticipatory obedience, aka surrender, collaboration, and a collective chilling effect across the news media.
The American mainstream media has also been rolled over by Donald Trump and his forces’ deft use of the propaganda technique known as “flooding the zone,” where so much happens so quickly that the target does not know where and how to focus.
Kenneth Lowande, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan, explained how this many years-long pattern of failures by the American news media is collectively enabling Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s authoritarian agenda:
The Trump administration is extremely effective at playing to the weaknesses of news organizations like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. They are being taken advantage of. From Day 1 of the Trump administration, they have written relentless, daily headlines that announce President Trump’s executive actions as if they are new laws. When readers see these, they give the President credit. They see it as an accomplishment.
This has been a problem for decades. I show in my book that news coverage of executive action is shallow, brief, and very positive for the President. The media might as well be allowing the White House to write its own coverage.
What can be done? The press needs to treat each new executive action for what it is: an order to bureaucrats. Nothing more, nothing less. These orders are remarkably contingent. Most of them don’t produce the success they promise.
In short: if people do not want the public to get used to having a dictator, then the media need to stop covering his actions as if he already is one.
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As an institution, the American news media believed that the rule of law was sacrosanct in the United States, democracy was a settled matter, the Constitution was respected by Americans and the American people would never put an authoritarian or other demagogue in the White House.
On the other hand, Black Americans, as a voting bloc, have been described as the miners’ canary in American society. In that role, Black Americans were consistently sounding the alarm about how Donald Trump’s return to power would imperil American democracy and society. In keeping with a common theme in American history, white Americans as a whole ignored those warnings and wisdom to their own (and the country’s) extreme detriment.
So what happens when a people vote for an autocratic authoritarian and against their own democracy? This is a tension and problem that the American mainstream news media and the country’s other elites have been mostly afraid to confront. Why? Because it is an indictment of their legitimacy. It is also an indictment of the character and values of the American people. To boldly confront the latter is almost verboten among the American mainstream news media and others who maintain the limits of the approved public discourse and “the consensus.”
I asked historian Timothy Ryback, one of the world’s leading experts on the fall of Germany’s democracy and the rise of the Nazi Party, for some historical context:
I am not one to draw straight lines from a historical figure or event in the past to present-day political figures or events. History doesn’t repeat itself. We are all unique individuals in unique settings and situations. With that said, I think we can speak about resonances and modalities.
Adolf Hitler and his closest lieutenants understood democratic structures and processes as well as anyone in the era, and set about disabling then dismantling the Weimar Republic. The Hitler acolyte Joseph Goebbels once said that the big joke on democracy was that it provided its mortal enemies with the means of its own destruction. This meant gridlocking legislative processes with obstructionist voting, using free speech guarantees to sow hatred and mistrust, and exploiting and abusing the judicial system in every way possible. Hitler’s chief legal strategist, Hans Frank, boasted that every time Hitler appeared in court, his polling numbers surged.
To that point, polling and other research from PRRI shows that a large percentage of Americans have an authoritarian personality. A 2024 report from PRRI details how:
[W]hile most Americans do not hold highly authoritarian views, a substantial minority does: 43% of Americans score high on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWAS), while 41% score high on the Child-Rearing Authoritarianism Scale (CRAS).
Two-thirds of Republicans score high on the RWAS (67%) compared with 35% of independents, and 28% of Democrats. Republicans who hold favorable views of Trump are 36 percentage points more likely than those with unfavorable views of Trump to score high on the RWAS (75% vs. 39%).
This political personality type and its social dominance orientation is overrepresented among right-wing Christians. PRRI continues: “White evangelical Protestants (64%) are the religious group most likely to score high on the RWAS, followed by smaller majorities of Hispanic Protestants (54%) and white Catholics (54%). A majority of weekly churchgoers (55%) score high on the RWAS, compared with 44% of Americans who attend church a few times a year and 38% of those who never attend church services.”
A series of polls and other research has found that Republicans, and Trump followers specifically, are more likely than Democrats to want a leader who is willing to break the rules and disobey the law to get things done for “people like them.” Research also shows that Republicans and MAGA followers embrace authoritarianism, including ending American democracy if white people like them are not the most powerful group.
A 2021 poll from the Pew Research Center found that a strong majority of Democrats (78%) believe that voting is a foundational and inalienable right. By comparison, two-thirds of Republicans believe that voting is a privilege that can be restricted. Those who support voting restrictions are more likely to be older, white, and less well-educated. This is the profile of the average Republican voter.
America’s democracy is rapidly collapsing. But what is its present state? The American news media, the Democratic Party, civil society, the country’s other elites and everyday pro-democracy Americans will not be able to effectively respond to the worsening crisis if they do not have the correct concepts and language to properly understand it.
Via email, Jake Grumbach, who is the faculty director of the Democracy Policy Lab and associate professor at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, offered this clarification:
The US is now in a new regime: competitive authoritarianism. There is political competition between parties, but the distinctions from liberal democracy is that 1) the ruling government routinely violates the Constitution and statutory law, and 2) uses the state apparatus as a tool to tilt the political playing field, especially by punishing political enemies.
Under competitive authoritarianism, the ruling party typically comes to power through electoral victory. Under competitive authoritarianism, and even under fully autocratic totalitarianism, ruling leaders often carry a lot of support from the mass public.
Democracy involves both majoritarianism — governance that is responsive to the people — and the rule of law — that everyone is accountable to the rules. Trump won the popular vote (though not an electoral majority), which gives him more democratic legitimacy than he otherwise would have. However, Trump’s electoral margin of victory was very small, and his public support has dropped dramatically since taking office.
Susan Stokes, who is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the Faculty Chair of the Chicago Center on Democracy, echoes Grumbach’s warning about how America is succumbing to authoritarianism. In this email, Stokes offers some explanations for why people in democratic societies embrace authoritarianism:
Majorities of people in most democracies consistently say they prefer democracy to other forms of government. There are some people who actually favor authoritarian rulers. They view democracy as messy and slow, and like the idea of a single person or small group imposing decisions on others. Many people don’t have a strong sense of the importance of due process or the rule of law — these are abstract concepts, of course, until people themselves face arbitrary rule or have friends and family members who do.
Most support for authoritarians — most votes for leaders who have shown themselves to be anti-democratic — has other motives, in particular economic factors. Many voters practice what political scientists call “retrospective economic voting” — if economic conditions have been good in the year or so leading up to an election, they will vote for the incumbent, if not they will vote for a challenger. That’s a lot of what the 2024 election in the U.S. was about. One could argue about how good or bad economic conditions were, but inflation was a new phenomenon for many people and very frightening. The cost of living was a real challenge for many Americans, given high food and housing costs.
This type of political reasoning often backfires. As Stokes explains, “The problem is if electing autocratic leaders means that voters gradually lose the ability to vote incumbents out when times are bad, then this strategy becomes self-defeating for voters. In my research, I find that income inequality is a big predictor of democratic erosion. The more unequal the distribution of income in a democracy, the more likely it is to experience erosion. Under vast inequality, it’s easier to persuade people that elite institutions are against them. Inequality also contributes to partisan polarization. And the more polarized a polity, the better for autocratic leaders. Even voters who would prefer to preserve democracy say to themselves, ‘This guy’s not perfect, but if the other side wins . . .'”
A series of recent polls have shown growing levels of anger and discontent among wide swaths of the American public towards Donald Trump and his administration’s policies and the harm they have caused the economy, the government, and the American people’s overall sense of normalcy, safety, and security. These polls have also shown that a large percentage of Democrats and a not insignificant percentage of Republicans and independents are also deeply concerned about Trump’s abuses of power and obvious contempt for democracy and the rule of law.
Donald Trump has repeatedly referenced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as being his model for expansive authority and power — and why such power is legitimate, necessary, and good. Stephen Skowronek, who is a professor of political science at Yale University, explained that such claims and comparison(s) are ahistorical and serve authoritarian goals:
Progressives have long lamented that Roosevelt was stopped by a bi-partisan coalition of southern reactionaries and Republican conservatives. But now that progressivism has been sequestered in one of the major parties, and Trumpism reigns supreme in the other, the costs of eroding all back stops are on full display. Trump has opened his second term with a drive toward presidentialism that apes Roosevelt’s, and the fate of multi-part power-sharing arrangements again hangs in the balance. In this case, however, the courts are already packed, the party has already been purged of internal opposition, and the case for the president’s exclusive control over the executive branch is well advanced. Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed America, but it was nothing compared to transformation now in view.
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The polls given some hope to those who believe that Donald Trump and has autocratic plans and MAGA movement will exhaust itself by overreaching and that the American people — assuming there are in fact “free and fair” elections in 2026 and 2028 — will course correct by voting the MAGAfied Republicans out of office.
I would suggest that such hopes are very premature. The compulsion and attraction towards Trump, MAGA, and authoritarianism are very deep, if not inexorable, for many tens of millions of Americans.
Joe Walsh is a former Republican congressman and conservative talk radio host who led a GOP primary challenge against Donald Trump in 2020. He is currently the director of The Social Contract and host of the “White Flag with Joe Walsh” podcast. Walsh maintains his connections to TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse. IHe explained that there is almost nothing too extreme and authoritarian to make Trump’s MAGA supporters abandon him:
Trump’s base wants him to be an authoritarian. That’s always been his appeal to the base. That he will be a strongman and do what he has to do to get them back the America they believe we once were. So, nothing he does as an authoritarian will bother them, no unconstitutional move will bother them, that’s what they want him to do.
The only thing that will move part of Trump’s base from him is economic pain. Losing their job, disappearing their 401ks, paying way too much for that next truck or pair of shoes. Real economic pain that personally hits them is the only way they turn on Trump in any meaningful numbers. That’s why his tariff madness is so politically dangerous for him. It’s bad policy, and it will lead to bad economic results.
Trump will have a much tougher time trying to lie about the economy because his base lives the economy. So, when Trump lies and says that Haitian migrants are eating cats and dogs, Trump’s base eats it up. But when Trump says your 401k is doing just great and your 401k has actually lost 50% of its value, his base won’t believe that lie because they know it’s not true.
The Age of Trump will last decades, not a few election cycles. The benchmarks and landmarks of normal politics in America have been radically shifted and changed, if not demolished. Ultimately, authoritarianism (e.g. herrenvolk democracy and white racial authoritarianism) is a feature and not a bug in America’s history and present. Denial and avoidance will not change our reality.
