Will Donald Trump destroy US democracy? Unlikely | Cas Mudde

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

70% : Today, Trump is in a much more powerful position.
66% : Finally, this time Trump has a plan.
62% : When Trump won in 2016, he was largely a one-man band.
57% : Trump is also in complete control of the Republican party.
53% : With the combination of Schedule F and an army of young loyalists, Trump could finally transform the "deep state" into a blindly loyal, if possibly much smaller and therefore less effective, apparatus.
50% : His first administration should therefore be seen as a coalition government, between Trump and the Republican establishment - at that time, personified by Mitch McConnell, then the powerful Senate majority leader.
35% : In addition to the usual rightwing pet projects, like deregulation and lower taxes, it includes Schedule F, which would slash legal protections for tens of thousands of bureaucrats so that they can be fired "at will" - a policy that Trump already introduced in the last days of his first administration and has promised to introduce again on his first day back in office.
34% : Although he distanced himself from Project 2025 in the campaign, and it is very likely that he never read the lengthy report, most of the people that are expected to take up key positions in his new administration are closely tied to the project and Trump himself has supported most of the key policies.
33% : And for middle- and low-level personnel in both the administration and the bureaucracy, the new Trump administration can draw on a large pool of younger Americans, well-versed in far-right ideology and loyalty to Trump by organizations like Turning Point USA.
27% : This does not mean that Trump cannot significantly weaken liberal democracy, but he will have to do it with weaker instruments (like executive orders) and with significant judicial pushback (although probably less from the US supreme court than from state and local courts).
24% : Does this mean that Trump will destroy US democracy, like his "friend" Viktor Orbán in Hungary?
20% : While it is too early to explain Trump's shockingly large victory, there is one thing I know for sure: Trump 2.0 will be nothing like Trump 1.0.
20% : McConnell is literally a shadow of himself, immobilized by health issues and unable to oppose Trump even within his own Senate faction.
17% : After Ron DeSantis's unsuccessful challenge in the midterms, only two years ago, opposition to Trump has largely disappeared within the grand old party.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.