Trump’s war on democracy is failing

If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.

Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

Haphazardism, as a concept, helps us understand Trump’s dangers to democracy in a more nuanced and precise way. And it can also help us see, after almost a year of Trump’s second presidency, where things might stand when he leaves power for good.

What haphazardism is

Donald Trump, like many of history’s villains, has extraordinary political talents. His authoritarian menace stems from these talents being married to a deep, primal lust for power — a desire to wield full authority over others without constraint or restriction. In his first term, these impulses were checked by a coterie of advisers who saw restraining him as part of their job description. This time, there are no guardrails.

Yet, at the same time, Trump is an impulsive man with little understanding of the actual levers of policy and administration.  His statements on the topics are marked with intentional lies, to be sure, but also feature seemingly genuine (and profound) misunderstandings about basic issues, such as how trade deficits work. He is also showing signs of age, with fewer public appearances and a noticeably compressed daily schedule. The advisers who step up to shape policy are not always the most competent, and sometimes have agendas of their own that clash with both Trump’s public statement and their fellow aides’ agendas.

Haphazardism emerges from the interaction of these dynamics.

On the one hand, unbound Trump is pushing the limits of his authority in ways that often directly threaten pillars of the democratic system. Trump has unilaterally asserted extraordinary powers, like the ability to direct revenue and levy tariffs, that are explicitly reserved for Congress. He has attempted to prosecute his political enemies, undermine the fairness of the midterm elections, bully corporations and universities, and hand control over increasingly large swaths of the media to friends.

In many of these areas, he really has been able to change policy in unprecedented ways. The closure of USAID, the unbalanced “deal” with Columbia University, convincing Texas to enact an extreme gerrymander, and pressuring Paramount into selling to a Trump-aligned billionaire family — these are all examples of real victories for Trump’s effort to assert more personal control over American governance and society. 

On the other hand, this list of authoritarian successes is counterbalanced by meaningful failures. Consider three developments from the past week alone:

• An aggressive pressure campaign on Indiana Republicans to enact an extreme gerrymandering that backfired, solidifying resistance in the state Senate and dooming the White House’s preferred house map in a Thursday campaign.
• An effort to prosecute one of Trump’s enemies, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, on such transparently fake charges that two grand juries refused to indict her.
• The resignation of Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, after a court ruled that she had been unlawfully appointed federal prosecutor for New Jersey.

These three failures all share something in common: the administration attempting to grab power without a real theory for overcoming the constraints in their way.

They did not understand the historic independence and small-c conservatism of Indiana’s Republican Party. They attempted to push through obviously political charges against James, heedless of how a jury might react. They didn’t care how illegal Habba’s appointment was.

These failures reflect more than mere misjudgments or technical incompetence. Rather, they reveal a White House trying to act on the president’s incoherent, often impossible desires. Trump personally wanted Republicans around the country to do extreme gerrymandering. He publicly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute James (and other enemies like James Comey). He wanted Habba installed in a key prosecutorial role.

Trump’s desires here do not reflect a coherent view of how to take over the American state. Rather, they reflect particular cases where the president wants maximal power or personal control without any deeper understanding of whether his desires are feasible or strategically wise. Trump’s aides and lawyers have little choice but to act on the boss’s desires and are often set up to fail.

This is the central way that haphazardism manifests: the sheer inconsistency or short-sightedness of Trump’s personal judgment leading to authoritarian setbacks. It’s a pattern that has repeated throughout the Trump presidency and produced some of its most notable and enduring failures.

The most important example is the “Liberation Day” tariffs. In that case, Trump’s personal obsession led him to assert extraordinary powers — to raise a tax seemingly at will — that would amount to a shocking revision of the constitutional order. On paper, that looks like a win for a president who wants to grab greater and greater personal power over the economy.

But, in the long run, the tariffs have done far more harm to Trump than good. They have been immensely unpopular and done damage to the real economy, both of which have fueled Democratic election gains and made it harder to convince others in society that resistance is futile. Moreover, they seem very likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court, meaning that Trump’s temporary gains for executive power will likely prove ephemeral.

Or, consider another example: the attempted takedown of Jimmy Kimmel in September.

In that case, FCC chair Brendan Carr was clearly attempting to act on Trump’s broadly stated desire to stop Kimmel. His chosen mechanism for doing that, making mafioso-like threats to network licenses during an appearance on a right-wing podcast, was extremely threatening to democracy. The government was overtly weaponizing its regulatory powers to punish a critic of the president!

But Carr’s actions were also self-defeatingly blunt. The obvious threat to free speech created a massive backlash, including a mass citizen-led drive to cancel Disney+ subscriptions. ABC-Disney ultimately had no choice but to reinstate Kimmel, and he remains on the air today. The short-term attempted power grab ended in long-term failure.

Finally, consider a third example: the purging of the civil service.

While the Trump team’s actions here have no doubt removed bureaucrats who might oppose his agenda from within, they’ve also pushed out untold numbers of talented individuals with irreplaceable knowledge of how government actually works. This doesn’t only damage the functioning of the US state; it also makes it harder for the Trump administration, specifically, to turn their desires into effective policies.

“A breakdown in state capacity — what the US is capable of doing — is very bad. And paradoxically…that may be the thing that is saving democracy,” says Oren Samet, a political scientist at Stanford University.

Is a haphazard America still a democracy? 

Haphazardism is, by its nature, a very confusing style of governance. It is one in which traditional rules of democratic politics, like the rule of law, no longer fully bind the chief executive. Yet, at the same time, that chief executive is not using the powers he is accumulating in any kind of effective or coherent way — leading not only to poor policy but also a failure to systematically prevent meaningful political competition from the opposition.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.

Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.

For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).

Unlike Levitsky, I think that it’s still more accurate to call the United States a democracy. I have a hard time describing a country that still has reasonably free and fair elections, in which the incumbent party loses and departs office, as anything but.

But, that’s not really a substantive disagreement so much as it is a difference in emphasis. We agree on the basic haphazardist account of the Trump presidency — that it is taking authoritarian actions without effectively changing the operating logic of the system to sustain an unfair lock on political power. Whether you call such a situation “authoritarian” or “democratic” depends on whether you put more weight on current governance or regime fundamentals.

Laura Gamboa, a professor at Notre Dame who studies democratic backsliding in Latin America, says this unclarity is relatively typical of periods of political transformation. When a democracy is under serious attack, she says, there is often “muddiness and contention.” We just might not be able to know what the most precise characterization of the country’s politics is for years.

Ultimately, however, these tricky categorization questions are less important than the question of America’s political trajectory, which is whether democracy is likely to survive (or rebound from) his second term. And on that score, Trump’s haphazardism gives us some reasons for hope.

While 2025 has been an undeniably bad year for American democracy, the haphazardist pattern that has emerged shows that Trump’s authoritarian project may be self-limiting.

Amid the fevered climate following Charlie Kirk’s shooting, there was a clear and plausible pathway the Trump administration could have taken to create authoritarian change — one that centered on using federal regulatory and prosecutorial powers to repress their enemies. But, in the following months, the administration’s haphazardism has made it very difficult for them to go down this road in any kind of straightforward manner. There hasn’t been a single-minded focus on repression, and the efforts they have made — like the prosecutions of Comey and James — have run up against major barriers.

This, as both Levitsky and Gamboa pointed out, reflects how hard it is to change a country like the United States.  In a country like the United States, with such a long democratic history and established institutions, it takes a lot of planning and ingenuity to overcome the forces standing in their way. Some modern authoritarians, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, possessed this kind of authoritarian vision and talent from the moment they took office. Trump seemingly didn’t.

It’s not impossible to overturn a democracy haphazardly. Other successful autocrats, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, built an authoritarian state through a more winding and improvisational pathway than Orbán. But doing it in the United States is an altogether different, and tougher, task.

Again, this does not mean the survival of American democracy is assured. Trump is persistent in pushing democratic limits, and the American presidency is an extraordinarily powerful office.

But, it does mean that the limits of the administration’s current strategy are very real — and coming into sharper focus.