This past weekend, millions of protesters showed up at 'No Kings' marches at thousands of locations, including in multiple MAGA strongholds.
, to register their profound rejection of Donald Trump’s conduct over the course of his first year of his second term in office. They have grounds to worry. Three major studies have recently found that American democracy is on an unprecedented downward trajectory.
And, and indeed the trappings of American autocracy may be thinner than they appear. Trump is wildly unpopular. Elections are not yet being stolen. On, which organizes to claw back liberalism from authoritarianism. He previously served as associate White House counsel in the Obama administration. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.that “Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed.” You have been taking these rankings, and similar data points, seriously, long before anyone else was seeing around the corner of why they should matter.What I find helpful about those numbers is that from a historical context, from an international context, they get us out of a mindset that I think you and I probably encounter when we talk to people, which is either: A). Those responses suggest that some of the chaos and dysfunction we’re seeing is just status quo normal, and it allows people who are otherwise not obsessively focused on politics to tune it out., and see that democracy, not just in the United States, but around the world, has been in decline for most of the 21century, and that it’s happening at rates that when you compare it to other moments in history portends pretty dangerous weather on the horizon. These rankings help focus on the fact that what we’re experiencing now is generationally, almost on an epochal level, different. Looking at those measures is helpful to get us to say, “OK, so what does that mean about this moment we’re in?” I often think it’s just helpful to know there’s a playbook. Somehow, knowing all of these things—going after the judiciary, going after a free press, going after the academy—are all from a playbook we’ve seen in other illiberal democracies, authoritarian governments, there’s just some tiny comfort in knowing this is what it looks like, and it is maybe startling to us, but it’s hardly startling.Having that context is both a warning and a comfort in a couple of ways. It seems weird to say that looking at us go off a democracy cliff is comforting, but here’s what I mean by that. There have been three major indexes that for the last decades have measured the state of democracy in the U.S. and around the world. One is that Varieties of Democracy Index out of Sweden, another is the Economist Intelligence Unit out of the U.K., and a third one is Freedom House in the United States. V-Dem and Freedom House both recently put out their annual reports showing yet further declines for U.S. democracy.which built another version of these, studying the trends when it comes to democracy and measuring its quality around the world. It put out its inaugural report a couple of weeks ago and it showed that the decline of U.S. democracy since the start of the second Trump term has been, the decline of the Turkish system under Erdoğan, the decline of the Venezuelan system under Chávez and Maduro, and the decline even of Russia under Putin. If you look at the trend line, the U.S. one has gone off a cliff faster than those other four.holy crap, the U.S. is declining faster than those canonical examples of Democratic backsliding! I think the speed of that decline is, in a weird way, good news. It’s crucial to note that Donald Trump is historically unpopular. He won a razor-thin election in 2024. We forget this because it was so devastating for those of us who thought it would be dangerous if he won again, but he didwin a majority of votes cast. And in the Electoral College, 230,000 votes across three states would’ve changed the election. This was a razor-thin election that Donald Trump took and proclaimed was a mandate for a radical overhauling of American government. There’s a real problem if you’re going to try to radically overhaul the American system with that slim a majority, which is that people didn’t vote for it and they’re going to recoil at it, especially if you do it very quickly, very chaotically, and in ways that are incredibly disruptive.Trump is acting as though he won a 60 percent majority and the people are rebelling against it, and that is actually not a good plan if you are trying to build an electoral autocracy, because the key to building an electoral autocracy lies in consolidating power before you become unpopular. Because in a system like the U.S. system, you can’t just seize control of everything, you need to corrupt all of these institutions. You need to win over all of these accomplices in the other branches in our federal system, in the private sector, and the way you win over those accomplices, the way you corrupt that system is you show that you have enormous power, and you instill a level of fear that people have to respond to such that everyone essentially hands things over to you.That started to happen at the beginning of this Trump term, when it felt like he was ascendant and all-powerful, and everyone was really afraid he was whisking people off the street and sending them to gulags in Central America without due process, and planes were taking off and not listening to courts. It felt like he had that level of power, and everyone essentially acquiesced and you had this sort of anticipatory obedience.But around Liberation Day, he blinked. He issues all of these global tariffs, the bond markets rebel, and he blinks. In that moment of blinking, the whole system kind of said,Ever since then, the system has not handed itself freely to him, as he has done things that have been radically unpopular, and I think he fundamentally failed at the one thing electoral autocrats need to do to create electoral autocracies, which is consolidate before they become unpopular. If you look at that Financial Times graph, at what Putin did, what Erdoğan did, what Chávez and Maduro did, and what Orbán did? At the beginning of their terms, they slowly corrupted the institutions at a speed that allowed them to take control before the people realized,and by the time people realized, it was too late. Trump is so undisciplined he failed to do that. So now he’s underwater by 20 points in every presidential approval survey, and the Democrats are winning every special election by double-digit margins over how they performed in 2024.; took it away from a Republican. The really interesting thing about that election is that it wasn’t that Republican turnout was underwhelming—it was a pro-Republican electorate that turned out in Palm Beach, they just voted for the Democrat. These are Republicans defecting. The American public are rebelling at the voting booth against Donald Trump before he has fully consolidated power, and that’s why that precipitous decline is both dangerous but actually may be our salvation.Protect Democracy formed in 2016 and has expanded exponentially since. When you and I first sat down and talked in 2016, you and your team put a lot of stock in litigating in that first Trump term. What’s changed in that toggle between litigating and organizing and some of the other stuff that you do from Trump 1.0 to 2.0?When we started Protect Democracy, we were founded by a group of lawyers coming out of the White House and the Department of Justice, so we started with a legal-heavy strategy, because for all these norms and traditions and institutions that were in danger from the rise of autocracy in the United States and around the world, if we could get a court to say, “Don’t do that,” we thought that was pretty strong medicine. The other reason was we were hammers and so we saw everything as a nail. That strategy was both successful in parts and unsuccessful in parts through Donald Trump’s first term. It was successful in that we were able to use it in a whole bunch of ways to hold the line, and the fact that we had an autocrat take power in this country in 2016 and then they were essentially turned out of power through the normal democratic process in 2020, that was a testament to the success, to some degree, of that strategy. We were able to help contribute to all of the institutions that the Founders put into the Constitution and support them doing what they were supposed to do in this country.Then, of course, the autocrat comes back in 2024, which causes us to reflect and say, “Well, maybe that strategy wasn’t successful enough?” And so we started to focus on the fact that what we were facing fundamentally was not a legal problem, but a political problem, and that the courts were only going to get us so far, including because the Supreme Court is made up of human beings who were also prone to drifting with the political culture. And we had a Supreme Court that had six justices on it who came out of a conservative legal movement that if you tried to describe it in pre-2016, terms, it would look like one thing but if you tried to describe it in 2023 or 2024 terms, it starts to look like another thing entirely. Case in point in the argument last week in the Mississippi ballots case,So as we turned into Trump’s second term, my concern was that we might win a bunch of cases in the lower courts, but they would get reversed, for the most part, when it got up to the Supreme Court. And fundamentally, Trump was able to survive the legal assaults on him in the first term because he was playing a game of populism, and that is a game of politics, not law. So at Protect Democracy, at the beginning of Trump’s second term, we basically said: “There are going to be important cases and we’re going to file those cases,” and we are doing that. We just filed a caseand recording people who are exercising their First Amendment rights, and they are being threatened with being put in a database of domestic terrorists. That’s illegal, and we’re going to get the courts to say so.We are still litigating where it makes sense to litigate, but I think I was a little bit bearish at the beginning of Trump’s second term about how far the courts could get us, and I was worried that the entire democracy movement was going to put all of its chips on the court strategy, and come the end of June, the Supreme Court was going to sweep the table of all of the chips. I wanted to make sure when that happened, we had a bunch of chips elsewhere on the table, on strategies that had to do with building the coalitions necessary to survive these moments. Looking at international examples—at Poland, and Brazil—they built these broad, all-of-society coalitions that contained people who disagreed about a whole bunch of normal policy questions, but agreed about the foundations of having a free and democratic system.I’m happy that I think I was wrong. I think I was wrong in that the courts have been far more important in Trump’s second term than I thought they were going to be. Even though it has indeed turned out to be the case that we won a lot of cases in the lower courts that ended up getting eviscerated as they moved up to the Supreme Court, still the lower court victories have slowed things down in really meaningful ways.This November’s election is going to turn on having people look around and ask themselves, “Do I like authoritarianism? Do I like lying? Do I like Greg Bovino throwing his weight around?” Protect Democracy just released a comprehensive report on threats to the 2026 elections. It’s called Executive Overrideto stand around and look scary and watch five-hour lines for security is a little bit of a preview of what it’s going to be like come November. Is this an attempt to get people to normalize having these guys standing around our polling places? Is that the play here?. I think that is the play here. But as with all things, it cuts two ways. It’s not a good thing, and we’re going to fight it tooth and nail, but normalizing it also recalibrates people’s risk tolerance and might actually have the effect of dulling people’s reaction to it come the election. “Oh yeah, I’ve gone to the airport, I’ve seen this, I’m just gonna go vote.” Right?But we have to anticipate the fact that a wildly unpopular autocrat has only one way to hold on to power in a system that still has elections, which is to undermine the fairness and the freedom of those elections. So here’s the bad news, and then also the good news. The bad news is we know that Trump is going to try to undermine the fairness of these elections because he’s already doing it. This is not speculation. This is the thing that I find wild about the people who are still wondering what’s going to happen: The guy lost an election one time so far, and he refused to leave office without inciting a violent insurrection on the Capitol. If you want to know how people are going to react in an election they’re not favored to do well in, just look at how they’ve reacted in the past. We know that he’s not just going to allow and encourage the United States to have a free and fair election.So let’s understand what’s coming, and what’s already begun. It’s essentially three things: deceive, disrupt, and deny. In 2020, after he lost the election, President Trump tried to deceive the American people into saying it was stolen. The night of the election, he comes out and claims they’re stealing the election in Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Detroit. When he did that, snap polls taken at the time showed that he convinced about 28 to 32 percent of the public that the election was stolen. That’s an alarmingly high number, but it actually wasn’t enough.Why wasn’t it enough? Because in our system, we don’t have a national election authority that an autocrat can simply seize control over, we have this incredibly decentralized system where it’s not one election—there’s thousands of local elections. So if you want to steal a national election in the United States, you need accomplices all over the system. You need local county clerks, you need secretaries of state, you need courts, you need legislative leaders in statehouses. When Trump turned to all those people after the 2020 election, having convinced less than a third of the American people that it was stolen, all those people said, “Yeah, nah.” Brad Raffensperger? Yeah, nah. The Republican leaders of the state legislatures in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania? Yeah, nah. The courts en masse? Yeah, nah. Only 147 Republicans in Congress said, “Sure, yeah, we’ll do that,” but it still wasn’t enough. So he learned he needed to deceive more of the country, and he spent the next couple of years building up this big lie and trying to convince people that our elections were rigged and stolen, so that the next time he would have more buy-in from his accomplices. He was actually having success doing that between when he left office in 2021, and 2024. The percentage of people that he’d convinced that elections were rigged and stolen had started to go up. But then he wins in 2024 and he erases all his gains, because Republicans, who had been persuaded by “Stop the steal,” start to say: “Oh, actually the elections are fine.” So it goes back down to where the number is now, according to polling, about a quarter of Americans think there’s something fundamentally corrupt about our elections, and about three quarters think elections, by and large, produce the will of the voters. That’s where he starts his second term.And his goal has been to change that to get more than the people he convinced in 2020 to believe elections are stolen. He’s going to do that through seizing ballots all over the country; he’s already seized ballots in, “We see dead people”—we found dead people on the voter roll. They’re going to get Nicolás Maduro to cop to some plea that Venezuela hacked the election. They’re going to create all these fictional conspiracy theories. They sent voting monitors from the DOJ to New Jersey and California in 2025.sees dead people. They’re going to come out with all this manufactured stuff to try to persuade people that something untoward is happening; that Iran is interfering; China’s interfering; the Cookie Monster is stealing ballots, right?And that’s all to set up the “disrupt.” Once you can convince people that there’s something that really needs fixing here, you can get all these people you don’t necessarily directly control to try to change the rules and disrupt the system. So right now, the president is putting all this heat on the Senate to. Which would mandate birth certificates and passports in order to register to vote, disenfranchising tens of millions of people, including, especially, married women who have changed their names and may not have gone back and gotten a new birth certificate with their new name on it. But the president hasn’t deceived enough people yet, and so the Senate is basically saying, “Yeah, nah.” So the president has to deceive more people. If he does, you’ll have more disruption. Ultimately, if the disruption doesn’t succeed, and the results are not to the president’s liking, you’ll have the “deny” phase, where they will simply try to deny the results. This is what happened in 2020.CPAC Used to Be the Most Important Event of the Year for Republicans. In 2026, Something Changed.. The sitting North Carolina State Supreme Court justice, Allison Riggs, won her reelection by about 725 votes. The loser of that race, Jefferson Griffin said,eah, the rules that were in place at the time, they shouldn’t have been the rules. We should go back and change the rules. If you go back and change the rules, I would’ve won . And I will tell you, I coached six Little League teams, of 5- and 9-year-olds, in three different sports. Not once has a 6-year-old said at the end of the game,because even 6-year-olds know you can’t do that. But apparently Jefferson Griffin didn’t understand that and tried to. So that’s the playbook we’re going to see. Deceive, disrupt, deny. We have aWe’ve seen this before. We saw it in 2020. We saw it in North Carolina in 2024. We have defeated it each time. That’s the fourth D: We’re going to defeat this. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it
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