Will US democracy survive Trump?

Donald Trump’s inauguration as America’s 47th president will be historic in several ways. He will be America’s oldest president. He will be the first who is a convicted felon. And he will be the first Republican president in two decades who won the popular vote – an achievement that both highlights and compounds the crisis of democracy the United States is now confronting.Since George W Bush defeated John Kerry by some 3mn votes in 2004, Republican presidents have won thanks to the Electoral College, which bolsters the influence of voters in less populous states. Many of these states lean Republican, lending a significant advantage to the party’s presidential candidates. That includes Trump, who won in 2016 despite receiving about 3mn fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.In 2020, however, this Electoral College advantage was not enough. With over 81mn votes – the largest number in US history – President Joe Biden trounced Trump by 7mn votes. But this time, Trump won over 77mn votes, compared to Kamala Harris’s 75mn. While a two-million-vote difference does not amount to anything close to a landslide, Trump and his team have presented the results as a major triumph and a powerful mandate to transform America.Trump’s victory can be attributed largely to his preternatural ability, shared with all successful demagogues, to identify an issue that resonates with voters, convince them that it is an even bigger problem than they think, and then offer "solutions” that are simultaneously facile and vague.Voters fear immigration? In 2016, Trump led chants of "Build the wall!” without an effective plan for doing so, let alone showing how a wall on the US border with Mexico – which was never built – would actually address illegal immigration. In 2024, he promised the "largest deportation operation in American history,” while providing few details about logistics, mitigating the economic and social fallout, or preventing human-rights violations. Ask questions, and all you would get was an inflated figure for undocumented immigrants and tirades about "criminals” who "eat pets.”Voters are struggling economically? That one is easy: blame Biden. In late 2019, the US economy was doing relatively well, giving the impression that Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation were working. But in 2020, the economy plummeted: between April and June, US GDP fell by about 30% compared to the previous quarter. Of course, the Covid-19 crisis caused the crash, but Trump’s response – or lack thereof – undoubtedly exacerbated it.From the start, Trump downplayed the pandemic’s seriousness, with severe repercussions for public health. So, by the time Biden became president, he had a huge mess to clean up. To limit the public-health fallout, his administration supported mask and vaccine mandates and other evidence-based measures aimed at stemming transmission. And to accelerate economic recovery and support people’s incomes, he launched an audacious fiscal-stimulus program.Such spending, together with supply-chain disruptions and other factors, contributed to a spike in inflation. While inflation has since been brought under control, and the US Federal Reserve is now cutting interest rates, prices remain elevated. For ordinary voters, the fact that inflation was a global phenomenon and that the US is outperforming its peers meant little. All that mattered was whether their living standards improved under Biden, and for many, the answer was no.To be sure, Trump’s opponents – first Biden, and then his replacement, Vice President Harris – did not mount an effective defense of their record. They failed to offer a convincing plan for managing immigration or to connect with the working-class voters who feel unheard and unprotected. While the Democrats touted complex industrial strategies involving massive public investment in climate-related projects, Trump simply shouted, "Tariffs!” Never mind that those tariffs will drive up prices for US consumers; he said they would fix everything, and that was good enough for desperate voters.It did not help that for nearly three years Americans had been seeing reports of seemingly huge amounts of aid going to Ukraine, leaving many wondering why that money was not going toward improving their lives. Whereas Biden and Harris promised to support Ukraine indefinitely, Trump declared that he would end the war in a day. Meanwhile, the Democrats alienated many young Americans by eagerly supporting Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has led to a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions.Trump’s victory has set the stage for a lurch toward autocracy. But Americans need not resign themselves to the collapse of their democracy. The US, after all, has a long history of abandoning dangerous political projects when they go too far (McCarthyism is a case in point). And it cannot be stated too often that Trump defeated his opponent in the last election by only 1.5 percentage points.Contrary to the political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s famous declaration that the end of the Cold War meant we had reached the "end of history,” the work of defending democracy is never done. If Americans allow apathy to take hold, they might find themselves living in a post-democratic society, which the late Samuel P Huntington’s own Cold War postmortem warned could lead to civilisational conflict and the collapse of the international order that has underpinned relative world peace for several decades. — Project Syndicate

• Koichi Hamada, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, was a special adviser to former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo.