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President Donald Trump is dismantling U.S. democracy at an “unprecedented” rate, downgrading the U.S.’s democratic rating on a global scale and plunging the country toward autocracy at a faster rate than autocratic leaders of other countries in the 21st century, the latest report by an international democracy watchdog finds.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Sweden’s Gothenburg University finds in its annual report that Trump’s second term has been characterized by a swift concentration of power in the executive branch that ignores the rule of law, suppresses dissent, and targets civil rights.
Many countries are falling further into autocracy, the report finds. But the U.S. stands out as “an exceptional new autocratizer due to both far-reaching changes in 2025 and their implications for the rest of the world,” the group writes. “The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency — in just one year — stands out on the world map.”
Trump has achieved in only one year what other countries with similar trends have taken a decade to achieve, the report says.
“[T]he speed of decline is comparable to some coups d’états,” the group wrote in its report.
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Staffan Lindberg, the founder of V-Dem, told The Guardian.
V-Dem measures democratic health using 48 measures like freedom of expression and the media, election quality, and adherence to the law.
The researchers found that the U.S.’s democracy has now fallen on its index by 24 percent, dropping its world rank to 51st place, from its spot in 20th. It is now at the same level that it was in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed, which established voting rights across racial groups. Freedom of expression, the group said, is at its lowest level since the end of World War II.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is flouting Congress and the judiciary. Trump has waged attacks directly on the courts while his administration, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, openly violates dozens of judicial orders.
The administration has unilaterally taken over powers to reallocate and grant federal funding at will, like Trump’s $10 billion gift to his “Board of Peace” and his slashing of billions of dollars of research and humanitarian grants under an agency that the Trump administration invented without any congressional approval.
Congress has not intervened at all. The Republican-controlled Congress has “abdicated its constitutional role in favor of the executive branch,” the report notes, “ceding significant legislative, fiscal, and oversight powers during 2025.”
The administration is also undoing civil rights achievements and equality initiatives, seeking to silence and take control over the media, and suppressing left-wing dissenters, contributing to U.S. democracy’s rapid decline.
The downward spiral could continue at this rate. This year is especially key for the state of U.S. democracy, researchers noted, due to the crucial midterm elections. Election quality has not contributed to the decline so far, but the U.S. could fall much further if this is downgraded during this year’s elections.
However, the report notes that not all is lost, and that 70 percent of autocratizations under the modern wave have been reversed.
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