The 2024 presidential election is over — and Donald Trump is the victor. There is no doubt about the election’s legitimacy: Trump is on track to win the Electoral College by a wide margin and potentially win the popular vote for the first time.
Yet while the election itself was on the level, what comes next may not be. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to enact his long-proposed plans to hollow out American democracy from within.
Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and anyone else who has opposed him. Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.
Yet as dire as things are, America has reserves it can draw on to withstand the coming assault. Over the course of the country’s long democratic history, it has built up robust systems for checking abuses of power.
America’s federal structure gives blue states control over key powers like election administration. Its independent judiciary stood strong during Trump’s first term. Its professional, apolitical military will likely push back against unlawful orders. Its politically active citizenry has a proven capacity to take to the streets. And America’s world-leading media will fiercely resist any effort to compromise its independence.
No country at America’s level of political-economic development has ever collapsed into authoritarianism. There are some close modern analogues, most worryingly modern Hungary, but even they are different in crucial respects.
This is not to make an argument for complacency or naïve optimism. Quite the opposite: The next four years will be American democracy’s gravest threat since the Civil War; if it survives them, it will surely do so battered, bruised and battle-scarred.
In Hungary, when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the U.S. Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.
America’s federal structure also creates checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington, D.C. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.
The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all its problems, does not depend on.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.
Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society and the people themselves.
This is the case against despair.
As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to develop countermeasures.
Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad.
