In November, the British newspaper The Guardian compared what H.L. Mencken wrote about Warren G. Harding with a contemporary portrait of Donald Trump:
Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate who — despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together, being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs — would go on to not only win election but become one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history.
The core of Harding’s support, according to Mencken, was “small town yokels, or low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”
Harding, however, was no Trump: The president, newly elected to a second term, has a mean if not sadistic streak, an exorbitant taste for revenge, a charismatic persona and, to put it mildly, a flair for publicity.
Now the question — after a frenzied week of pardons, executive orders, threatening phone calls and emergency declarations — is: Where is this man taking America?
Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard, argued in an email that Trump has returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at a time when the country’s political system is particularly vulnerable:
In its formal institutions, America remains an electoral democracy. The constitutional checks and balances on President Trump, which proved resilient during the first term in office, have obviously greatly eroded today.
This includes the weakened constraints on executive aggrandizement arising from Republican control of both houses of Congress and the majority of statehouses, the rudderless and demoralized Democratic Party, the right-wing skew on the Supreme Court, the diminishing audience for legacy news media and the disarray of liberal opposition movements and institutions in civic society. Strongman leaders often erode democracy far more in their second term of office, compared with their first, when they are learning the ropes.
As a result, Norris argued, “America faces clear risks of accelerated institutional backsliding from electoral democracy into an electoral autocracy.”
Weakened institutions, democratic backsliding and a demoralized left are, for Trump, an ideal combination, giving him a kind of home-field advantage.
As Norris put it, Trump joins those politicians who
follow authoritarian beliefs and values emphasizing the importance of threats to security (the “invasion of migrants”), aggressive hostility punishing outsiders (us-them) who do not share group norms and moral values (the “woke” brigade), and the importance of loyalty toward the leader or leaders defending the group (“I alone can fix it”).
In this regard, American democracy faces an existential risk from the second term of President Trump. The Trump 2.0 effect is most likely to come from accelerating changes to the cultural “vibes,” legitimating authoritarian values, norms and practices.
Trump has returned to office fully equipped to push the national government in a radically new direction. In order to get a sense of how far this might go, I asked a range of scholars to evaluate the early developments in the new administration.