It will take decades to rebuild trust in a country that removed a tyrant once – and then reinstated him four years later
When Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021 it was possible to believe that Donald Trump’s reign had been an aberration. “America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back,” the new president declared to relieved European leaders shortly after winning the 2020 race. It was true, but not for long.
Trump’s defeat proved that US democracy was mechanically operational, not culturally robust. His supporters tried violent subversion to prevent the inauguration of a successor. A second term should have been unthinkable. Republicans who failed to denounce the 6 January insurrection should have been unelectable. Instead, within four years, US voters reinstated the champion of a failed coup against their cherished constitution as commander-in-chief.
That is worth remembering in any analysis of midterm congressional elections. Voting was under way at the time of writing. Opinion polls in the run-up favoured Democrats. But it is a measure of how grievously Trump has imperilled democracy that peaceful completion of that process, followed by a fair count, cannot be anticipated with confidence.
The most that can be said is that the elections were not aborted, nor did they look blatantly rigged on the eve of polling, which gives hope that the balloting process can still function in theory. That is no protection against a president with a record of denying results that displease him and a party that cravenly endorses every lie and coercion he deploys to consolidate his power.
With two years left in his second term, Trump has ample scope to punish disloyalty and reward sycophants. Facing a choice between election integrity and partisan venality, precedent suggests few Republicans prefer the path of constitutional virtue. That moral collapse in the ruling party is salient for some voters, but that group – the anti-tyranny constituency – were always going to vote Democrat. In the swing-voting middle, Trump is a drag on the Republicans because people feel let down on the economy and disrespected by a president who is more interested in the construction of a White House ballroom for himself than the affordability of everyday goods for everyone else.
A disciplined and sophisticated fascist would have focused on suffocating domestic opposition and dismantling institutional checks on the presidency, instead of launching a strategically inept and economically self-sabotaging war against Iran. That miscalculation has damaged Trump. It upset “America first” ideologues who thought he stood against forever wars in the Middle East. By precipitating closure of the strait of Hormuz, it landed higher bills on voters whose motive for voting Republican in 2024 had been the spike in inflation preceding that poll.
Democrats can’t afford to be fussy about different flavours of anti-Trump vote. If the economy is what people care about, that is the campaign to run. If a quixotic, megalomaniac foreign policy choice made in February leads indirectly to the election of a Congress better equipped to hold a rogue president to account, that would obviously be better than the scenario where the same failure passes with impunity.
But it leaves the argument incomplete in the same way that Biden’s 2020 victory was insufficiently decisive. The case that defenders of US democracy still haven’t landed is the one that explains Trump’s bad decisions as the inevitable consequence of his beliefs, not just disappointing meanders away off the true path.
If US society were truly and passionately wedded to the principles enshrined in its constitution, a campaign exposing Trump as a persistent aggressor against that foundational ethos would be unbeatable. But it has been tried and beaten.
Before Biden stepped down mid-race in 2024, he sought to frame his bid for re-election as an existential contest for the soul of the US political system. Trump was a despot, he said, whose embrace of the 6 January insurrection was a clear disqualification from ever being allowed near the Oval Office again. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania. When Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee, she made the same point. Trump was “unhinged and unstable”, seeking “unchecked power”, she said weeks before polling day. America decided the price of eggs was a more pressing concern.
Perhaps Trump’s second term can achieve what the first one didn’t. Maybe the extra exposure to a more virulent strain of the virus is generating antibodies in the US body politic that the initial four-year dose couldn’t produce. If so, we won’t have proof of it any time soon. A nation that swerves dictatorship by luck, because the aspiring dictator lacked the strategic acumen to complete his mission, doesn’t look immune for the long term.
It is a lesson US allies learned from the false comfort they took when Biden said the old America was back. Slowly, European democracies are adapting to a world in which they cannot assume US friendship. Reliance on the US defence umbrella and advanced technology is now recognised as a strategic vulnerability to be urgently addressed.
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For Britain, Trump is an engine driving closer integration with Europe. His trade policy, combining innumerate protectionism and territorial rapacity, has destroyed the flimsy case for Brexit that posited nonexistent transatlantic deals as alternatives to the EU single market. White House indulgence of Vladimir Putin and scorn for Nato makes it hard to credibly sustain the idea of UK leverage through a “special relationship” with Washington.
Some restoration of trust in a post-Trump America is feasible. But so is the spread of Trumpian nationalism through Europe. The election of far-right governments could strain and ultimately even break postwar 20th-century institutions that were founded with vows of determination never again to let enemies of liberal democracy plunge the continent into spirals of hatred and war.
That history was meant to be an inoculation on both sides of the Atlantic. But when it mattered, the 20th-century parables didn’t sway US voters. The warnings went unheeded when familiar authoritarian intent appeared, lightly camouflaged in modern celebrity style, speaking in all-American idiom. The challenge now for European democrats is to study that lesson – the cautionary tale of America’s fragile defences against tyranny in the 21st century – and turn it into campaigns that prevent the same thing happening here.
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