{"id":531114,"date":"2026-03-18T16:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T16:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/531114\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T16:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T16:19:08","slug":"the-united-states-loses-its-status-as-a-liberal-democracy-trump-is-aiming-for-a-dictatorship-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/531114\/","title":{"rendered":"The United States loses its status as a liberal democracy: \u2018Trump is aiming for a dictatorship\u2019 | U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

Democratic backsliding is advancing in the developed world. The annual report<\/a> from Sweden\u2019s V-Dem Institute leaves no room for doubt: almost a quarter of the world experienced democratic backsliding, or a shift towards autocratization, in 2025, and six of the 10 newly regressive countries identified in the research are located in Europe and North America, including G-7 powers such as Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.<\/p>\n

But the most unsettling conclusion reached by the Swedish institute is that the United States \u2014 once a proud beacon of the more or less free world \u2014 is no longer a liberal democracy and is now on a par with countries like Hungary or Turkey, thanks to President Donald Trump. Autocracy is also spreading throughout Europe, but its reach extends far beyond the Old Continent: 41% of the world\u2019s population (3.4 billion people) now live in countries where democracy is eroding.<\/p>\n

The institute, which belongs to the University of Gothenburg and uses 48 metrics in its evaluation, is one of the most reliable sources when it comes to rating the state of governments around the world, and the conclusion of its 2026 study confirms the worst fears about the authoritarian drift of the U.S. under Trump\u2019s leadership<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to V-Dem, the U.S. is hurtling toward autocracy at a faster pace than Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s Hungary<\/a> or Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Turkey (in all three cases, and in that of another self-proclaimed autocrat, Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin<\/a>, it is a drift toward personalism, with strong, or alpha, leaders who impose themselves on and colonize the system, starting with Trump himself). Another similar case, in the so-called world\u2019s largest democracy \u2014 at least nominally, because in V-Dem\u2019s definition it is an \u201celectoral autocracy\u201d \u2014 would be that of Narendra Modi\u2019s India<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur data on the United States goes back to 1789. What we are seeing now is the greatest democratic backsliding the country has ever seen,\u201d says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute. Thus, according to the 2026 ranking, democracy in the U.S. has fallen back to the same level as in 1965, although the current situation is completely different from that of the civil rights era<\/a>, when laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. Since then, the report says, all progress has been erased.<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s first term was for some a mere anecdote destined to be erased by history \u2014 a misjudgment that some still lament \u2014 the Republican\u2019s second term can already be defined as a rapid and aggressive concentration of power in the presidency (despite the titanic efforts of some judges to maintain the separation of powers<\/a>). The speed with which American democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern times, asserts the V-Dem report, which has published its assessments annually since 2012.<\/p>\n

For the first time in more than half a century, researchers emphasize, the U.S. has lost its status as a long-term liberal democracy. The country is undergoing a rapid process of what the report\u2019s authors call \u201cautocratization,\u201d the authoritarian drift already confirmed in Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, and India, among other countries. The difference lies mainly in the uniformly accelerated speed at which the destruction of the democratic system has taken place in the U.S. \u201cIt took Orb\u00e1n in Hungary about four years, Vucic in Serbia eight years, and Erdo\u011fan in Turkey and Modi in India about 10 years to suppress democratic institutions, something Trump achieved in just one year,\u201d Lindberg points out.<\/p>\n

Worldwide, democracy has regressed to its lowest levels since the mid-1970s, something the research director calls the largest global and simultaneous process of autocratization.<\/p>\n

\"CentroICE family detention center in Dilley, Texas.Eric Gay (AP)<\/p>\n

What criteria are used to assert that Trump\u2019s America is increasingly distant from that of the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution? The clearest indication of democratic erosion is a \u201crapid and aggressive concentration of power in the presidency.\u201d Congress has been sidelined, jeopardizing the checks and balances (judicial and legislative limitations on the executive branch) that are fundamental to American democracy.<\/p>\n

In the first year of his current term<\/a>, Trump signed 225 executive orders, while Congress, still controlled by Republicans, passed only 49 new laws. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly eroding, and press freedom is at its lowest level since the 1940s. But it\u2019s not just freedom of expression that is dwindling; journalists, in fulfilling their duty to inform, risk being directly insulted by the president<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lindberg points out that there is no longer a meaningful separation between the legislative and executive branches. \u201cThe legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers in favor of the president. It no longer functions as a check on the executive branch,\u201d and that, considering the scope of most of Trump\u2019s executive orders (to shut down entire government departments, fire thousands of employees, or declare war on migrants), is very serious. More than 600 ongoing legal proceedings aim to curb the Republican\u2019s accumulation of power in the courts and restore some of its functions to democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump is aiming for a dictatorship\u201d<\/p>\n

Another aspect of the rapid deterioration of democracy in the United States, according to the report, is the elimination of internal safeguards that protect the federal government from abuse of power. \u201cTrump has fired inspectors general and senior officials in every department and replaced them with loyalists. This is exactly what Orb\u00e1n and Erdo\u011fan did. They are removing the constraints on power. By now it should be obvious that Trump is aiming for a dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to its disturbing findings, the V-Dem Institute report maps the distribution of power worldwide, which by the end of 2025 included 92 autocracies and 87 democracies. Nearly three-quarters of the world\u2019s population (74%, or six billion people) live in the former. There are now more people living in closed or full autocracies (28%, or 2.3 billion) than in so-called electoral autocracies, or merely nominal democracies like Turkey or India (26%, or 2.2 billion). Only 600 million people (7% of the world\u2019s population) live in full democracies.<\/p>\n

According to the report, the most attacked aspect of democracy worldwide is freedom of expression, which worsened in 44 countries last year. The average global citizen today finds themselves, democratically speaking, as if they were living in 1978, since almost all the democratic gains of the so-called \u201cthird wave of democratization,\u201d which began with the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974<\/a>, have been erased.<\/p>\n

Other severely affected aspects of democracy include freedom of association, which went from improving in 54 countries in 2000 to declining in 24 in 2025; the fairness and transparency of electoral processes, which deteriorated in 22 countries last year; and government attempts to censor the media, the tactic most frequently used by autocratic regimes to stifle freedom: government censorship worsened in 44 countries over the past decade. Finally, torture \u2014 an increasingly common tool for suppressing opposition and dissent \u2014 was used in 33 countries in 2025.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Democratic backsliding is advancing in the developed world. The annual report from Sweden\u2019s V-Dem Institute leaves no room…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,12,5,3,38629,21,19,22,20,25,24,52074,6508,2805],"class_list":["post-531114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-donald-trump","tag-narendra-modi","tag-news","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-viktor-orban","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-washington-d-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}