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Donald Trump and the Republican Party are dismantling American democracy at a record-breaking pace, according to the latest edition of a long-running project tracking the health of democracies across the world.

“The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times,” write the authors of the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 democracy report. “Under Trump’s presidency the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.” That was the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, and it was also the year most scholars view as the U.S. finally having become a true democracy.

The V-Dem Institute, based in Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, has been compiling the world’s largest dataset on democracy for more than a decade. The work involves thousands of academic experts measuring various attributes of democracy across the world’s countries and rolling those measurements up into aggregate indexes that assess how well governments reflect the will of their citizens, protect their individual liberties, and safeguard the integrity of their electoral processes.

In the first year of the second Trump administration, democracy in the United States is in free fall.

V-Dem’s scale runs from 0 (full-blown totalitarianism) to 1 (flourishing electoral democracy). Practically speaking, countries in 2025 ran the gamut from 0.01 (North Korea) to 0.88 (Denmark).

From the 1990s to the dawn of the first Trump administration, the United States typically rated 0.8 or above, good enough to place us in the top 20 countries in the world. But last year our score plummeted to 0.57, knocking us out of the top 50.

The report’s authors note that several specific factors are driving the decline. The Republican-controlled Congress has largely abandoned its role as a co-equal branch of government, effectively handing the president the “power of the purse” to unilaterally cancel or redirect federal funding and arbitrarily set tariffs. Congressional Republicans have also ceded much of their lawmaking authority to the White House, allowing Donald Trump to attempt sweeping policy changes through executive orders (and leaving the courts to figure out whether any of it is legal).

Trump has also directly undermined the workings of the judicial system, most notably by pardoning 1,500 people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Trump has called for impeachment and filed misconduct complaints against judges who rule against him, refused to follow court orders, and channeled French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte in declaring, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Trump promised, in his second inaugural address, to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” vowing that “never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” In reality, the data shows that he has cracked down on free speech more aggressively than any president in the modern era, driving V-Dem’s measure of American free expression down to its lowest point since the end of World War II.

The president has deployed federal troops to cities governed by Democrats, for instance, and threatened to use “very big force” against peaceful protesters. He launched a campaign of retribution against law firms for work he opposed and authorized federal agencies to target organizations and individuals who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity.”

He also weaponized federal funding to force universities to dismantle DEI programs and restrict certain forms of campus protest. Last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted about revoking more than 300 student visas, largely over foreign policy views the administration disagreed with.

“In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s,” wrote Aryeh Neier, co-founder of Human Rights Watch, earlier this month.

Trump has also bragged about his efforts to crack down on unflattering media coverage. He has sued news outlets over unfavorable stories, barred some media organizations from covering the White House, and suggested that mocking him on late-night talk shows is illegal.

Staffan Lindberg, founding director of the V-Dem Institute, said that leaders in authoritarian regimes frequently claim to be upholding the very rights they’re working to suppress. “It’s a standard tactic,” he said. “Even Putin used to say he was protecting freedom of speech by purging ‘fake news.’ ”

In many ways, America’s authoritarian turn has proceeded precisely as many scholars predicted it would in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection: The first Trump administration had followed the same authoritarian playbook seen in other backsliding nations, like Turkey and Hungary.

But democracy experts have been stunned by the speed of backsliding in the first year of the second Trump term. V-Dem’s data demonstrates that democratic erosion is happening much more rapidly here than it has elsewhere in recent years.

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This regression is usually “incremental and often inconspicuous, spanning years or even decades,” the report’s authors write. But “in terms of the speed of autocratization, Trump 2.0 outpaces not only Trump 1.0 but also the most prominent autocrats of the last 25 years,” including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

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Authoritarian turns can reverse themselves, and the V-Dem report finds that 10 other nations—including Bolivia, Brazil, and Poland—are turning back toward democracy after a period of decline. Some observers are looking toward those countries for lessons on how to rebuild American democracy after Trump.

It won’t be easy. Lindberg notes that autocratic parties, like the Trumpist incarnation of the GOP, rarely reform themselves. But the 10 countries moving back toward democracy in 2025 have one major thing in common: “mass mobilization,” Lindberg says. “Lots of people out protesting in the streets is one of the most effective ways to stop autocratization. But those protests must be sustained, frequent, and long-standing.”

Recent protests in Minnesota, where Twin Cities residents took to the streets to protect their neighbors from the administration’s mass-deportation efforts, offer one template for what such mobilization would look like in an American context. But they also underscore the dangers of direct opposition to an authoritarian regime: hundreds of civil rights violations, dozens of arrests, and two lives lost.

And in a sign of just how rapidly America’s democratic decline is proceeding, none of it will show up in V-Dem’s data until next year.

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