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New data suggests Trump’s assault on democracy may be stalling out

Three new reports give some surprising reasons for optimism.

The status of American democracy feels paradoxical: somehow both damaged and well-functioning at the same time.

On the one hand, the United States has a president who is acting like a dictator: threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, menacing allies with threats to annex their territory, targeting domestic enemies with spurious criminal investigations, and deploying masked armed forces to cities.

On the other hand, his ambitions have been continually frustrated by court rulings, a grassroots protest movement that has turned out millions of Americans on three separate occasions, and an opposition party that’s all but certain to flip at least one house of Congress in November’s elections.

So what do you call this — authoritarianism, democracy, or something in between? In recent weeks, three major studies have tried to answer this question, using rigorous methodologies to provide a quantitative estimate of democratic health in America.

Broadly, the reports’ findings converge on a similar picture: that American democracy has been damaged in President Donald Trump’s first year, perhaps severely, but remains alive and functioning. In fact, it might even be healing.

A close look at the reports’ details, including careful attention to their disagreements and divergences, helps clarify the reasons why that’s true — and maybe even give a little bit of optimism about democracy’s future.

Just how damaged is American democracy?

Studying democratic health is tricky. There isn’t an objective instrument you can use to measure it the way that, say, thermometers can tell you body temperature.

So instead, the three reports rely on surveys. They ask leading experts to respond to detailed questionnaires on different aspects of a country’s politics, and then put the results together to construct a kind of overall assessment.

The first two reports, from the V-Dem Institute and Freedom House, respectively, try to do this not just for the United States but for the whole world: ranking every country in the world on 100-point scales designed to evaluate the nature of their regimes. Developed democracies like Norway or Japan score very highly; outright authoritarian states, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, are near the bottom.

Editions of each report are released annually, and, for decades, the United States was a top performer in both. But the 2026 edition,........

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