The Trump administration is not guided by any recognizable democratic theory; it is guided by a practice of power that treats democracy as a language to be spoken and a costume to be worn, but
not as a binding set of rules. Where Robert Dahl saw “polyarchy” as a web of inclusive rights, free media, and competitive elections that limit any single center of power, Trumpism takes the
institutional skeleton of that system and rearticulates it as a plebiscitary presidency. Elections remain, but they are reframed as up‑or‑down votes on a leader rather than recurring moments of
open competition among plural elites. Institutions that were meant to guarantee contestation – independent agencies, courts, public media, civil‑society organizations – are recoded as enemies of
the people or obstacles to national greatness, and thus as fair game for capture, purge, or permanent delegitimation.
For Joseph Schumpeter, democracy was a “method”: citizens choose between competing teams of would‑be rulers, and the integrity of that competition – the openness of the game, the willingness of
losers to concede, the acceptance of uncertainty by incumbents – is what makes a regime democratic. Trump’s project has weaponized this minimalism against itself. Elections are embraced as
moments of acclaim, not as contingent verdicts that might remove the incumbent; if they threaten to do so, they are denounced as rigged or stolen. Opposition parties are not rival elites in a
shared arena but traitors; critical media are not imperfect information providers but “enemies” to be beaten and shamed. The result is no longer Schumpeter’s cool, competitive elitism, but a
heated plebiscitarianism that keeps the ritual of competition while systematically undermining its constraining force.
Giovanni Sartori’s typologies help to chart the drift. In his vocabulary, democracy demands not just ballots but real alternatives, institutionalized pluralism, and meaningful limits on power
concentration. Trump’s governing style pushes the United States away from a competitive, pluralist configuration toward an asymmetric dominance regime: opposition still exists, but on a tilted
field. Judicial appointments are politicized to lock in loyal majorities, the bureaucracy is purged and refilled on the basis of personal loyalty rather than professional competence, and state
resources are increasingly fused with partisan and even personal interests. The system remains formally multiparty, but one camp uses state levers to entrench itself – the textbook dynamic of
competitive authoritarianism rather than of liberal democracy.
Seen from the vantage point of alternative democratic projects of the late twentieth century, the direction of travel is even starker. Participatory democrats like Carole Pateman imagined
deepening democracy by extending meaningful participation into workplaces, communities, and everyday institutions: citizens would become more capable and more equal by sharing in decisions that
shape their lives. Deliberative democrats from Jürgen Habermas to Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson argued that the legitimacy of democratic decisions depends on public reasoning – on
citizens and representatives exchanging arguments, justifying policies in terms others could, in principle, accept. Radical democrats such as Chantal Mouffe hoped to harness populist energies to
expand democracy’s reach: politicizing technocratic questions, connecting dispersed grievances, bringing new voices in under conditions of ongoing pluralism and agonistic respect.
Trumpism borrows the rhetoric of these currents while betraying their core commitments. Participation is channeled into rallies, outrage and online fandom, but the actual sites of co‑decision –
agencies, committees, regulatory bodies – are recentralized in the executive and insulated from critical publics. The public sphere is not a space of argument but a battlefield of mutually
incompatible narratives in which polarization is a resource and disinformation a tool. Populist language is omnipresent, but “the people” are imagined as a homogenous, implicitly ethnonational
bloc, defined against racial, religious, urban or cosmopolitan “others”. Adversaries are not legitimate opponents inside a shared democratic game but enemies to be delegitimized, punished or
expelled. What participatory, deliberative and radical theorists understood as ways of democratizing democracy becomes, in Trump’s hands, a way of mobilizing anger in order to narrow power rather
than to diffuse it.
Fareed Zakaria’s notion of “illiberal democracy” captures the regime formula that emerges: elections without constitutional liberalism; majoritarian claims without rights; sovereignty without
self‑restraint. In this model, winning an election is treated as a license to dismantle constraints – to weaken courts, sideline parliaments, politicize law enforcement, intimidate media, and
blur the line between state, party and leader. Trump’s second term intensifies all these tendencies. Under the banner of a “unitary executive”, the presidency is reimagined as the commanding
brain of a hierarchically controlled state; plans like those associated with Project 2025 treat independent agencies, civil service protections and inspectors general as bugs to be fixed rather
than as safeguards to be cherished. The language of security, sovereignty and anti‑elitism provides the moral cover for this demolition job: anything that slows or contradicts the leader’s will
can be cast as undemocratic – a conspiracy of bureaucrats, judges, “globalists” or “woke” elites against the authentic people.
The irony is brutal: never has the vocabulary of democracy been invoked so loudly at the top of American politics, and rarely has the practice veered so openly toward its illiberal negation.
Dahl’s polyarchy, Schumpeter’s competitive elitism, Sartori’s pluralist party democracy, Pateman’s participatory hopes, deliberative dreams of reasoned public will‑formation, Mouffe’s vision of
agonistic, egalitarian populism – all presuppose a minimum of self‑limitation by winners and a maximum of protection for losers. The Trump administration treats self‑limitation as weakness and
loser protection as a bug in the code. It does not offer a new concept of democracy; it offers an old autocratic reflex, repackaged for an age in which no leader can afford to admit openly that
he has given up on democracy at all.