Trump: Restoration is Futile
In the 1976 BBC adaptation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, the elderly emperor reflects on a lifetime spent navigating the violent politics of imperial Rome. Throughout the series, various characters—Claudius himself, senators like Cassius Chaerea, republican diehards clinging to memory of Cicero—speak longingly of restoring the Republic. They imagine that removing one bad emperor, reforming certain practices, or appealing to ancient virtues might reverse Rome's transformation into autocracy. What they fail to grasp is that they stand not at the Republic's temporary eclipse but at the Empire's irreversible beginning. The constitutional settlement that had governed Rome for centuries has already dissolved; the social and economic forces that sustained republican government have vanished; the cultural consensus about legitimate authority has shattered. By the time Claudius writes his histories, restoration is not merely difficult—it is conceptually incoherent. The Republic exists only as nostalgia, a rhetorical device deployed by those who cannot accept that they inhabit a fundamentally different political order.
American political discourse since 2021 has exhibited precisely this confusion about historical location. The Biden presidency marketed itself explicitly as restoration—a "return to normalcy" that would reverse the aberrations of the Trump era and reestablish the pre-2016 constitutional equilibrium. This framing drew conscious parallels to Gerald Ford's post-Watergate presidency, which successfully contained the Nixon crisis through institutional repair, prosecutorial forbearance, and appeals to national healing. Biden's inaugural address echoed Ford's themes: institutional reverence, bipartisan cooperation, the essential decency of American democracy. The implicit promise was that Trump represented a temporary deviation—a Caligula or Nero whose removal would allow the Republic to resume its natural functioning.
This restoration project failed completely. Trump's return to power in 2025 marked not the final convulsion of a dying movement but rather the consolidation of a new political order. More critically, Trump's second administration demonstrates vastly greater transformational capacity than his first term. Where Trump-45 operated within existing institutional constraints, occasionally exceeding but never fundamentally replacing them, Trump-47 pursues systematic reconstruction of the American state apparatus. The comparison to Ford's post-Nixon restoration reveals why: Nixon's abuses, however serious, left basic institutional structures intact. Trump's movement reflects and accelerates structural transformations that make restoration impossible.
The Structural Foundations of Authoritarian Populism
Academic research identifies populism's roots not in inexplicable public irrationality but in profound structural changes transforming post-industrial economies—specifically the rise of the knowledge economy, technological automation, collapse of manufacturing industry, erosion of organized labor, and neo-liberal austerity policies that produced economic conditions in affected communities. These changes exacerbated inequalities between depressed rural areas and small cities on one hand, and thriving metropolitan areas on the other.
The geographic dimension proves particularly significant. The 2008 financial crisis catalyzed these divisions as communities already in decline suffered deeper and longer economic downturns than metropolitan areas where superstar knowledge, technology, and service-oriented firms agglomerate. This produced electoral patterns demonstrating that Trump's populist appeal was most resonant in counties with the weakest income growth, declining populations, and rising mortality rates. The phenomenon extends beyond simple economic distress; low social mobility—an important type of economic unfairness—correlates better with populism geography than income inequality, immigrant stocks, or cultural factors.
Crucially, these economic transformations interact with deeper institutional failures. The failure of political elites constitutes the fundamental cause of populism, while economic factors bubble up as symptoms. Liberal governance regimes systematically failed to acknowledge how their policies produced social disruption. The failure of center-left parties to restore security and prosperity to the unemployed and under-privileged meant their traditional supporters fled to populist parties which promised economic nationalism and cultural protection.
The economic geography of this transformation matters immensely. In the 2020 presidential election, seventy-nine percent of counties were won by twenty percentage points or more, reflecting sharp increases in political geographic sorting since 1976, when only thirty-six percent of counties showed similar margins. This sorting is not random but reflects systematic migration patterns where revealed preferences of voters who move from one residence to another correlate with partisan affiliation, producing increasingly homogeneous communities.
Research on affective polarization—the tendency of partisans to dislike and distrust the opposing party—reveals how geographic sorting intensifies political division. Affective polarization in the United States has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in eight other democracies including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden. This American exceptionalism reflects specific structural factors: since the 1970s, major political parties have become increasingly aligned with certain ideologies, races and religious identities, so when partisans identify with their party and look across the aisle, the people they see are more different from them than a few decades ago.
The partisan media environment accelerates these dynamics. The rise of 24-hour partisan cable news appears relatively unique to the United States, and countries where political polarization has fallen received more public funding for public broadcasting than the US. This creates self-reinforcing information ecosystems where affective polarization has politicized trust such that partisans only trust government when run by their party, leading to gridlock since representatives have little incentive to compromise.
Why Restoration Failed: Biden's Impossible Task
The Biden presidency rested on a fundamental misdiagnosis of American political crisis. The administration treated Trump as aberration—a departure from normal politics that competent, institutionally-respectful governance could contain and reverse. This paralleled Ford's approach to post-Nixon governance: stabilize institutions, avoid vindictiveness, demonstrate that the system works. Ford succeeded because Nixon's corruption, however extensive, occurred within a functioning constitutional framework. Watergate represented elite malfeasance, not systemic breakdown.
Biden faced radically different conditions. Trump emerged from and accelerated structural transformations that make pre-2016 politics unrecoverable. Consider the variables:
Geographic polarization at historic highs: Within-state geographic sorting is currently at historic levels, with partisan sorting within states nearly matching the polarization index for the US House. This creates electoral geography where Democrats remain an urban party and will continue to be dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies due to single-member-district, majoritarian systems that produce two parties that hate each other.
Economic structural change irreversible: The deindustrialization and knowledge economy transition that produced Trump's coalition shows no signs of reversal. Globalization produces winners and losers, and when inequality reaches points where society is sufficiently strained, populist backlash takes hold by turning society inward through cutting back on foreign borrowing, immigration, and trade. Biden's infrastructure investments and industrial policy, while significant, cannot reconstruct the manufacturing economy or restore the social structures that accompanied it.
Institutional legitimacy collapse: Democratic backsliding tends to be driven by choices of political leaders, not sudden groundswells of authoritarianism in the general populace, but once legitimacy erodes, restoration proves extraordinarily difficult. Seventy-one percent of registered voters believe democracy is at risk, and sixty-five percent think the country is heading in the wrong direction—levels of dissatisfaction that no single presidency can address.
Affective polarization's social consequences: The percentage of Americans who would be somewhat or very unhappy if their child married someone of the opposite party has increased by about thirty-five percentage points over the last fifty years. Political identity now structures social relationships in ways comparable to race or religion, creating communities defined by partisan homogeneity.
The Biden administration's legislative achievements—infrastructure investment, climate policy, industrial strategy—addressed policy substance but could not reverse these structural dynamics. Moreover, Biden faced constraints Ford escaped: deepening partisanship has eroded checks and balances embedded in US institutions, with politics increasingly nationalized, local media declined in influence relative to partisan outlets, and state issues blending into national politics, undermining federalism.
Most critically, Biden confronted Republican opposition that refused to accept his electoral legitimacy. Ford governed with bipartisan cooperation because both parties accepted the constitutional framework. Biden faced systematic obstruction from Republicans who increasingly view electoral losses as evidence of fraud requiring extra-constitutional response rather than policy adjustment.
Trump-47: Transformation Beyond Trump-45
Trump's first administration tested the boundaries of executive power but operated largely within existing institutional frameworks. Civil servants slow-walked objectionable orders. Courts blocked overreach. Congress exercised sporadic oversight. The "deep state" that Trump railed against actually functioned as designed—career officials prioritized legal compliance and institutional mission over political loyalty.
Trump's second administration pursues systematic demolition of these constraints. The transformation operates across multiple dimensions:
Civil service destruction: Trump's Schedule F executive order could reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants into at-will political appointments, who Trump could fire and replace with loyalists. This represents sweeping changes aiming to increase political control over civil servants and reduce bureaucracy size through the Department of Government Efficiency. The magnitude exceeds first-term efforts: when OMB began implementing Schedule F in 2020, it identified eighty-eight percent of its five-hundred-person staff as covered by the new classification.
The institutional consequences prove profound. If Trump implements Schedule F, the result will be mass exodus of extremely competent professionalized civil servants that are truly the envy of the rest of the world, replaced by loyalists chosen for loyalty rather than competence within specific policy domains. This produces agencies quickly drained of expertise and institutional knowledge, where it is far easier to dismantle, downsize, and restructure than to build back expertise and morale.
Research on career civil servants during Trump-45 found that despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, most civil servants largely sought to comply at work, circumscribed by their conceptions of activities as appropriately within the scope of their mandates, with resistance cohering with institutional and professional imperatives. Trump-47 eliminates this friction by removing professionals who might resist illegal orders.
Judicial capture completion: Trump-45 appointed three Supreme Court justices, but the Court retained some independence. Trump-47 operates with a conservative supermajority that increasingly defers to executive authority. The Supreme Court has increased its authority over election adjudication, narrowed the scope of voting rights protections, and seems inclined to support politicization of executive branch administration. This creates conditions where judicial power to set aside legislation and serve as check on majoritarian erosion may be compromised when courts themselves have been captured.
Administrative state dismantling: Beyond personnel changes, Trump-47 pursues structural elimination of regulatory capacity. The agenda is to deconstruct the administrative state—stripping agencies of regulatory power or capacity to enforce regulations—with what remains directly responsive to the president. This represents comprehensive, radical, and risky recommendations that could endanger democratic institutions, dismantle civil liberties, and concentrate presidential power beyond anything attempted in the first term.
Electoral integrity undermining: Trump-45 challenged the 2020 election but ultimately left office. Trump-47 operates in context where state legislatures under GOP control have moved to reduce voters' access to ballot and politicize election administration, creating infrastructure for refusing to accept future electoral defeats. The difference matters enormously: first-term challenges occurred after the fact; second-term changes embed rejection of unfavorable outcomes into election administration itself.
The Impossibility of Democratic Restoration
Democratic backsliding is occurring in unprecedented numbers of wealthy countries once thought immune to such forces, with threats emerging not from dramatic coups or military aggression but from autocratic leaders leveraging democratic institutions—election officials, legislatures, courts and media—to consolidate executive power. This represents what scholars term "autocratization"—gradual erosion rather than sudden rupture.
The American case demonstrates particular severity. Half of countries experiencing backsliding exceed the wealth threshold above which social scientists previously believed advanced industrial democracies could not break down, including most countries classified as exhibiting severe backsliding. The United States faces backsliding despite wealth, democratic tradition, and institutional sophistication—suggesting structural rather than contingent dynamics.
Several factors prevent restoration of pre-Trump governance:
Path dependence and institutional memory: Democratic backsliding is a process, not a single moment—one doesn't realize they're in a period of democratic backsliding until it's too late, even when leaders are democratically elected, they exploit power to erode democratic institutions by silencing opponents, capturing judiciary, and shutting down independent media. Once normalized, these practices prove difficult to reverse. Future presidents inherit Trump's expanded executive powers and diminished constraints.
Polarization as mutual delegitimization: The shift from political disagreement and polarization to mutual delegitimization, where opposing entities systematically and intentionally undermine each other's legitimacy, transcends policy disagreement to question the other party's right to govern. The belief that the other party risks US democracy is a symptom of affective polarization—deep dislike and distrust of those in the opposing political party absent major ideological differences.
Economic populism's self-reinforcing dynamics: Populist response turns society inward by cutting back on foreign borrowing, immigration, and trade, with populist voters willing to endure lower growth and consumption so long as elites are similarly hobbled. This creates political economy incompatible with pre-2016 globalist consensus. After fifteen years, per capita income in countries ruled by populists is ten percent lower compared to non-populist counterfactuals, suggesting populist promises of greater economic equality are largely empty rhetoric, but this does not prevent continuation—populism feeds on the failures it produces.
Geographic sorting's structural entrenchment: More than half of American partisans live in neighborhoods with less than thirty-three percent members from the out-party, creating physical separation that reinforces political division. When counties become more homogeneous, it becomes harder to use redistricting to create competitive Congressional districts, with recent research indicating gerrymandering accounts for at most one-third of noncompetitive districts. Geography itself has become partisan infrastructure.
Media ecosystem fragmentation: The information environment that sustained mid-century democratic consensus no longer exists. Partisan media creates single-member-district, majoritarian systems producing two parties that hate each other, with national news more politically polarizing and less trusted relative to local news, because national news contains more partisan cues that activate partisan sentiment.
Comparative Context: Why America Differs
Backsliding governments around the world have been led either by right-wing ethnonationalists or left-wing populists, with effective resistance requiring strong institutions, social trust, and political elites committed to upholding democratic norms. The American case exhibits distinctive features that complicate resistance:
Winner-take-all electoral system: Countries with winner-take-all voting systems display higher levels of anger and hostility between parties, with proportional representation reducing geographic cleavages that emerge naturally in places like the United States. America's constitutional structure amplifies polarization through Senate malapportionment, Electoral College distortion, and first-past-the-post House elections.
Inequality amplification: Countries with bigger gaps between rich and poor show elevated affective polarization, with the US ranking fourth among high-income countries for Gini index inequality. Economic inequality interacts with political polarization to create challenges confronting US political institutions in the face of hyperpolarization and deepening wealth inequality that other democracies experience to lesser degrees.
Racial dynamics: Many longstanding aspects of America's governing institutions can reasonably be criticized as anti-democratic or dangerous to civil liberties, with idiosyncrasies of American government and the nation's long history of race-based political exclusion creating specific susceptibilities to democratic erosion. Changes in racial demographics lead to shifts in power and influence, with racial diversity perceived as threat by segments of the population, making the interplay between racial demographics and partisan politics a ticking time bomb for American democracy.
Historical discontinuities: The United States has experienced democratic reversals before—after the Civil War, during Radical Reconstruction, Black men voted and held office across the South, but those multiracial governments were overthrown, often violently, and white supremacist Jim Crow regimes solidified power. This history suggests American democracy exhibits fragility that other nations lack, with many pathologies besetting American governance today best understood as part of long backlash to Civil Rights Movement successes.
The Authoritarian Equilibrium
Political scientists distinguish between "democratic backsliding" and "autocratization" based on reversibility. Backsliding implies temporary deviation; autocratization suggests systematic transformation toward new equilibrium. American political development increasingly resembles the latter.
Democratic erosion follows three key steps: capturing neutral institutions meant to check power, dismantling checks and balances through executive overreach, and silencing the opposition including the press. Trump-47 advances all three simultaneously. The Schedule F civil service purge captures neutral institutions. Judicial appointments dismantle checks. Media attacks silence opposition.
Research on democratic resilience identifies factors that enable recovery: moats protecting democracy include independent media, opposition parties, and institutional checks, which must work together as mutually reinforcing strategies rather than separate defenses. When institutions assume others will act, democratic erosion accelerates. America exhibits precisely this dynamic—Congress assumes courts will act, courts defer to executive, opposition parties fragment, media faces delegitimization.
The comparison to classical fascism proves instructive but incomplete. Threats to democracy emerge not from dramatic coups but from autocratic leaders leveraging democratic institutions to consolidate executive power. This produces different pathologies than 1930s authoritarianism. Where fascism imposed itself through violence and party discipline, contemporary autocratization works through institutional capture and procedural manipulation. This makes it harder to identify, resist, and reverse.
Economic factors reinforce political transformation. The material effects of deteriorations in governance extend far beyond countries experiencing coups and civil conflicts, with weakening political institutions affecting economic outcomes in ways that investors in the United States may stand to lose more from democratic backsliding than counterparts in other countries. This creates perverse dynamics where economic interests that might ordinarily oppose authoritarianism instead accommodate it to preserve market access.
The Post-Liberal Order
The Claudius analogy returns with force. Characters in I, Claudius repeatedly invoke republican virtues, senatorial prerogatives, constitutional traditions—all while operating in a system where those concepts have become purely rhetorical. The Senate still meets, but exercises no real authority. Elections still occur, but outcomes are predetermined. Legal forms persist while substantive constraints vanish.
American political discourse increasingly exhibits this quality. Both parties invoke "democracy," "constitution," "rule of law"—but these terms no longer reference shared understandings. For Democrats, democracy means robust voting rights, independent institutions, and acceptance of electoral outcomes. For Republicans, democracy means popular sovereignty that overrides institutional constraints when those constraints block majoritarian will. These are incompatible visions packaged in identical language.
The structural forces producing Trump—deindustrialization, geographic sorting, affective polarization, institutional decay, economic inequality, media fragmentation—show no signs of abating. Biden's restoration attempt failed not through incompetence but because restoration targets an unrecoverable past. The Republic that Democrats wish to restore exists only in memory, increasingly distant from current conditions.
Trump-47's transformational scope exceeds Trump-45 precisely because second-term consolidation builds on first-term normalization. Schedule F, judicial capture, administrative state dismantling—these represent systematic reconstruction rather than chaotic improvisation. Where Trump-45 tested boundaries, Trump-47 eliminates them. Where Trump-45 faced institutional resistance, Trump-47 removes resisters.
Whether this produces stable autocracy or prolonged turbulence remains uncertain. Democratic backsliding has been reversed in countries like Poland, Brazil, Czech Republic and Israel through adequate responses to autocracy, suggesting reversal is possible. But countries where democratic backsliding took hold and was not reversed like Hungary and Turkey demonstrate the difficulty of restoration once autocratization advances.
The question is not whether American politics will "return to normal." Normal ended in 2016, confirmed irrecoverable in 2024. The question is what new equilibrium emerges from current turbulence—whether authoritarian consolidation, revolutionary upheaval, managed decline, or something genuinely unprecedented. Like Claudius writing his histories, those observing this moment inhabit an interregnum where old forms persist but no longer govern. The Republic exists as history, not destination. What comes next remains bitterly contested, with outcomes dependent on factors—elite choices, institutional resilience, popular mobilization, economic performance, international pressures—whose interaction defies confident prediction.
This is not, as liberal commentators hoped, near the end of a crisis that restoration might resolve. This stands instead at the beginning of a transformation whose full dimensions remain obscure. The task is not recovering what was lost but navigating what emerges. That requires abandoning restorationist nostalgia for clearer assessment of actual conditions—structural, institutional, economic, social—that shape possible futures. Only by recognizing that the polity now inhabits the Empire, not the Republic's twilight, can analysis begin addressing the choices that history has imposed.
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