“The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” one of the world’s top democracy researchers says in a new report, CNN reports.

David Frum: “The Dire Meaning of Gallup’s Announcement”

“Last week, the polling firm gallup announced that it would no longer survey presidential-approval ratings. This news stirred suspicions. President Trump’s numbers are declining badly, much worse than Joe Biden’s at the equivalent point in his presidency. Gallup’s most recent presidential-approval poll, in December, had Trump at 36 percent—well below the RealClearPolitics poll average of 42 percent. Trump is known for taking punitive action. He sued The Des Moines Register and its pollster, Ann Selzer, for an ego-bruising 2024 survey that suggested he might lose Iowa to Kamala Harris.”

“Assuming the worst is often prudent, but Gallup’s own explanation—citing changes in the company’s business strategy—makes a sad commercial sense. Quality polling companies such as Gallup inhabit a world of rising costs, declining rewards, and multiplying competition. Polling worked because people once accepted a call on the phone the same way they accepted jury duty: as one of the small obligations of citizenship that helped democracy work better. Large numbers of citizens have come to perceive the institutions of democracy as unfriendly to them. The dispassionate stranger on the phone inquiring how a citizen intended to vote—and why—is one of those institutions.”

Adam Liptak: “Starting with the 2024 decision that gave President Trump substantial immunity from prosecution and continuing through a score of emergency orders provisionally greenlighting an array of his second-term initiatives, Mr. Trump has had an extraordinarily successful run before the Supreme Court.”

“That came to a sudden, jolting halt on Friday, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for six members of the court, roundly rejected Mr. Trump’s signature tariffs program. It was the Supreme Court’s first merits ruling — a final judgment on the lawfulness of an executive action — on an element of the administration’s second-term agenda. It amounted to a declaration of independence.”

“It also served as another in a series of clashes between the leaders of two branches of the federal government cut from very different cloth: the controlled, cerebral chief justice and the biting, brazen president.”

Politico: “FCC Chair Brendan Carr wants broadcasters to air ‘patriotic, pro-America content’ to support the White House’s plans to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary.”

“’As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, it is important to reflect on the ideals and events that have defined our past while keeping an eye towards our country’s bright future,’ Carr said in a statement Friday. ‘I am calling on broadcasters to pledge to provide programming that promotes civic education, national pride, and our shared history.’”

Nate Silver: “It’s prudent to consider worst-case scenarios. What makes the situation especially hard to assess is that there’s no particularly clear precedent for the situation the United States finds itself in right now. No country with this long a democratic tradition has faced this much of a threat to it, and the U.S. is exceptional in general for being the wealthiest nation in world history, perhaps on the verge of a profound economic and technological transformation.”

“No one should be confident about how the story ends. But it can also be hard to see the world through clear eyes when you’re constantly in crisis mode.”

“For instance, I think it’s reasonable to feel more optimistic about democracy after what’s happened in Minneapolis.”

Jonathan Last: “The Supreme Court in its wisdom created what is, in practice, total criminal immunity for the president. The Constitution’s mechanisms for restraining a president—the impeachment clause and the Twenty-fifth Amendment—have been proven to be dead letters. In 237 years they have never once performed their intended functions; there is no reason to believe that they might suddenly become functional in the future.”

“So our president is now a defined-term king. He cannot be removed and he cannot be prosecuted. His ambitions are limited only by his own sense of morality.”

“The only way to constrain this new American Caesar is to create disincentives for those who would carry out his orders. To rob future presidents of the foot soldiers needed to wage a war against the half of America they dislike.”

“And the way to create those disincentives is to bring the maximum force of law against every agent of the government who broke any federal or state law under Trump.”

Jonathan Rauch: “Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.”

“When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

Anne Applebaum: “Maybe there’s a broader goal, too: to build distrust, and, ultimately, to reshape all Americans’ perceptions of reality. I know that sounds dramatic, but I spent many years writing about authoritarian regimes, and almost all of them try to undermine admired institutions, in order to radically alter the way people think.”

Quinta Jurecic writes that “the popularity Trump enjoyed after the election has vanished, protesters have marched in record numbers to oppose his one-man rule, and citizens have shown up to defend their neighbors from immigration enforcement and other federal forces.”

“None of this means that American democracy as we know it will survive—especially given the threat of Trump’s potential interference in the 2026 and 2028 elections—but it has a pulse. As Trump’s term goes on, the administration appears less capable of establishing durable authoritarian rule, and the possibility that the nation will find a way through the chaos with self-government intact no longer seems quite as remote.”

Seth Masket: “Many political observers have tried to make peace with the Trump era of U.S. politics by reassuring themselves that there are still guardrails. In his first term, after all, his worst anti-democratic impulses were often constrained by Congress, the courts, law enforcement, public opinion, journalists, and even his own advisors. But in this term we’re largely seeing those guardrails crumble.”

“Democracies have fallen before, of course, and many others have drifted toward authoritarianism. Some find their way back, some don’t. The U.S. was never immune from the challenges built into democracies, and especially presidential systems. But Trump hit U.S. democracy at many of its modern weak spots.”

“The conservative legal movement has for decades insisted that an originalist understanding of the Constitution — that is, an interpretation that looks to how the document was understood at the time of the nation’s founding — demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit,” the New York Times reports.

“That follows, the argument goes, from the ‘unitary executive theory,’ which says the president should have complete control of the executive branch and that congressional efforts to shield the leaders of independent agencies from politics should be forbidden.”

“In September, though, a leading originalist law professor, Caleb Nelson, challenged that conventional wisdom in an article that attracted attention in legal circles and beyond. He wrote that the text of the Constitution and the historical evidence surrounding it in fact grant Congress broad authority to shape the executive branch, including by putting limits on the president’s power to fire people.”

Paul Krugman: “There was a time, not so long ago, when America was the leader of the free world. It was the first among equals within an alliance of nations bound together by shared values — above all a commitment to democracy and civil liberties. From London to Berlin to Tokyo, in the aftermath of genocide and the utter devastation of World War II, America – as Ronald Reagan put it – was the shining city on the hill…”

“MAGA, however, doesn’t want to be part of that world. In fact, it doesn’t want a world of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to exist. The Trump administration has become especially hostile to Europe, precisely because the Europeans are trying to hold on to the values MAGA is trying to destroy at home.”

Gideon Rachman: Trump’s America and a clash of civilizations with Europe.

A new Harvard Institute of Politics survey finds that adults under age 30 believe that things in the country are generally on the wrong track, 57% to 13%.

Just 32% describe the US as a healthy democracy or one that’s “somewhat functioning,” while 64% call it system in trouble or one that has completely failed.

Said pollster John Della Volpe: “Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”

“A federal judge warned of an ‘existential threat to democracy’ in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump,” the New York Times reports.

He accused Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”

The judge, Mark Wolf, wrote for The Atlantic that Trump’s actions were “contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench.”

Brian Kalt: “If a two-termer tried to run for vice president and the eligibility question ended up in court, this new succession statute would not settle the question, but it would send a powerful message about Congress’s understanding of these constitutional requirements. Moreover, to the extent that the courts left the eligibility question to Congress to resolve when its joint session counts electoral votes every four years on January 6, the statute would send a powerful message to those proceedings, too.”

“The people are the ultimate enforcers here. The more decisively political leaders from both parties reject the loophole interpretation, the less public support any two-termer would get for any constitutional shenanigans, and the higher the political cost would be to those who would aid and abet them. Such action is a worthy pursuit for a republic that hopes to endure.”

Anne Applebaum: “When you imagine media in a dictatorship, you probably think of something dull and gray. Maybe a Soviet state-television program, extolling the annual harvest. Perhaps a smudgy newspaper photograph of Chairman Mao or General Pinochet, surrounded by blocks of turgid prose.”

“But if that is your mental picture, then your imagination is out of date. Nowadays, authoritarian propaganda can be varied, colorful, even mesmerizing. Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, used to perform on television for hours, singing, chatting, and interviewing celebrities. On one recent day, the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda—formerly the organ of the Soviet youth movement, now a mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—offered stories ranging from clickbait about “the beautiful women who lure Muscovites into dating scams” to an alarmist account of how Ukraine is ‘being turned into a training ground for the EU army.’”

“The point of these efforts is not merely to misinform but to build distrust. Modern authoritarian regimes often offer not a unified propaganda line but rather contradictory versions of reality, and in many different forms: highbrow and lowbrow, serious and silly, sort of true and largely false. The cumulative effect is to leave citizens with no clear idea of what is actually happening.”