DEMOCRACY DOOMSDAY CLOCK: How Close to Midnight?
Trump II is an anomaly.
On the one hand, he’s losing major battles daily—judges overturn his lawless orders (Harvard, law firms, nationalizing the California guard), economic confidence tumbles during the tariffs fiasco and ICE embraces Stephen Miller’s gestapo-like tactics of rounding up brown people. Yet he might still be winning his larger war – namely, transforming centuries of “freedom for all” into fascism for a few.*
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*There’s a continuing debate over the right term to apply to Trumpism —autocracy, dictatorship, authoritarianism, tyranny, monarchy, fascism. All overlap with a common element – one-man minority rule.
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While in the not so recent past, it was considered naive to say that, it’s now naive not to. Trump embraces dictators, insists “I can do whatever I want under Article II,” claims “I run the country and the world,” and envies Kim Jong Un’s standing ovations from his cabinet. “Malignant narcissism” doesn’t do this justice.
His superpower is shamelessness—brushing aside political kryptonite with strategic falsehoods, vengeance, and corruption. He’s now systematically attacking the four pillars of a functioning democracy: a free press; separation of powers; the rule of law; and higher education.
At this moment, roughly 40% of Americans support him. Another 40% recoil from his Clockwork Orange approach. The final 20%—the persuadable middle—will have to decide by election days 2026 and 2028 whether to endorse democratic traditions or dangerous extremism. Will the public choose Jamie Raskin or Stephen Miller as their political model?
To track this battle, the “Wrecking America” Substack will periodically gauge how close we are to midnight on Democracy Doomsday Clock. Like nuclear risk, climate change and the Covid pandemic, threats to democracy need tracking even if there’s now no convenient Dow or CPI for creeping tyranny…although this past week alone he crossed several bright red lines.
We’ve of course never been a flawless democracy—see the 3/5ths clause, Alien & Sedition Act, Dred Scott and Civil War, Palmer Raids, McCarthyism—but we’ve also never had a president who in one body channels Jefferson Davis, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon.
According to the adage “you can’t fix what you don’t measure,” here’s a snapshot of nine critical indices that scholars agree help differentiate democracy from dictatorship.* Connecting their dots draws an alarming portrait.
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*For the best books explaining the rise of authoritarianism in America, see: Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (2020); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongman (2020); Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight (2020); Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works; Bruce Kuklick, Fascism Comes to America (2022); David Corn, American Psychosis (2022); Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland (2018); Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004); Umberto Eco, How to Spot a Fascist (1996); Mark Green, The Inflection Election: Progress or Extremism? (2024).
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⚈ LIES. Trump once shared his credo with pal Billy Bush, “If you say it, people believe it. They just do.”
Lying is the dictator’s go-to tool. Hitler blamed Poland for forcing his 1939 invasion. Trump blames Ukraine for Russia’s. He denies his budget will slash Medicaid by trillions, insists that South Africa is engaging in “white genocide” by displaying photographs from the Congo and seems to compare minor protests in Los Angeles this past week to Dresden after the 1945 firebombing. His hyperbole is in the service of portraying him as a Superhero saving the day. As if anticipating MAGA credulity, Jonathan Swift once wrote, “You cannot reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into.”
Historically America relied on an independent judiciary, elections and the media to resolve disputes, factual and legal. Now those safeguards are being compromised by a serial fabulist. There’s no available vaccine for such a social virus that, unfortunately, is a communicable disease.
⚈ FREE SPEECH. Trump touts free speech while trying to criminally investigate reporters, punish AP for using “Gulf of Mexico,” deny visas to students critical of Israel, and urge the FCC to yank network broadcast licenses (which are only issued to stations).
He calls journalists “scum,” mocks reporters, and fuels violent threats against critics. As former DHS official Miles Taylor noted, Trump is “criminalizing criticism.”
Does he even know that the First Amendment explicitly protects “freedom of the press” from government interference, the only line-of-commerce explicitly protected in the Constitution?
⚈ VOTING RIGHTS. Fair elections are the foundation of democracy. But John Roberts has long sought voter suppression—from trying to weaken the historic Voting Rights Act in Nixon’s Office of Legal Counsel to actually doing it forty years later as Chief Justice.
After his 5-4 Shelby County majority opinion in 2013, red states raced to restrict voting rights under the camouflage of “election integrity,” contrary to Roberts’s blithe assertion from the bench that the South had changed. Occasionally, Republicans even say the quiet part out loud: “If we don’t suppress the Detroit vote,” said a Michigan GOP lawmaker in 2004, “we’ll lose.”
We’re not facing a dramatic Reichstag which led to the abolition of the German legislature and elections in 1933. But Trump’s day-by-day erosion of democratic norms mimics the slow descent of Orban’s Hungary into an elected autocracy.
⚈ RULE OF LAW. Trump has a dog-hydrant relationship with the law. Nixon, facing an 8–0 ruling to hand over Watergate tapes, obeyed. Would Trump similarly comply if and when The High Court definitively rules on the obvious constitutionality of Habeas Corpus and his abuse of The Insurrection Act?
Already convicted of 34 felonies and dodging more charges only by winning the presidency, Trump uses pardons as political favors (“No MAGA Left Behind,” said his recent pardon lawyer). DoJ has dropped investigations into allies (major corporations, Mayor Adams) and launched probes against opponents (a judge, Member of
Congress and a U. S. Senator is handcuffed and thrown to the ground))...while complaining that Biden had “weaponized” his Justice Department without a shred of evidence.
“Justice” is symbolized by the blind Lady of Justice statue at the DoJ, meaning no one should be favored or targeted when it comes to law enforcement. For the first time in American history, however, Trump is openly ordering his Attorney General to treat law as an extension of politics, as his good friend Putin does in Russia. Like him, Trump’s core belief is not the Rule of Law but the Law of Rule, i.e., “Might Makes Right.”
⚈ RACIAL DIVERSITY. Reactionary demagogues can alter definitions, as Reagan did to the worthy phrase “social welfare” in the Constitution. Now it’s the turn of "diversity" and “D.E.I.” Previously, “diversity” meant inclusion. Now “diversity” is thrown around like a sanitized N-word (unless it’s the GOP’s “diversity of viewpoint” for taking over Harvard).
Like all wannabe dictators, Trump needs scapegoats. Whether Jews in Germany, gays in Russia, or Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, the formula’s the same: vilify, divide and dominate since hatred of “The Other” has often been a political winner.
No one confesses to racism—David Duke denies he is one. But while not all Republicans are racist, nearly all racists are Republican. For those who can’t wrap their heads around the reality that Trump is a racial arsonist, consider his completely unnecessary move this week to re-rename Southern military bases after Confederate Generals. Showing mercy to soldiers is one thing – which Lincoln properly did after the cessation of hostilities – but rewarding those who led battles against the United States Government is merely nostalgia for treason.
It’s insane that 160 years after Appomattox and 60 years since the ‘60s Civil Rights Laws, an American president insists on being on the white side of history.
⚈ SCIENCE. Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko crippled Russian agriculture with junk science starting in the 1930s. America’s Lysenko-ism includes appointing vaccine-deniers to lead HHS, stopping pediatric cancer research during trials and expelling brilliant foreign students in a global knowledge economy.
Demonizing talent may play to his base of “the poorly educated” (in Trump’s own phrase). But it also hands the future to our rivals. As one devastating example, the example of Nazism chasing Einstein and von Braun to the United States did Germany no good.
⚈ VIOLENCE. Mussolini said, “We don’t debate our enemies. We destroy them.” Last year author and human rights official Rick Stengel observed that “violence is as intrinsic to Fascism as free speech is to democracy.”
For example, only one party regularly opposes stricter gun safety laws although gun deaths are now the leading killer of children in the U.S. Trump refuses to criticize right-wing violence, shrugs off calls to hang Mike Pence, and relishes personal attacks on judges and journalists. That can inflame armed radicals, like the nut who attacked a pizza parlor because of Hillary’s “pedaphilia” and those militants convicted of plotting to kidnap or kill Michigan Governor Whitmer.
Indeed, according to former Senator Mitt Romney and Rep. Dan Bacon, some GOP lawmakers privately admit they’ve changed votes out of fear for themselves and their families. Trump’s pardons and clemencies of Jan. 6 rioters risk further provoking political violence since potential perpetrators might consider themselves immune from prosecution.
⚈ MILITARISM & NATIONALISM. Trump called veterans “suckers and losers” and praised “Hitler’s generals,” according to John Kelly, his former White House chief- of-staff. His $45 million self-love military parade on his birthday this weekend would make Putin, Xi and Kim blush.
General Eisenhower—who of course actually led troops in battle – rejected this kind of performative jingoism that Col. Bone-Spurs embraces. TR put it best: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.”
⚈ EMOLUMENTAL GREED. Putin may be the world’s richest man thanks to early deals with Russian oligarchs. Trump’s version? Using the presidency as a daily profit center to line his pockets while picking ours. Helping his lust for self-enrichment has been the 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United case-4 which turbocharged billions of additional secret corporate money into a politics that enables oligarchs to call the shots (See The Haves and the Have-Yachts By Evan Osnos this month and Musk’s record $280 million donation to elect Trump.)
Despite an Emoluments Clause that prohibits gifts from foreign leaders “of any kind whatever", unless approved by Congress, Trump welcomes them. After his 2016 election, he was aware of the fact or appearance of self-dealing and promised to halt new overseas business. Now, his sons’ recent world tour pursuing hotel deals and crypto ventures have reportedly made the family $3 billion in five months. These are the same people who complained that Hunter Biden’s paintings sold for more because of his last name.
TICK TOCK.
So how close are we to midnight? Too close.
Trump is a match always searching for a fuse. In just 145 days, he’s stress-tested nearly every check-and-balance in pursuit of Minority Rule. If he keeps up his pace of trying to grab more power daily, it’s hard to even imagine what America will look like after the next 1300+ days.
Like FDR mastered radio, JFK-TV, and Bernie on-line fundraising, Trump could abuse even more advanced versions of A.I. in his steady push for unilateral power. As of now, there are no laws to inhibit MAGA’s exploitation of deep fakes and any effort to do so will no doubt be met with fake pleas for “free speech.”
This Saturday will be another national “No Kings Day,” which should not be underestimated. Columnist Nick Kristof and author Corey Brettschneider in The Presidents and the People have come to similar conclusions that the best way to defeat or outlast Fascism historically were peaceful street protests and word-of-mouth organizing. In Ukraine, street power ousted a Putin puppet in 2014 in the Orange Revolution. In Romania, when a few hundred protested Nicolae Ceausescu's Communist dictatorship, they were killed. When 100,000 did in 1989, he was.
So while the fate of democracy may come down to the 2026 and 2028 elections—or a crucial SCOTUS vote—Rachel Maddow earlier this week framed the crisis well: “We know what Donald Trump will do. The question is—what will we do?”
For 250 years – other than our Civil War – America has successfully found peaceful ways to stay a constitutional democracy. On January 20th, the time on our Democracy Doomsday Clock was about 3p in the afternoon. After Trump’s last week of catch-me-if -you-can authoritarianism and militarism, we were closer to 10 at night. So as several million people pour into our streets, Lincoln’s insight becomes newly relevant. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
Indeed, this week may be looked back on as when Trump’s corporate monarchy peaked. His usual use of bravado and assertion proved to be no match for the twin realities that the L. A. protests were not remotely a “rebellion” and his own admission Thursday that he could not implement Miller’s war on farm workers.
No Kings, not even from Queens!