The Institutions Didn’t Even Hold the First Time
5 min read
Scholars and advocates for democracy who have tried to warn voters about the dangers posed by a second Donald Trump term are, to some extent, victims of their own success—or, rather, the perception of it. Having fought to defend the nation’s institutions during Trump’s first term, they now worry that Americans have become complacent about the risks of a potential second term.
“There’s this mythology that permeates that Trump didn’t damage institutions in the first term,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer who now works for the civil-society group Protect Democracy, told me recently. “And I think that’s completely wrong.”
Indeed, institutions at nearly every level of American society failed during Trump’s first term, which is a big reason a second Trump term is even possible. The press, all three branches of the federal government, nongovernmental organizations such as the Republican Party, and the private sector all crumpled when confronted. The failures were of both personal leadership and systems. A reelected President Trump won’t just have figured out how to better fight a healthy system. He will face one that is already in dire condition.
An exhaustive account of institutional collapses would be, well, exhausting, but a tour d’horizon should suffice. In 2015 and 2016, a majority of Republican-primary voters and an overwhelming majority of Republican Party leaders opposed Trump’s candidacy for president, but the party revealed itself to be incapable of organizing—one of its most basic functions—to resist the threat posed by a charismatic outsider. The traditional press also showed its susceptibility to a candidate able to attract almost endless attention, and how powerful that attention was, even when negative. The result was a narrow Trump victory in 2016.
The first constitutional check on a president is Congress. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, who showed little interest in serious oversight work. After Democrats took over the House following the 2018 midterms, they began investigating Trump. They even impeached him after he attempted to withhold funds from Ukraine in exchange for helping Trump’s reelection campaign, but the GOP-led Senate declined to convict him, moving the goalposts. Elsewhere, however, Democrats were slow to respond to Trump’s stonewalling. For example, they sought his tax returns and were finally able to release them—in December 2022, nearly two years after he’d left office.
This was in part because Trump was able to recognize that the courts were a weak link in the constitutional order. The justice system is designed with lots of protections to ensure that no one is deprived of due process, but that also means that a defendant with sufficient money and bad faith can manipulate those protections to run down the clock.
The nature of the failures in the executive branch was more complex. Many members of the administration cooperated with Trump on legally, ethically, or morally dubious schemes. Others resisted them, sometimes bravely: Whistleblowing and public testimony from White House and State Department officials rattled by Trump’s pressure on Ukraine was courageous and came at a cost to them. In other cases, administration officials resisted Trump simply by refusing to execute bad ideas. This may have sometimes staved off acute disasters, but the federal government cannot function correctly if unelected officials feel empowered to decide when to follow lawful orders from the president. This is one of the institution’s vulnerabilities: Officials of conscience sometimes have no good options.
Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election demonstrated the disastrous convergence of all of these failures. The president’s attempts to railroad state officials into supporting his efforts were prevented by people such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, but Trump demonstrated how brittle the systems were by coming close to subverting the election. Some local election officials also showed far less integrity.
After January 6, the House once more impeached Trump, but the Senate again refused to convict. One major factor was that the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, concluded that Trump’s career was finished, thus excusing himself from taking any political hit by supporting a vote to convict.
The judicial branch is frequently celebrated as the institution that best resisted Trump’s election subversion. Courts did reject the Trump campaign’s legalistic efforts to keep him in office, but that is largely because its claims were so flimsy and lacking in evidence that judges had no other choice. The judiciary’s actions since then have revealed it to be as fragile as the other two branches. Trump has managed to thus far avoid criminal trials for his election subversion and for pilfering sensitive national documents and trying to hide them from the government; he has promised that will obstruct justice to ensure that remains true if he wins. Politico recently reported that judges have repeatedly expressed concerns about Trump gumming up the legal system with frivolous process arguments.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has played along with Trump. It ruled this past summer that nearly anything a president does under cover of the presidency is immune from prosecution, giving Trump sanction for past actions and opening up new avenues for future chicanery. One of the justices in the majority is married to a prominent participant in Trump’s election subversion. Another had a pro-Trump flag flying over his house, for which he blamed his spouse.
The private sector is no more resilient. After January 6, social-media companies banished Trump, and major corporations pledged not to contribute to politicians involved in election denial. But Trump is back on Facebook and X, and many of the companies that made the pledge have since quietly begun donating to such politicians once again. Major private institutions have continued to bend the knee to Trump, even before the election has taken place. The press has also weakened. The Washington Post spent years warning that “democracy dies in darkness,” but last month, the paper opted not to endorse a candidate for president, reportedly at the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos.
The bad news is that the only major institution left is the American electorate. That is also the good news. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. They rejected his party in 2018 and only weakly supported it in 2022, with Trump out of office. In a democracy, the people are the most important institution—the source of legitimacy for all parts of government, and of accountability for the private sector. The choice is in their hands.
