Donald Trump’s personality cult and the erosion of U.S. democracy

This month, it emerged that the FBI was investigating Trump for his wrongful possession of classified U.S. documents, including items allegedly related to the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. The wholly partisan reaction to the revelations only boosted Trump’s stock, driving millions of dollars in donations to his political action committee, and fueling right-wing outrage over the supposed overreach of the state. Meanwhile, the results of a series of primary elections across the country — most notably, Tuesday’s landslide defeat of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy0.) by a Trump-aligned challenger — reinforced how internal party opposition to Trump has generally proven to be a political death sentence. Of the 10 Republican lawmakers in the House who voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, only two even stand a chance to return to the chamber next year.

Trump’s hold over the Republican Party has led to the rise of a new crop of potential Republican lawmakers who parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies. That has profound implications for the country’s electoral processes: According to an analysis published by my colleagues this week, nearly two-thirds of GOP nominations for state and federal offices with authority over future elections involve candidates who embraced falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the previous one and deny its legitimacy.

In the time since Trump left office, his sway over Republicans has arguably grown. A straw poll of attendees at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month saw enthusiasm for Trump as high as ever. If he chooses to launch a 2024 presidential campaign, the bulk of the Republican establishment is set to meekly line up behind him. “If you look at a political analysis, there’s no way this party is going to stay together without President Trump and his supporters,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told my colleagues last year. “There is no construct where the party can be successful without him.”

It’s a state of affairs more familiar in other parts of the world than in the United States. The wholesale capture of a wing of American politics by what is, as Cheney put it, a “cult of personality” surrounding one demagogic leader has limited precedent in U.S. history. But we can see current variations of the theme in, among other places, Hungary under its illiberal nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkey under long-ruling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and India under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In all three countries, the ruling faction in a parliamentary democracy has become a vehicle for consolidating the power of the figure at the top. They are in different stages of their evolution: Erdogan’s grip may be loosening with former allies defecting and forming new parties, while Modi and Orban are more comfortably in control. The leaders’ majoritarian demagoguery has led to the erosion of their democracies, which critics argue have become to varying degrees quasi-autocracies where media is cowed, ethnic or religious minorities are bullied, and the opposition marginalized.

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