Debra Thompson, associate professor of political science and the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University, is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Nearly a year ago, surrounded by tech billionaires and MAGA loyalists, Donald J. Trump was once again sworn in as President of the United States. To say it’s been a year of upheaval in the American political landscape would be putting it mildly.
I probably pay more attention to American politics than most and even so it has been a struggle to keep track of the volume and velocity of this administration’s actions. Executive orders (229 at last count) have been accompanied by off-script declarations, mixed court rulings, daily belligerence and a steady barrage of personal insults.
Any single episode is easy to dismiss as spectacle. Taken together, however, they point to something more systematic and far more dangerous: a style of governance that circumvents democratic checks and balances, personalizes power, and converts institutions into political weapons.
The best way to assess the shift toward what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism in the United States isn’t through rhetoric alone, but by looking at the concrete actions that reveal who is protected, who is punished, and the growing cost of dissent.
The preemptive assault on democratic rule
One of his first acts was to pardon nearly 1,600 people facing charges for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including commuting the sentences of 14 members of the far-right militant groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It was an early reminder of the patronage-inflected hallmarks of Trump-style governance: Loyalty and flattery were rewarded; critics were belittled, threatened and punished.
Executive orders immediately became President Trump’s weapon of choice. By the end of January, 2025, he used this power to freeze hiring in the federal public service; terminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government; declare the existence of only two sexes; withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization; create the Department of Government Efficiency to cut spending across federal departments; direct government agencies to end censorship and the “weaponization” of the Justice Department; rename the Gulf of Mexico; end “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schooling, and more.
Two early and enduring targets of the President’s ire were the “administrative state” and the “DEI infrastructure,” both key elements of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that the Trump administration has largely followed. “What we’re trying to do,” Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and Project 2025 architect made clear long before the election, “is identify pockets of independence [in the federal government] and seize them.”
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began a slash-and-burn campaign to decimate the federal public service, with little consideration of what this would mean for Americans’ access to basic and necessary public services.
Mr. Musk and his team of 20-somethings defied congressional authority, civil-service protections, and the basic tenets of democratic accountability, and gained access to vast amounts of personal data and government financial systems. In his first month in office, President Trump froze foreign-aid spending and DOGE began the process of dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The coming months witnessed mass upheavals across all federal departments where public servants were unceremoniously fired, sometimes only to be rehired weeks later. Those who remained were at one point required to detail their weekly accomplishments in an e-mail to DOGE officials or lose their job.
In March, more than 1,300 federal workers were culled from the Education Department, which Mr. Trump ordered dismantled, followed by nearly 10,000 employees who were laid off in the Department of Health and Human Services. DOGE simultaneously began a process of mass deregulation, compiling thousands of health, safety and environmental regulations in a plan to dramatically shrink what Mr. Vought called the “woke and weaponized” federal government.
The attack on DEI tapped into the long-standing racial resentment of the Republican base and is perhaps the only coherent component of Mr. Trump’s ideological agenda.
All offices, programs and grants in the federal government pertaining to DEI were terminated in short order. The administration also gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, restricted gender-affirming care for minors, banned transgender women in girls’ and women’s sports, attempted to cut billions in funding from schools and colleges with DEI programming, pledged to eradicate “anti-Christian bias,” prioritized federal resources to initiatives that promote “patriotic education” in K-12 schools, ordered Confederate statues to be restored, criticized the Smithsonian Institution and other museums as “woke” and “out of control,” scrubbed women, people of colour and LGBTQ people from federal websites, flagged hundreds of words (e.g. disparity, privilege, race, socioeconomic, vulnerable populations, women) to limit or avoid in government communications, and cancelled, froze or cut thousands of grants from federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Wrestling the boogeyman of DEI was never simply about “restoring sanity” or “eradicating wokeness,” of course. DEI proved to be a useful cover that was intentionally mobilized to pre-empt, threaten, defund and diminish any potential opposition to the Trump administration’s consolidation of power.
It’s the reason why the administration has fired (or attempted to fire) high-ranking Black officials such as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Charles Q. Brown Jr., librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Willie L. Phillips, all of whom were unceremoniously dismissed, only to be replaced with demonstrably less qualified Trump loyalists.
We should also understand the attack on higher education in the United States as a strategic tenet of the pre-emptive assault on democratic rule.
Columbia University was the first targeted and the first to negotiate a deal to pay US$200-million to restore access to the more than US$1-billion of frozen research funding. Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Duke, the University of California, Los Angeles, and others have similarly had funds frozen or cut.
To instill real uncertainty in the system of higher education and compel others to bend the knee, President Trump set his sights on Harvard, the nation’s oldest, wealthiest and most prestigious university. In mid-April, the administration froze US$2-billion in funding, attempted to prevent the school from enrolling international students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status. Harvard, better positioned than most to stand its ground, filed a lawsuit in response, arguing the freeze on research funding is “flatly unlawful.”
The Trump administration claims its heavy hand with universities is because of their failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism, or their continuation of DEI initiatives. It is more potently an effort to intimidate and control parts of American society that are well positioned to challenge presidential authority.
And of course, the tariffs. President Trump signed an executive order to impose 25-per-cent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico (except for energy resources and oil, which would face a 10-per-cent tariff), and 10 per cent on all Chinese goods on Feb. 1. Two days later, and after frantic last-minute negotiations, the President announced the tariffs would be delayed by a month and in the meantime ordered his advisers to calculate broad “reciprocal tariffs” on U.S. trading partners across the globe.
Mr. Trump then announced the tariffs on Canadian imports would resume on March 4. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded with retaliatory tariffs and called on Canadians to stand united in defence of sovereignty and the economy. Mr. Trump’s repeated statements about Canada becoming the 51st state and the detrimental economic consequences of tariffs together eventually catapulted Mark Carney to the office of the Prime Minister.
Mr. Trump paused auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico on March 5 and postponed tariffs on all goods for one month on March 6. On March 11, Mr. Trump threatened to double tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel to 50 per cent in retaliation for Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposed 25-per-cent surcharge on electricity exports, but then backtracked by the same day. The following day, 25-per-cent tariffs on all steel and aluminum went into effect (these would be increased to 50 per cent in June), inciting global retaliatory action. Two weeks later, 25-per-cent tariffs were imposed on cars and car parts and by the beginning of April the United States had imposed tariffs of 10 per cent on nearly all its trading partners, sparking a plunge in global stock markets and Chinese retaliation. On April 9, after a week of market chaos, Mr. Trump initiated a 90-day pause and added exemptions for electronics, computers, and smartphones two days later.
It’s almost as if none of this was particularly well thought out.
And all that barely scratches the surface of the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. From there, the expansion of unitary executive power has been the only consistent feature of an otherwise incoherent and contradictory governing style. The past year has been marked by near-constant upheaval, with new, revised or abandoned directives emerging from the Oval Office almost daily. Yet beneath this chaos lies a discernible ideological agenda, one that echoes the priorities set forth in Project 2025.
What has unfolded has certainly been a spectacle of media attention, parades, self-aggrandizement, but more consequentially, a sustained and dangerous transformation in how government operates. Executive power is now exercised through narcissistic logic, without deliberation, multilateralism or transparency, centred on Mr. Trump and mirrored in the ambitions, dealings and desires of his inner circle. The result has been an expansion of patronage, an embrace of retribution, and open contempt for the democratic constraints on executive authority, all while a constitutional crisis looms and the fragile threads of American social cohesion continue to unravel.
A shocking escalation of tactics and force
Mr. Trump’s approach to immigration over the past year is a case in point. “Securing the border” and initiating a “crackdown” on illegal immigration were cornerstones of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and on his first day Mr. Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border and directed the Secretary of Defense to deploy the military to “protect Americans from foreign threats.” He also immediately rescinded protections from the Biden administration that prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from rampaging in schools, hospitals and places of worship, suspended the refugee admissions program, blocked asylum access for unauthorized migrants, and ordered an end to birthright citizenship.
By the early days of the summer, legal immigration was under attack as well. In June, the administration banned nationals from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti and Iran, from entering the United States and expanded the travel restrictions to an additional 20 countries in December. Mr. Trump justified putting a “permanent pause” on immigration applications from these places by launching into a xenophobic tirade against immigration from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries,” which he condemned as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
In September, President Trump signed a proclamation that added a US$100,000 fee for applicants to H-1B visas, which enabled companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers. The immediate implications of the policy change were unclear, spurring chaos and confusion as companies scrambled to ensure visa holders travelling abroad returned to the United States before the rules took effect. Though the move angered Mr. Trump’s constituents in the tech sector, last month a federal judge upheld the Trump administration’s authority to impose the fee.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services also erected more stringent requirements for permanent residents to acquire American citizenship, including a harder civics test, stricter social-media vetting and investigations into applicants’ “moral character.” Even visitors from countries that have traditionally had close ties to the United States, such as Australia, France, Germany and Britain, may soon be required to submit five years’ worth of social-media information, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) proposal published in December. Most Canadians are not subject to that particular rule, but as of December, 2025, must submit to being photographed and subject to biometric facial technology by CBP upon entry and exit at all land borders, sea ports and international U.S. airports.
At the same time, Mr. Trump is perfectly willing to sell American citizenship. For the low price of a US$1-million unrestricted donation to the Department of Commerce (US$2-million for a corporations and similar entities) and a US$15,000 processing fee, potential immigrants can access an expedited visa through the Trump Gold Card program. A “platinum” version of the card that costs US$5-million and offers “special tax breaks” will soon be available. Following the approval of this visa, applicants will be eligible to obtain legal permanent residency.
The biggest upheaval in immigration over the past year by far is the Trump administration’s violent and militarized deportation campaigns. The efforts of ICE agents to arrest, detain and deport as many migrants as quickly as possible has explicitly contravened their due process rights, at times deporting migrants with no criminal backgrounds to countries other than their own. After a push from the White House to increase arrests and deportations, ICE began targeting immigration hearings, restaurants, construction sites, and farms – though there was a pause on the raids on farmworkers thanks to the successful lobbying efforts of the agricultural industry. In Chicago, masked and armed ICE agents stormed an apartment building in the middle of the night on Sept. 30, zip-tying dozens of American citizens, including children, in a shocking escalation of tactics and force.
Americans have not willingly submitted to masked men kidnapping people off the streets. In June, the Trump administration declared that mass protests in Los Angeles against ICE were “a form of rebellion against the authority of the United States” and deployed 4,000 National Guards and 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to the city to “restore law and order.” The President soon ordered troops to Washington, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland and Chicago (and threatened to send troops to New York, Baltimore and Oakland) under the auspices of crime control and supporting immigration enforcement efforts; a more accurate rationale for activating the National Guard is that Mr. Trump considers it his personal police force.
The Supreme Court ruled in December that the President could not send these troops to Chicago – and presumably other cities – over the objection of Illinois officials. But overall, the Court hasn’t been much of a check on presidential power in this area; over the past year, the Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security to continue its aggressive immigration operations in Los Angeles, enabled immigration agents to use racial and linguistic profiling when deciding to stop and question people about their immigration status, and agreed to hear President Trump’s challenge to the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Threats and retribution
The assassination of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 was a fulcrum. Political violence of any kind is a failure of democratic norms and often leads to a process of escalation that emboldens those with extreme ideological positions to retaliate. In this case, both the escalation and retaliation came from those in power.
President Trump immediately blamed “the radical left” and framed political violence as exclusively committed by the left against the right. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said in an address to the nation. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in the country today, and it must stop right now.”
Mr. Kirk’s assassination escalated a government crackdown on political speech. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily forced off the air by Disney executives, themselves under pressure from the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, becoming a bewildering but adamant spokesperson for free speech in the process. As right-wing influencers urged their followers to expose and dox anyone posting anything negative about Mr. Kirk posthumously, and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including Vice-President JD Vance and policy adviser Stephen Miller, swore to “use every resource” to “identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy,” leftist non-governmental organizations, President Trump issued an executive order that designated Antifa a domestic terrorism organization.
President Trump hates his opponents and directly said so during Mr. Kirk’s memorial extravaganza. It is obvious that he is willing to wield the power of the state to punish them.
Former president Joe Biden must have seen the writing on the wall when he, as one of his last acts as president, pre-emptively pardoned his family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Army general Mark Miller, and members of the House Jan. 6 committee, including former representative Liz Cheney and Representative Bennie Thompson.
President Trump’s many acts of retribution include: removing security protections from former officials, such as Dr. Fauci and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo; firing those who worked on any investigation linked to him, including dozens of prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington; targeting the law firm Paul Weiss for its links to Democratic causes and fundraising; vilifying his perceived enemies, and even threatening to strip them of their American citizenship; ousting top officials at the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation; suspending security clearances of lawyers at the Washington law firm that assisted special counsel Jack Smith; and threatening those who have crossed Mr. Trump or refused to do his bidding with criminal charges, including Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney-General Letitia James, and most recently, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
The targets here are not simply President Trump’s perceived enemies, American elites writ large. Mr. Trump seeks to create an environment of fear, uncertainty, and intimidation for anyone who might try to hold him accountable.
Mr. Trump not only hates those he considers his political enemies; he also truly does not care about ordinary Americans. President Trump’s budget, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” cut nearly US$1-trillion from Medicaid and adds work requirements, income and residency verifications, and more frequent re-enrolment periods. It will cause an estimated 11.8 million Americans to lose their health insurance by 2034. The bill also cuts funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), used by more than 40 million low-income Americans. In the face of more natural disasters and extreme weather events like the Los Angeles wildfires and deadly floods in Texas this past summer, the Trump administration has cut funding to the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda and his control of the Department of Health and Human Services has been nothing short of disastrous. In less than a year, Mr. Kennedy has removed the entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory committee, promoted vaccine skepticism, revised guidelines that all but guarantee almost-eradicated diseases such as measles will have a rapid and dangerous resurgence, promoted junk science that links autism with Tylenol, fired tens of thousands of employees, terminated US$500-million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology, and more.
The longest-ever government shut down in October and November forced 1.4 million federal employees on unpaid leave or to work without pay, suspended SNAP benefits to millions of low-income Americans, and delayed or cancelled thousands of airline flights. It did not, however, stop Mr. Trump’s plans to renovate the White House Ballroom for an estimated US$400-million.
Spectacle, turmoil and drama
The chaos is at times co-ordinated and even coherent. It’s not unlike the football strategy of flooding the zone: Distract opponents with the sheer volume of the offence. President Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon once said as much. But the countless bungles, blowups and simply bizarre moments of this first year also point to an administration that feeds off spectacle, turmoil and drama.
State secrets and war plans were revealed in a group chat. Mr. Trump’s public spat and breakup with his former right-hand billionaire, Elon Musk. Hosting a giant military parade on Mr. Trump’s birthday. Renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War. Berating President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office. Replacing former president Joe Biden’s portrait with a picture of an autopen. Accusing former president Barack Obama of treason. Getting stuck on an escalator at the United Nations and alleging “triple sabotage” after telling the leaders of other sovereign nations that their countries are “going to hell.” Demanding that the Justice Department pay him US$230-million for past cases.
And there aren’t enough hours in the day to get into all the ways that Mr. Trump has sought to deflect attention from the Epstein files.
These last few moments of the first year of the second Trump presidency have taken an even more dangerous tack. The United States attacked a sovereign state and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, bringing him to New York to face criminal charges. Mr. Trump later told The New York Times that U.S oversight of Venezuela could last years, and that the only check on his power on the world stage was his own mind and morality. President Trump then again threatened to annex Greenland, promoting a reinvigorated brand of American imperialism that could upend the international order.
After an ICE agent killed American citizen Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis last week, President Trump responded with defensiveness and belligerence, while members of his administration called her a “domestic terrorist” and ordered hundreds of more federal agents to descend on the city. As protests against ICE gain momentum in cities across the country, confrontation between ordinary Americans willing to take a stand and armed forces poised to kill civilians seem increasingly likely. On Thursday, President Trump went so far as to threaten invoking the Insurrection Act to shut down the protesters.
There’s no sugar-coating it: A year of Donald Trump has been more catastrophic for American democracy than we could have predicted. I don’t know how much more often I can say this, but the cruelty is the point. President Trump’s strongman tactics and callous attitude toward the suffering of vulnerable parts of American society are celebrated by some even as life for ordinary Americans becomes harder.
But those same Americans, who have much to lose in protecting their neighbours, are still doing so. Amid the unravelling of American democracy, there are networks of mutual aid, acts of refusal and sustained resistance. Democracy does not disappear all at once; it is hollowed out gradually, and therefore can be defended in the same way: Through ordinary people insisting again and again that empathy is not weakness, care and solidarity are among the most powerful weapons, and democracy worth fighting for.
