Trump’s war on the republic

At 9:40 this morning, Donald J. Trump carefully exited his motorcade on the tarmac of Palm Beach International Airport. Once on his feet, he shuffled his way to the waiting press with a large, badly covered bruise on his right hand. And over the next 22 minutes and 13 seconds, the President of the United States said things that, from any other president, would have initiated an immediate call for the 25th Amendment. But for Trump, it was just another day. He attacked one of his own friendly reporters for daring to ask a question he didn’t like. He talked about bombing another country like it was a hobby he enjoyed. But maybe the most unsettling thing the President of the United States said was that he’s in talks with a mystery man he “believes” is the leader but refused to name, and that he is considering appointing himself into a joint leadership position in the Middle East.

Of course, the reason the reporters were there was for Trump’s take on Iran, and he gave them more than anyone bargained for. Trump jumped right in and explained that there was a “five-day period” and that “we’ll see how that goes. And if it goes well, we’re going to end up with settling this. Otherwise, we just keep bombing our little hearts out.”

And after the very Trump-friendly Newsmax reporter Mike Carter asked him about Iran’s claim that he was not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war, Trump snapped back and said, “Well, they’re going to have to get themselves better public relations people.” When Carter tried to follow up with a question about ICE being deployed to airports, Trump cut him off. “You’re not doing a good job. Did you hear me?” Then he took a question from a CNN reporter, but not before saying, “Can you believe it? I’m taking CNN over Newsmax. Can you believe it?”

And then came the exchange about who would control the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important waterways on Earth. Trump threw around the idea of it being jointly controlled. When a reporter asked by whom, Trump said, “Maybe me. Me and the Ayatollah, whoever the Ayatollah is, whoever the next Ayatollah is.” And he added, “And there’ll be a very serious form of regime change. Now, in all fairness, everybody’s been killed from the regime. They’re really starting off.”

He then compared his decision to deploy ICE agents to American airports to the invention of the paperclip. “That was like the paperclip,” he said. “182 years ago, a man discovered the paperclip. It was so simple, and everybody that looked at it said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” He was comparing a militarized immigration presence at airports where American families are trying to catch flights to a 19th century office supply, and acted like he was a genius for the comparison. And for the record, the modern paperclip was patented in the late 1800s, not 182 years ago, and its origin story is more complicated than one man’s eureka moment. But historical accuracy has never been the point with him.

And when a reporter asked if he would still request $200 billion from Congress to fund the war even if a deal is reached, Trump said, “It’s always nice to have. It’s a very inflamed world.” Two hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money, and his answer is “it’s always nice to have.”

That was 22 minutes and 13 seconds on a tarmac in Florida with a man we are depending on to lead and protect our country.

And what we saw on that tarmac is not an isolated moment. It’s a symptom of something much bigger. Something that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should. Not because it’s not serious, but because there’s so much chaos, noise, and cruelty being hurled at us every single day that the overarching story keeps getting buried. And I think that’s exactly how they want it.

Because while Trump was standing in the Florida sun comparing himself to the inventor of the paperclip and proposing to co-run a Middle Eastern waterway with a man who might be dead, three major democracy watchdog organizations quietly released their reports. These are independent organizations that each use different methods and track different data. They’re based in different countries, and they all arrived at the same conclusion. American democracy is in a free fall.

Not declining slowly, or eroding at the edges, which would be bad enough. But in a freefall. The kind of decline that scholars who have spent their entire careers studying how democracies live and how they die are calling unprecedented.

The first report comes from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the largest global dataset on democracy that exists. Over 4,200 scholars and country experts, covering 202 countries, with data going back to 1789. This isn’t a think tank with a political agenda. This is a massive, rigorous, academic measurement system used by political scientists around the world. And their conclusion was devastating: in a single year, the United States experienced the most rapid democratic decline in its history. Our ranking plummeted from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries. We now sit between Slovakia and Greece. Our Liberal Democracy Index score fell 24 percent in one year. And for the first time in over 50 years, the United States lost its classification as a ‘liberal democracy’ and was downgraded to what they call an ‘electoral democracy,’ meaning we still hold elections, but we no longer have the fully functioning checks and balances, the rule of law protections, and the civil liberties that define a liberal democracy. We haven’t been in that lower category since 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act was fully implemented. That’s how far we’ve been set back.

V-Dem also found that freedom of expression in the United States is now at its lowest level since the end of World War II. That Congress’s ability to check presidential power has reached its lowest point in over 100 years. And they classified the United States as one of 44 countries currently “autocratizing.” That’s their word. Not mine. It means actively moving away from democracy and toward autocracy. The institute’s founding director, Staffan Lindberg, said it plainly: the developments in the United States are “moving toward dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid.” He called it “the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.”

And when the White House was asked to respond? Their spokeswoman called V-Dem “a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization.” That’s the playbook. When the data exposes you, you don’t address the data. You attack the people holding the ruler. Every authoritarian regime in history has done exactly that.

The second report comes from Bright Line Watch, a group of over 500 American political science professors who regularly rate American democracy on a scale from zero to 100. After Trump’s election in November 2024, they gave us a 67. Not great, but still in the range of a functioning democracy. Then, just weeks into his second term, that score dropped to 55. The steepest single decline in the survey’s entire history. They now classify the United States as a “mixed regime.” Nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. They place us between Israel and Mexico, and below countries we’ve always considered our peers, like the United Kingdom and Canada. And the co-director, John Carey at Dartmouth, said something that all of us need to hear. He said the score might have dropped even further if not for the courts pushing back. And then he added: “That’s the most important set.” Meaning the courts are the last line. And if they fall, there is nothing left.

The third report comes from Freedom House. They’ve been tracking political rights and civil liberties around the world since 1972. The United States has always been rated “free.” Always. But in their 2026 report, we had the sharpest decline in freedom score out of all 88 countries in the “free” category. The sharpest. We received our lowest score since they began using their current scale in 2002. And global freedom has now declined for 20 consecutive years. The title of their report says everything: “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy.”

And then there’s the Century Foundation, which recorded a 28 percent drop in American democracy in a single year. From 79 to 57 out of 100. This isn’t one organization with an axe to grind. This is every major democracy measurement system on Earth, using different methods, studying different indicators, arriving independently at the same conclusion. And the man they’re measuring? He was standing on a tarmac this morning talking about “bombing our little hearts out”.

So how did we get here? How did the country that wrote the blueprint for modern democracy fall this far, this fast? And yes, we are a democratic republic. We elect representatives. We have a Constitution designed by people who had just fought a revolution against a king and were determined to make sure no single person could ever hold that kind of power again. But that entire system, every piece of it, runs on democratic norms. Free press. Independent courts. Separation of powers. Civilian control of the military. The peaceful transfer of power. Accountability. Transparency. The idea that the law applies to everyone, including, and especially, the president. Those are what’s in freefall. And it didn’t happen by accident. It’s not random chaos. It is a playbook. Every move has been used before in countries that lost their democracies the same way we are losing ours. And once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

It starts with the watchdogs. Every federal agency in the United States has an inspector general. Their entire job is to find waste, fraud, and abuse inside the government. They are nonpartisan by design. They serve across administrations. And the law requires the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice and a detailed justification before firing one. In his first week back in office, Trump fired 18 of them. In one night. Without giving Congress a single justification for any of them. And at least five of those inspectors general had been actively investigating Elon Musk’s companies at the time they were fired. The man who was handed access to sensitive government data across multiple federal agencies, whose companies hold billions in government contracts, who was never elected and never confirmed by the Senate, and had the people investigating him removed. And now over 75 percent of inspector general positions are sitting vacant. And the staff who remain have testified to Congress that they are terrified to do their work, speak up, or report anything unfavorable. And that is exactly what dictatorships require.

Then they went after the press. V-Dem found something that every single one of us needs to understand. In their data, going back 25 years, across every country they track, attacks on free expression have been the single most common tactic used by leaders who are concentrating power. The first thing they go after. Every time. Because if you can silence the people who tell the truth, you can do anything else you want. The United States just received its lowest press freedom ranking since Reporters Without Borders began tracking in 2002. Countries like Sierra Leone, Romania, and Liberia now rank above us in press freedom. Countries that have lived through civil wars and dictatorships have freer press environments than the United States of America right now.

Congress revoked over a billion dollars in funding for public broadcasting at Trump’s request. NPR. PBS. Over 1,500 local stations, many of them in rural communities that depend on them. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had existed since 1967, was shut down entirely. The FCC, under a chairman who helped write Project 2025, launched investigations into every major outlet that covered the administration critically. NPR. PBS. ABC. NBC. CBS. And we all know who they didn’t investigate? Fox. That’s not regulation. That’s the government deciding which outlets are allowed to function freely and which ones get punished for telling the truth. Trump sued the New York Times for $15 billion. The FBI searched a Washington Post reporter’s home. And a Free Press report documented nearly 200 federal assaults on the First Amendment in 2025 alone. Two hundred. In one year. They don’t ban the press overnight. They make it expensive to tell the truth. They sue. They investigate. They pull funding. They make every journalist do the math: is this story worth losing everything for? And enough of them decide it’s not. That’s how silence becomes the default. Not by force, but by fear.

Then they came for the courts. And this is where it gets truly dangerous. Because as Bright Line Watch said, the courts are the last set of referees. And when the executive branch stops obeying court orders, the rule of law is no longer operational. It’s just words on paper. A federal judge named Patrick Schiltz wrote something very important. Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee, a conservative jurist, not a partisan critic. He wrote: “The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt, again and again and again, to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” He searched the entire history of this country and could not find another time when the government had to be threatened with contempt repeatedly just to follow the law. That has never happened before. We are in completely uncharted territory. And Bright Line Watch experts forecast a 53 percent likelihood that the administration will at some point direct law enforcement not to enforce a court order at all. When a president decides court orders are optional, there is no rule of law.

And then they weaponized the justice system itself. The Department of Justice, under this administration, attempted to indict six Democratic lawmakers on sedition charges. Their crime? They posted a 90-second video reminding military members that they are not required to follow illegal orders. These weren’t random politicians. They were veterans. Former military officers. Former intelligence professionals. People who had served this country in uniform. And the President of the United States called their video “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” But a D.C. grand jury, a group of regular Americans, looked at the evidence and said no. They refused to indict. The legal system held. Our fellow Americans held. And during the Epstein files hearing, the Attorney General of the United States was caught with a printed list tracking what a member of Congress had searched on a DOJ computer while they were conducting lawful oversight. The Department of Justice was surveilling a member of Congress during a legal investigation. That is the executive branch spying on the legislative branch. That is a violation of the separation of powers so fundamental that it should have been front-page news for a month. Instead, it barely lasted a day. Because the chaos buries everything. And that’s the point.

And underneath all of it, they are increasing their attacks on our upcoming elections. V-Dem said something that so many of us already know. They said the 2026 midterm elections will be “a critical test for the quality of elections, and democracy, in the United States.” And they warned that if election indicators also decline, “the U.S. will fall even further.” Texas Republicans have already redrawn their congressional maps before the 2026 elections to gain five additional seats, triggering a nationwide gerrymandering push in the middle of a cycle. An executive order attempted to restrict mail-in voting and mandate voter ID nationwide, overriding the authority of states to run their own elections.

And just today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could end grace periods for mail-in ballots in 14 states and Washington, D.C. The conservative majority appeared ready to side with Republicans, with Justices Alito and Kavanaugh both raising concerns about late-arriving ballots undermining “confidence in election outcomes.” A ruling is expected by June, just months before the midterms. If they rule against mail-in ballot grace periods, it would upend voting procedures across the country right before the most important election of our lifetimes, and it would disproportionately affect the voters who have traditionally been most likely to vote by mail: Democratic voters. If you want to know whether a country is still a democracy, there’s really only one question that matters: are the elections free and fair? The people who are tearing down every other democratic norm are already working to make sure the answer to that question is no.

None of this is random. Democracy scholars say the Trump administration is using the tactics of competitive authoritarianism. That’s the model Viktor Orbán built in Hungary. Elections still exist, but the playing field is systematically tilted. The courts are stacked. The media is captured or intimidated. Civil society is defunded. And the opposition is allowed to exist just enough to maintain the illusion of democracy while being denied any real chance of winning. Political scientist Daniel Stockemer developed a six-step model of how democracies die this way, incrementally, from the inside. And by his analysis, the United States breached the first three stages within a single year. Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who spent years tracking Hungary’s democratic decline, put it this way: “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism.” And here’s what we all need to remember. It looks like chaos, and it feels like chaos, and that’s the point. The chaos is the strategy. Because while we’re reacting to the outrage of the day, the insult, the bizarre quote, the latest tarmac meltdown, they are quietly dismantling the system behind the curtain. It’s all moving in the same direction. And that direction has a name. It’s authoritarianism.

But none of this is just one man. Trump is the face, the chaos, the daily circus on the tarmac. But behind him is a machine. It’s the Project 2025 architects at the Heritage Foundation. It’s Peter Thiel funding the movement and profiting from the surveillance state his companies help build. It’s Elon Musk, unelected and unaccountable, who sat inside federal agencies and had free rein to destroy as he pleased. It’s the Epstein-connected elites who have every reason to keep this system in place because it protects them. Trump didn’t build this alone. He’s the front man for people who have wanted to dismantle democracy for decades and finally found someone reckless enough, compromised enough, and desperate enough to let them do it. That’s a post for another night, because there’s a lot to say about who these people are and what they want. But we need to name it tonight, even briefly, because what we’re watching isn’t one man’s decline. It’s an organized project.

And maybe I think about this differently than most people because I’ve seen it before. Not here. In Hungary. I first went to Budapest in the mid-2010s. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. The architecture, the Danube, the thermal baths, the food. The people were warm and open and proud of their country. I fell in love with it. I wrote travel stories about it, and I couldn’t wait to go back.

And then I did go back, in 2019. And something had changed. It’s hard to explain, but the energy was different. The openness was gone. There was a heaviness to everything. It felt almost more communist, if that could be an identifier, even though Hungary had fought so hard to leave that behind. Orbán had been tightening his grip for years by then, and you could feel it in the streets, in the way people talked, and in what they didn’t say. The country I had fallen in love with just a few years earlier felt like it was holding its breath.

That trip opened my eyes. I was there writing travel stories, but my brain was screaming something else entirely. We’re in trouble. Not just Hungary. Us. I could see what was happening there, and I could feel it at home. And I remember thinking, this is where we’re headed.

And then we went to Germany right after to learn about the rise of fascism. I stood in the places where it happened. And it all came crashing down on me. Everything I had felt in Hungary and everything I had been sensing at home collided in that moment. It was one of those trips that changes you. And in those moments, I was reminded that others had stood where I stood, thinking it couldn’t happen to them or their country. And it did. And I knew it could happen to us.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get to go back to Budapest. I hope we will. My whole family loved it. But the Hungary I fell in love with isn’t really there right now. They, too, are facing an election on April 12 that could determine their entire future. After 16 years of Orbán’s rule, the opposition is mounting the most serious challenge in over a decade. I will be watching their election closely, because it will forecast what to expect from our own in November. My heart goes out to the Hungarian people, and I remain hopeful for their future. History is a warning to us all, here in the US and overseas. You don’t lose a country all at once. You lose it in pieces, so slowly that most people don’t notice until the place they loved is gone.

Much like Hungary, we too have a real chance to have our voices heard and make our own choices for the future of this country. In November, we go to the polls. And everything we do between now and then matters.

But first, we have work to do this weekend. The next No Kings rally is this Saturday, March 28. This matters. We need to show up in numbers that are impossible to ignore. Get your team together and your signs ready. Bring your neighbors. And reach out to the people in your life who know something is wrong but haven’t taken that next step yet. Invite them to come with you. Because when you stand in a crowd of people who see what’s happening as clearly as you do, it changes something in you. And if we can ignite that fire in them, the people they talk to in the coming months will feel it too.

And I want to take a moment to thank everyone for all of your support. Being able to write these every night has been a true gift. So often we feel like we’re spinning our wheels and that there’s not much one person can do, but you have enabled me to do this as my full-time job now. To learn things I never knew I didn’t know and to share them with so many people. I want you to know that your support, through memberships, commenting, and making sure the truth is reaching more people, has a direct impact. We are reaching more people. And we’re also reminding each other that we’re not alone and that better days are coming.

The closer we get to November, the harder they will fight to keep us from the ballot box. Because they know what’s at stake. They know this country still belongs to us, and they are terrified that more people might remember that. They haven’t won yet, and we are never going to let them. The truth is still breaking through. And most importantly, we are still here, still fighting, still refusing to back down, and still choosing country over comfort every single day. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.

This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: Caught my “editorial staff”, aka my husband, Pete, and our pup, taking a break while technically still “on the clock.” Thought I’d share a lighthearted moment. What you’re really seeing here is a negotiation for Pete to get his chair back. He succeeded. Treats were involved.

Sources:

https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/20/nx-s1-5754021/trump-democracy-autocracy-dictatorship-reports
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2026/growing-shadow-autocracy https://tcf.org/content/report/centurys-new-democracy-meter-shows-america-took-an-authoritarian-turn-in-2025/
https://brightlinewatch.org/violence-redistricting-and-democratic-norms-in-trumps-america/
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/27/chief-judge-schiltz-one-way-or-another-ice-will-comply-with-this-courts-orders/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-democrats-death-penalty-sedition-military-orders-rcna245003 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lawmakers-demand-doj-stop-tracking-lawmakers-epstein-files-searches-rcna258721 https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/politics/supreme-court-mail-in-ballots-takeaways-mississippi
https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-gaggles-with-press-upon-departure-in-palm-beach-fl-mar-23-2026/