Americans see what's happening
It took some time, but Americans increasingly see Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader who is hurting the country.
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It was clear after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election that many Americans were not prepared for what was about to happen. Some thought he'd bring prices down, and many of those who were aware of his authoritarian plans seemingly didn't take them very seriously.
In recent months, it appears a significant portion of the country has come to the conclusion that what is happening is dangerous and that this man is hurting our nation. It took some time for Americans to digest what was occurring, as is often the case, but most get it now.
As has been widely reported, Trump's approval rating is quite low. According to a recent YouGov/Economist poll, he's at around 39 percent. More importantly, some recent polling shows that Americans have changed their tune on how they view this administration and the state of American democracy in important ways.
A February report from Navigator Research found that 52 percent of Americans say the government can now be described as "authoritarian." A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey from October found that 56 percent of Americans would describe Trump as a "dangerous dictator," which was a four-point increase from seven months prior. The number of Americans who said the federal government has too much power went from 51 percent in 2024 to 62 percent in 2025, according to Gallup, which is the highest percentage it has ever recorded.
Beyond what the average person thinks, a January report from The Century Foundation showed that the United States scored a 79/100 on the democracy health scale in 2024. That went down to a 57/100 in 2025.
"In the first year of Trump 2.0, the United States went from being a passing if imperfect democracy to behaving like an authoritarian state," the report states.
Without question, the United States has moved away from being a flawed democracy and toward what authoritarianism scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt at Harvard University and Lucan Way at the University of Toronto call "competitive authoritarianism."
That is, we're a country that still has elections and acts like a democracy, but we're not truly a democracy anymore. We've moved much closer to the sort of situation you see in a country like Hungary, Turkey or Russia.
The people who research these things see it, and it seems the American people see it. Whatever the waking-up point may have been—from the actions of DOGE to the invasion of American cities by ICE to efforts to subvert our elections—most of us are currently on the same page here.
Thor Benson
While no one reasonable is happy to be in this situation, this polling does give me some hope that we will continue to see a rejection of this administration in election results going forward. As I said in a recent YouTube video, there are some significant threats to the midterm elections that we need to keep an eye on, though.
There's new reporting on Trump's efforts to meddle in the midterm elections, but details are still scant, so we'll have to wait for more information to emerge in the coming months. We do know that Trump is trying to stop mail-in voting and require voter ID in the midterms if he can get away with it. Luckily, it appears efforts to pass a national voter ID law through Congress have failed.
We're never going to get the whole country to agree on what kind of threat Donald Trump represents to American democracy or whether what he is doing is harmful to the U.S. overall, but it looks like a majority now understands the problems we're dealing with.
The Democrats winning back the House, and possibly the Senate, certainly won't solve all of our problems, but it could help increase accountability for this administration and slow down its efforts to achieve its goals. If things come together in the way it looks like they could, we might just survive this thing.
