We Finally Have Data to Show How Fast Trump Has Eroded American Democracy and Free Speech
It only took a year of Trump 2.0 to move us back to the 1950s-1960s in terms of measurements of our freedom.
Photo via Unsplash, Gayatri Malhotra, V-Dem Institute Splinter Free Speech
Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to the daily ebb and flow of news during the first year of the second Donald Trump administration should reallllly have picked up on the way that American democracy and free speech have been consistently eroding during this period. There’s not really any excuse for missing it at this point; the loss of basic freedoms has been unfolding at a breakneck pace, unprecedented in modern American history. Of course, actually quantifying the loss of American freedom tends to be more tricky, but a newly released, deeply comprehensive study of world democracies offers a terrifying visualization of just how fast ours has degraded. It only took us a year of Trump 2.0 to basically be back in the 1950s or 1960s, from a free speech standpoint. And that’s all data and analysis collected before federal agents started gunning American citizens down on the streets of Minneapolis in early 2026, by the way. Lord only knows what next year’s report could ultimately look like.
The report in question is from Sweden’s V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which has spent a decade assembling what it describes as the world’s largest dataset on democracies and autocracies around the globe as it measures how individual nations backslide into autocracy or build more freedoms for their citizens. It does this by measuring how well governments protect citizen liberties, the electoral process and free speech. And suffice to say, the charts they’ve assembled for the United States in particular are frightening to look at. As the report sums up: “The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times. Under Trump’s presidency the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.” That is oh-so-coincidentally the same year that the landmark Voting Rights Act was finally passed, which was one of the bars America needed to clear in order to be categorized as a full liberal democracy. The V-Dem Institute is basically telling us that only a year of the second Trump administration has essentially ended that era.
Via V-Dem Democracy Report
Those red parts of the graph? That would be the first and now second Trump administrations, with the scale our descent in the last year dwarfing even the frightening democratic backsliding that Trump managed to accomplish during his first term in office from 2017-2021. This makes a good deal of sense, as Trump often found himself constrained in his first Presidential go-round by lifelong civil servants and advisors in key governmental positions who were able to talk him out of or refused to go along with his most totalitarian impulses—recall that it was only the very slight amount of spine shown by Vice President Mike Pence that ultimately stopped Congress from trying to appoint slates of fake electors and circumvent Joe Biden’s electoral win in January 2021. In the second Trump administration, on the other hand, the President has gone out of his way to exclusively surround himself with MAGA lackeys, no longer concerned about any appearances of professionalism. Coupled with a conservative Supreme Court that has rubber stamped most of his impulses, it has made his task of eroding American democracy much faster and more efficient this time around.
The numbers on the side of that scale, by the way, indicate V-Dem’s liberal democracy index, in which a score of 0 represents complete totalitarianism, and a score of 1 is unrestrained liberal democracy with extremely strong protections of individual rights and free speech. Currently, the world’s nations range from as low as the .01 score of North Korea, to the .88 score of Denmark. The United States had been above the .8 mark since roughly the 1980s, but the last year of the Trump administration has pushed it all the way down to .57, which pushes the United States entirely out of the top 50 nations in the world for democracy. It returns us to a level we haven’t seen since the Civil Rights Era, which we can likely observe is no coincidence.
What specific policies and developments have driven such a precipitous decline in American freedom? Well, how much time do you have? The separation of powers and duties in the American government has been stretched to the breaking point by the cheerful abdication of responsibilities vested in the legislative and judicial branches by the Constitution. Both the the GOP-controlled Congress (particularly the House of Representatives under Mike Johnson) and the Supreme Court have giddily turned over their powers as a co-equal branch of the federal government, simply allowing Trump to write legislation via executive orders, while Democratic members of Congress mount what are typically feeble, symbolic protests. This puts more stress on the court system to challenge Trump’s authority, and he has responded by attempting to undermine faith in any American court or judge that rules against him, shuffling decisions on to the Supremes who have consistently vested more and more power to the executive branch. Trump has even called for impeachment and punishment against judges who have ruled against him, or law firms that dared to represent cases against the government.
Likewise, despite running on a free speech platform backed by hypocrites like Elon Musk, who have pretended to create online free speech platforms while actually instituting totalitarian surveillance and de-boosting of content critical of the administration, Trump has likewise taken the status of American free speech back by decades. Trump himself vowed in his inaugural address that “never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” but then less than a year later he signed an executive order authorizing federal agents to target any organization or individual they deem as espousing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity” sentiment. According to Trump, it is illegal in the United states to be “anti-capitalist,” and you have no right to free speech to speak out against this.
According to a new assessment by V-Dem, democracy is back at 1978 levels for the average global citizen. The gains of the third wave of democratization since the mid-1970s are almost eradicated. The U.S. is downgraded from liberal to electoral democracy.
www.democracywithoutborders.org/41651/
— Democracy Without Borders (@democracywithoutborders.org) Mar 18, 2026 at 7:21 AM
And there are so many more instances of what has driven the score provided by V-Dem down in their democracy report, from the blue cities that have seen themselves flooded by federal troops and immigration agents, to Trump’s threats against protestors, to even sacred Republican tenets like the Second Amendment being trampled by the likes of FBI director Kash Patel casually telling Americans that they can’t bring their legally possessed weapon to a protest. We’re currently at the point where a protestor can be arrested after espousing anti-Israel sentiment and then be held in ICE detention for a full year, before finally being released with no criminal charges only after their health precipitously declines … despite the release of that person being ordered by a judge THREE TIMES.
What is happening in America is nothing new, in a global sense. Democracies rise, and democracies slide back into autocratization when they lack robust protections to stop bad actors and people who would abuse the system from taking advantage of their power. The Trump administration, like so many other autocrats before them, have seized upon America’s complacency and weakness, vowing to uphold cherished freedoms even as they degrade them while pointing American citizens at ideological enemies (immigrants, liberals, trans people, etc.) as justification for why crackdowns should be accepted or even cheered. Trump is just using the standard autocrat playbook, but as the V-Dem Institute observes, he’s been doing so at breakneck speed, putting other autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orban to shame in many respects. Those guys wish they could have moved as fast as Trump has managed to do. As the report observes:
Typically, processes of autocratization during the “third wave” are incremental and often inconspicuous, spanning years or even decades. In terms of the speed of autocratization, Trump 2.0 outpaces not only Trump 1.0 but also the most prominent autocrats of the last 25 years.
That’s how we end up with bad actors gaming the system, falling back on Constitutional protections whenever they’re convenient and then working to erase those same protections for everyone else. It’s how we now have, for instance, unabashed Nazis running wild on college campuses, preaching hate and striving to strip away the rights of others, simultaneously claiming that their own free speech is being violated when people object to their calls for ever-increasing authoritarianism.
MAGA: Freedom of speech!
V-Dem: Freedom of Expression is now at its lowest since the end of WWII.
— Elvira Rosert (@elvirarosert.bsky.social) Mar 18, 2026 at 3:04 AM
Nor is it easy for a country to go back, once such a slide has taken hold, given that the party pushing for more autocratization rarely if ever reverses course on its own—instead, they need to be either rebuked or defeated. As V-Dem Institute founding director Staffan Lindberg told Slate in an interview, only “mass mobilization” of angry American citizens is likely to head off the erosion of our rights.
“Lots of people out protesting in the streets is one of the most effective ways to stop autocratization,” Lindberg said. “But those protests must be sustained, frequent, and long-standing.”
Whether Americans truly have the stomach for such a thing remains to be seen, but it will no doubt be exceedingly difficult in a climate of political polarization where people are so committed to the idea of choosing a side that almost nothing can measurably reverse their positions. Still, with Trump’s approval currently dipping toward historically low levels, perhaps there does exist a tipping point in which our national experiment with autocratization can be reversed, and we can start restoring the freedoms one used to associate with being an American.
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