Americans have seen changing tides in the last ten years, marked by what many call a rise of a populist, a global pandemic, changes in mutual tolerance and forbearance of political opponents, as well as an ongoing complex immigration debate. Many scholars have suggested that democratic erosion has spread to the United States, due to backsliding of democratic norms and forbearance and legitimacy of candidates of the opposite party occurring within the last ten-fifteen years, intense racial divisions and ideals in which the United States as an institution was so intentionally built on, executive overreach by United States President Donald Trump in which independent bureaucratic agencies are being used to follow suite with the current Presidential agenda, such as the Department of Justice, in which bypasses and is constantly eroding the democratic system of checks and balances, increasingly an attack on higher education, as well as access to higher education, and free speech of both professors and students alike. A particularly striking example is what followed the 2020 United States Presidential election, in which Joe Biden of the Democratic Party won the presidential office, a series of events began to take shape.


On January 2nd, 2021 the then Former President and now current President of the United States–Donald Trump of the Republican Party made a call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in regards to the 2020 election, actively prompting and pressuring Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”, due to Georgia turning blue in the 2020 election due to Georgia being a “swing state” shifting from being red–republican to blue–democrat, leading to Democrat Joe Biden to win the state of Georgia. In response, to the 2020 election, thereby followed an attempted self coup and insurrection on the United States capitol on January 6th, 2021, in which supporters of Donald Trump otherwise known as “MAGA” , stormed the U.S capitol in utter outrage over the certification of the 2020 election by Congress. Thereby followed the January 6th committee to investigate

source: https://cedarvalleysentinel.com/politics-2025/sweeping-changes-an-analysis-of-the-first-50-executive-orders-by-president-trump-in-2025/

the breach on the capital.

More recently as a result of this occurrence in 2021, swing states have caught Trump’s attention and have been subject to intense scrutiny by Trump, more specifically, in Georgia most notably Fulton County–which is most often times blue caught Trump’s attention, this led Trump to on Jan 28, 2026 conducted an FBI raid with a search warrant and seized hundreds of ballot boxes of a Fulton County election center, initiated by the same attorney–Kurt Olsen who aided Trump in the original lawsuit. This is a primary example of stealth authoritarianism as coined by Political Science scholar Ozan Varol, which is the cloaking of certain repressive measures under the guise of law, due to the fact that the FBI raid was solely based on what many consider to be “debunked myths” regarding the 2020 election, with the legitimacy of elections constantly being questioned by Trump and his supporters and Trump’s constant abuse of legal mechanisms, though states such as Georgia and other blue states targeted such as Minnesota, though many state officials have condemned the accusation of voter fraud. Additionally, this FBI raid directly points to how Trump constantly makes use of discriminatory legalism, as coined by political scientist Jan-Werner Müller in “What is Populism”,which is the use of the justice system to directly target opposition as a means of consolidating power while simultaneously favoring supporters, this is evident in regards to Trump’s pardon of January 6th supporters while at the same time targeting states in which the opposition–the Democratic Party most-often times win elections.


This tactic has major implications to how voters view elections, these actions not only will discourage citizens from voting in what is known to be free and fair elections but will also make United States elections appear to not be as legitimate due to increased public attention surrounding the topic of elections. As this tactic and others continue to be used by the current Trump Administration the United States is consistently changing tides in regards to party lines, governmental relations as well as the eradication of established norms which poses a major threat to the U.S democratic system.