As the end of the summer approaches, Congress returns to Washington, and the November elections move into their stretch run, it seems a good time to try to assess where exactly we are in terms of this second Trump administration and the health of U.S. democracy. I will not try to be exhaustive but will offer an overview.
What I want to suggest is that what we are seeing is not simply Trumpism. It is the latest battle between two very old and very different visions of what America is and who counts as the American people. But this contest over visions is happening in part through the undermining of democracy and the effort to stop it, as well as through the profound suffering of people victimized by the United States government, most especially immigrants caught up in the government’s cruel enforcement strategy.
Ideological currents
I believe the second Trump administration can fairly be described as reactionary, populist, nationalist, patriarchal, Christianist, personalist and authoritarian. It is a government certainly unlike anything seen in my long lifetime, or even in the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. That would take us back to around 1900.
David Gushee
Let me unpack my ideological labels, as follows:
Reactionary — The recent generations of the hard edges of the American Right have been characterized by negative reaction to most social changes that have occurred in our country at least since the Civil Rights Movement began. Let’s take the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision of 1954 as a starting point.
But this right-wing reactionary posture is not just about race and sometimes not mainly about race. It also includes negative reaction to the following: Modern feminism and advances for women’s rights, Supreme Court decisions setting a higher barrier between church and state, the sexual revolution and especially the gay and now trans rights movements, immigration law changes that admitted millions from the Global South, the legalization of abortion, the protests against the Vietnam War, the environmental movement and heightened environmental regulation, the larger federal government and social safety net, and the evolving of a more religiously pluralistic U.S. population and culture.
From the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 all the way through today, Republican candidates and conservative ideologists have expressed negative reaction to some, most or all these social, cultural and policy changes and have sought to turn back the clock. “Make America Great Again” effectively articulated this politics of reactionary nostalgia, and it is a dream not confined to Donald Trump.
Populist — The current ideology of the Right is, or sounds, populist. Donald Trump was at one time quite effective in expressing a connection to the concerns of rural and working-class Americans whose jobs were shipped overseas and whose communities were hollowed out by economic globalization. He sounded like an economic populist, representing “the people” against the big global corporations. His tariff fixation is the last remaining link to this original economic populism.
“His tariff fixation is the last remaining link to this original economic populism.”
But his administration is “populist” in another sense. That is, by implicitly and sometimes explicitly identifying a true, core, native “American people” whose power, values and interests supposedly have been weakened, scorned or ignored and whose cause must be defended. This administration joins this kind of populism when it attacks the “elites” (adding “woke” or “liberal” or “immigrant” here both stokes and symbolizes much cultural resentment) who have run roughshod over what the supposedly “true” or “real” American people want and deserve.
Elon Musk’s DOGE debacle was, in part, fueled by animus toward the federal civil service, which was treated as the elite enemy of the true people who could not suffer enough to atone for their many sins. That experiment continued until it turned out that the civil servants were just our neighbors and we need them to run the government services we depend on.
Attacks on judges, media, civil servants, Hollywood figures, educators and other groups also are part of this anti-elite populist strategy.
Nationalist — This Trump administration is nationalist in the sense of putting (perceived) U.S. interests first and demonstrating little loyalty to allies (other than Israel, whose leader’s enticement to war with Iran has badly bloodied this administration).
It is nationalist in the sense of demonstrating little cooperation with international organizations, trade agreements and treaty obligations. And it is nationalist in the sense of essentially identifying “the nation” with just a part of its population — the white traditionalist Christian part.
It is in this sense that the widely used critique of “white Christian nationalism” really connects with the reality we are witnessing.
Patriarchal — The second Trump administration is substantially more male-dominated at senior levels than recent U.S. governments, including Trump’s first term. Women have largely been excluded from senior appointments. It is an administration that has dragged its feet on releasing the Epstein Files and has done nothing to press for accountability for those in Epstein’s orbit who abused women and girls. Its Defense Department is led by a man who has reportedly made blocking or removing women (and people of color) from senior leadership a consistent priority.
Overall, this administration represents significant backward movement in its ideology, representation and policy toward women’s equality.
Christianist — I here sharpen my language related to the widespread use of (especially evangelical and Pentecostal) Christian imagery, language, preachers, music and culture within the circles of the Right and the second Trump administration. I emphatically differentiate a Jesus-obeying Christian discipleship from this ideologized right-wing Christianist civil religion.
“I emphatically differentiate a Jesus-obeying Christian discipleship from this ideologized right-wing Christianist civil religion.”
This is Christianity as tribal totem, as ethnic identity marker, as expressive of white-traditionalist-religious-moral cultural power. It is a very significant part of the ideology of this administration, and the loyalty it creates in its religious voters has helped to secure its power.
Personalist — The second Trump administration is even more personalist than the first one. That term means, in this context, it is a government driven not by a rational policymaking process but often by the whims of the president, however erratic or counterproductive they might be.
Tariffs based on personal spite, prosecutions based on revenge motives, alliances ruptured based on fantasies of land acquisition (Greenland!), government by late-night social media posts. This is personalist rule. It is a cousin to, and related to the next point.
Authoritarianism — I argued in my Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies, and continue to believe, what sets Donald Trump as president apart from conservative and Republican candidates and presidents before him is his manifest indifference to the Constitution, rule of law and democratic/republican norms.
Here I want to draw a very clear distinction between ideological currents that are far older than Trump and will long live on after his departure, and Trump’s willingness as president to use his powers to press the boundaries of democracy and its norms to or beyond their limit. I argued three years ago that this is what makes him uniquely dangerous, and it is even more the reality we are living in today.
Progress and hindrances to autocracy
The New York Times has created an Autocracy Index that is monitoring the health of our democracy based on widely recognized standards of democratic health and erosion. Recently it published its update on U.S. democratic erosion, focusing on 12 parameters. These are:
- Manipulating the law to stay in power
- Stifling speech and dissent
- Persecuting political opponents
- Bypassing the legislature
- Using the military at home
- Defying the courts
- Declaring false emergencies
- Vilifying marginalized groups
- Controlling information
- Trying to take over universities
- Creating a cult of personality
- Using power for personal profit
These standards apply to any country and are the kinds of things democracy monitors check up on when they assess various countries.
I strongly urge you to read the whole article, with the most recent updates posted on Aug.20. The worst scores — that is, where the writers say that they are seeing the worst democratic erosion and movement toward autocracy — were for items 7, 8, 11 and 12, and especially 11 and 12. But the Times also expresses great concern about Trump’s efforts to manipulate the law to stay in power — in this case, to keep the GOP in control of Congress.
Overall, I agree that after 20 months in power, this president and administration have presided over considerable democratic erosion and movement toward autocracy.
“Resistance has been real, and it has been effective.”
However, autocracy of the Putinist or even the Orbanist type has not been consolidated. Resistance has been real, and it has been effective.
Civil society and NGOs have functioned despite efforts at intimidation. Lawyers have filed hundreds of lawsuits. Judges have frequently ruled against the president. Citizens have regularly protested. Election watchers have been vigilant.
Religious communities have been notable for exercising their specific, precious freedoms to articulate counter-autocratic values and to put those values into action in various practical ways.
The Catholic Church under both Francis and Leo has provided valuable moral witness. The U.S. Catholic Bishops have done the same on issues such as the treatment of migrants.
The Democrats know what is at stake and have functioned in an almost entirely united fashion as an opposition party, without showing signs of intimidation. Many individual legislators have taken risks, for example, to go into ICE detention centers or demand access. Some have been detained and arrested.
Significant parts of the media have resolutely exercised their freedoms (while others have been bought out or taken over).
Individual Americans exercise their right to dissent and their rights of free speech each day on social media and regularly on the streets. Just open Facebook or Substack.
Americans have communicated to pollsters that a substantial majority of us disapprove of the president’s performance, while polling on major policies and the coming elections indicates significant resistance to his agenda.
The president’s effective political power and influence have weakened as a result. Such low opinion ratings and months of polling data on the upcoming elections will also make it harder to steal them. Viktor Orbán discovered this in his recent election defeat.
Lithograph depicting Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg.
Historical contextualization
I have been struck by an idea first sparked for me in a book by Duncan Newcomer on Abraham Lincoln. The book is called Quiet Fire.
That idea is this: One way to look at what is going on is to draw a line from 1863 to 1963 and speak of a late-stage Abraham Lincoln vision, the vision that gave us the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Second Inaugural. This vision was of a new birth of freedom in America, a starting over after a baptism of blood and fire.
Then picture this vision living on for a hundred years, bearing fruit in the Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, offered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.
In this framework the lineage from Emancipator Lincoln to Dreamer King is of a reformed American multi-racial, egalitarian, constitutional, democracy — with the idea of America, the identity of America, being loyalty to this very reformation, this new birth of freedom, a rebirth that followed the scourge of slavery and of war.
This would be an America chastened by its sins and their consequences, an America reborn as a nation of all the people, by all the people and for all the people, an America in which everyone from every background is just as much part of the “people” as anyone else, whether their family was here in 1699 or arrived in 2025.
This was the vision of America I was taught to cherish and fully embrace today.
Opposed to that vision is the unreconstructed American vision, a vision of white dominance, male dominance, Christian(ist) dominance, native-born dominance.
This is the America of structured hierarchy in which white traditionalist Christian men rule because they are believed to be the true “people” of this land, and in which democracy is limited to some of us having the freedom to choose between which of these men will rule us at a given time, with others cut out of the polity, by law or by intimidation.
The best way I know to understand our terrible current moment is as an attempted counter-revolution against the long American struggle for a new birth of freedom. It is the “new birth of freedom” lineage over against those who once were and still are its most determined adversaries.
There is no evidence that in the USA of 2026 anything approaching a majority of Americans is attracted to such a reactionary vision or the authoritarian governance that is being attempted to advance it. But this party is in power now, and that makes a considerable difference.
Today, as in the past, Americans will have to achieve our democracy one day at a time, one lawsuit at a time, one protest at a time, one vote at a time. The next few years may well be quite harrowing. I make no predictions. But I think I know what the task is: Preserve democracy and defeat the counter-revolution that attempts to take us back to a world we should have no desire to return to.
David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.
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