section_path: Twenty-first century
section_name: Twenty-first century
paragraph_text: Twenty-first century
  
  The twenty-first century saw the erosion of voting rights and the rise of partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures. The first presidency of Donald Trump accelerated the undermining of democratic norms. A paper published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science said, "Trump undermined faith in elections, encouraged political violence, vilified the mainstream media, positioned himself as a law-and-order strongman challenging immigrants and suppressing protests."
  
  In 2019, political scientists Robert R. Kaufman and Stephan Haggard saw "striking parallels in terms of democratic dysfunction, polarization, the nature of autocratic appeals, and the processes through which autocratic incumbents sought to exploit elected office" in the United States under Trump compared to other backsliding countries (Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary). They argued that a transition to competitive authoritarianism is possible but unlikely. In 2020, Kurt Weyland presented a qualitative model for assessing democratic continuity and reversal using historical data from the experience of other countries. His study concluded that the United States is immune to democratic reversal. In 2021, political scientists Matias López and Juan Pablo Luna criticized his methodology and selection of parameters and argued that both democratic continuity and reversal are possible. With regard to the state of scholarly research on the subject, they wrote that "the probability of observing democratic backsliding in the United States remains an open and important question". According to some Canadian security experts, Canada may reevaluate historically close Canada–United States relations in response to democratic backsliding in the U.S, which could bring instability to the region and compromise Canada's greatest source of intelligence.
  
  In 2025, Steven Levitsky found the first two months of the second Trump administration to be the most aggressively and openly authoritarian case of democratic backsliding that he has seen, expressing particular concern about attacks on the courts.