If George Washington was the father of America’s democracy, Donald Trump is its undertaker

George Washington notably declared American democracy to be “an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people”.

The American people are now abandoning it as a failed experiment.

Voting at Precinct 3 in Berlin, New Hampshire.Credit: Getty Images

In word and in deed, Donald Trump for years has made plain that he does not respect the results of elections, unless he is winning.

Yet most American voters, in full knowledge, cast their ballots for him in this election.

In case anyone had forgotten his autocratic instinct, Trump issued a reminder just two days before election day.

He has never accepted the outcome of the 2020 election, fomented a riot to try to stay in the White House, and on Sunday said that “I shouldn’t have left” it.

Seven in 10 Americans understood the risk, telling CNN pollsters last week that they didn’t expect Trump would concede defeat if he lost. Yet most voters willingly handed him power.

If Washington was the father of America’s democracy, Trump has auditioned to be its undertaker and is now positioned to duly deliver.

He didn’t have to seize power. America, the modern world’s greatest champion of democracy for the past eight decades, has lost faith in its calling.

That is the true uniqueness of this election – not the candidates, not the policies, not the pageantry. They matter. And, in a democratic system, the power holders and their policies can be replaced, renewed, reviewed.

But in an autocracy, an absolute leader is not interested in being replaced nor his policies reviewed. The great advantage of democracy is not that it produces the best possible government but the bloodless removal of a bad one, as Karl Popper said.

Trump has made clear, over and again, that, if given power, he will not surrender it. As he said to an audience this year, vote for him “just this time, you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more”.

When Joe Biden took power, he said he would try to save American democracy.

“From the very beginning, nothing has been guaranteed about democracy in America,” he said in 2022. “Every generation has had to defend it, protect it, preserve it, choose it.”

Until now. Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, failed.

Donald Trump smiles at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Centre.Credit: AP

Democracy has been in retreat on planet Earth since the “democratic recession” took hold at the time of the global financial crisis 16 years ago. Only 24 full democracies survive among the world’s 200 nations, according to The Economist’s Democracy Index.

And now the centrepiece of the system, the hub of a network of democratic allies embracing more than 40 nations, has collapsed in on itself.

American democracy was hollowed out by a failure of its promise to its people. Most Americans believe that their country is riddled with corruption, most believe that government serves the elites and not the people, and “nearly half of all voters are sceptical that the American experiment in self-governance is working”, to summarise a New York Times poll published last month.

And now they have delivered the death sentence to the system they feel betrayed them.

Not because they expect Trump to actually fix a broken system. In her landmark work, The Politics of Resentment, political scientist Katherine Cramer described how she took regular part in a wide range of community groups in her home state of Wisconsin, one of the swing states in deciding elections and part of the great swath of left-behind, fly-over America.

When Cramer asks groups of Trump supporters how they expect he will improve their lives, they are surprised at the question, she reports. They don’t expect Trump to be the vehicle for their improvement but for their disenchantment and anger.

When Trump said last year, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution”, he spoke for those voters. They have given up on their system, feeling abandoned by smug big-city elites, but have confidence in Trump to offend the elites and damage their system.

The US, the nation that kept liberty alive in the face of a fearsome axis of autocracies eight decades ago, seems to be losing confidence that it’s worth the effort.

Will Trump’s America be prepared to confront the rising partnership of autocracies in their fast-forming new front – Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the ayatollahs’ Iran and Kim Jong-un’s North Korea?

It must be in question. A former Trump national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, explained why Trump prefers the world’s worst dictators to America’s traditional allies. It’s part of “his struggle for self-worth”. If he’s accepted by so-called strongmen, “he might convince others, and especially himself, that he was strong”.

Benjamin Franklin said that America was “a republic, if you can keep it”. He might be surprised to know that, in the end, it just gave democracy away.

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