He campaigned on a pledge to “Make America Great Again,” the slogan emblazoned on the baseball caps he often wore at public rallies, and spoke out against political correctness , illegal immigration and government lobbyists, while promising to cut taxes, renegotiate trade deals and create millions of jobs for American workers. It's been a year since Donald Trump's election and political scientists suspect a decline in democracy in the United States over the past year. How do we know Trump is eroding our democracy? Reject democratic rules, we can compare ourselves with other countries with direct experience of declining democracies and understanding what democracy is. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Trump himself—in rejecting democratic rules, denying the legitimacy of political rivals, tolerating political violence, and considering restrictions on critics' civil liberties—tests positively as “authoritarian.” Political scientists use the term authoritarianism to describe a way of governing that values ​​order and control over personal freedom. A government led by authoritarianism is usually led by a dictator. A 2011 study of democratic backsliding identified 53 historical cases of democratic decline. Of these, only five involved coups or other sudden collapses into authoritarianism (like losing). A democratically elected would-be authoritarian's first year in office is an unreliable indicator of future democratic collapse, and he compared the United States to 1930s Spain, 1970s Chile, and Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela contemporaries. They rejected the argument recently made by the Wall Street Journal, among others, that fears of a rise in antidemocratic forces in the United States amount to a liberal fever dream, while warning that Trump's left-wing opponents could fuel those same forces. a bit like a sandcastle. It takes a long time to build but can be quickly swept away. The Trump wave probably won't wipe out democracy in the United States, but it is steadily eroding it. We have already become dangerously accustomed to many of Trump's unacceptably authoritarian habits. Now we barely blink when he posts tweets calling for the investigation of his political opponents or the closure of critical media. Such behavior poisons the minds of many voters, who applaud his strongman tactics and also falsely believe that Congress's nonpartisan legislative scorecard is "little more than fake news." Many in Trump's base now trust InfoWars' crazy conspiracy theories to be more than accurate and well-documented. report. And the Republican Party's willingness to accommodate populist bigots like Roy Moore reveals how much Trump has corroded previously bipartisan American values. After Trump, we will find ourselves hard-pressed to repair the damage, raising the possibility that the era of democratic decay he ushered in will persist and last. This is the most likely scenario: American democracy will survive, but in a deeply weakened form. In a recent academic paper, we identified 37 cases in 25 different post-war countries where democratic quality declined significantly (although a fully authoritarian regime did not). t emerge). That is, about one in eight countries has experienced a measurable decay in the quality of their democratic institutions (such as losing). In recent decades, countries that have moved away from democracy have done so through a)