During former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in May, in which he was convicted on thirty-four counts of illegally falsifying business records to hide payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, astute media observers called out his demagoguery amid the proceedings. Trump’s smearing of Judge Juan Merchan wasn’t particularly surprising, since he has a history of lambasting judges who don’t agree with him. But his attacks on the trial’s very legitimacy, which were parroted by a slew of other prominent conservatives, were new and unnerving.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, for example, showed up in New York to blast the trial as a “sham” because (he claimed without evidence) Democrats were using the courts to keep Trump off of the campaign trail. Johnson’s statements echoed Trump’s own, in which he blasted Merchan as “corrupt” and “conflicted.” Other House members joined in. Florida Republican Matt Gaetz slammed not only Merchan but also the witnesses and the prosecutors as “corrupt.” Virginia Republican Bob Good went even further, calling the trial “political persecution” involving “collusion between the department of injustice [sic] and these crooked courts in New York City.”
At least twenty Republican politicians appeared at the trial, many of whom made similar attacks. None, however, offered evidence for their most inflammatory claim: that President Joe Biden colluded with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to bring the case.
Such numerous and baseless attacks by high-ranking U.S. officials on a legitimate criminal proceeding are unprecedented in American history. But they should not be viewed in isolation. These attacks are yet another instance of the MAGA right’s attempt to delegitimize an American institution that could serve as a check on Trump’s quest for total unaccountability. Like Trump’s demagoguery of our media (“fake news!”), intelligence agencies (“deep state!”), and electoral processes (“rigged!”), the attacks on our judiciary should be viewed as part of a broader strategy by Trump and his allies to destroy gatekeepers, the rule of law, and even the very idea of objectivity itself in order to hand Donald Trump virtually unlimited political power were he to regain the presidency.
More evidence of this strategy can be found in Trump’s lawsuit arguing for total presidential immunity—which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court granting broad immunity to presidents for “official” acts—and on the official website for Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project. Known as Project 2025, the wide-ranging collection of policy proposals assembled by the rightwing Heritage Foundation is meant to be a guide for the next conservative president. The 900-plus-page document calls for sweeping changes to the federal government, such as eliminating the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve and making it easier for the President to fire federal workers and replace them with cronies. Most alarmingly, it calls for handing the President almost total control of the executive branch.
Trump’s attacks on our courts and other institutions should not be written off as simply distasteful or as “Trump being Trump.”
In light of this, Trump’s attacks on our courts and other institutions should not be written off as simply distasteful or as “Trump being Trump.” They must be acknowledged as something far more dangerous. A functioning democracy depends on the strength of its institutions, and history teaches us that it is autocrats who undermine them.
Trump, of course, has a long history of attacking our institutions—he was slandering the judiciary long before the hush money trial. In 2017, for example, he called James Robart, the Republican-appointed judge who stopped his Muslim travel ban, a “so-called judge” who made a “terrible decision.” In 2018, after an appeals court rejected his administration’s stricter rules for asylum seekers, Trump declared the ruling “a disgrace” and attacked the judge, Jon Tigar, as a biased “Obama judge.” And in 2020, after Trump ally Roger Stone was convicted on multiple counts, including making false statements to Congress and witness tampering, Trump blasted not only the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, but even the jury foreperson as “totally biased.”
But Trump’s favorite institutional target has always been the press. To discuss his relentless attacks on our fourth estate, I contacted Seth Stern, the advocacy director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). Stern says that Trump’s attacks, which have been ongoing since 2015, have had undeniably damaging effects. His cries that the media are the “enemy of the people” and “fake news,” and his “egging on crowds to assault or harass journalists” have, Stern says, “turned a lot of Americans into skeptics of essentially everything they read” while generating an atmosphere of hostility that is increasingly dangerous. Stern notes a rise in egregious arrests of journalists and attempts to censor or retaliate against them.
Freedom of the Press Foundation operates the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which monitors troubling “incidents” involving U.S. journalists: everything from unwarranted arrests to equipment seizures to assaults to border interrogations. Since the tracker launched in 2017, it has logged almost 2,000 of these incidents (as of late June 2024) and more than 2,500 anti-media tweets by Trump (before his account was frozen). While both Stern and FPF’s Kirstin McCudden, vice president of editorial, say it is difficult to attribute any single incident to Trump, some direct links can be detected. McCudden forwarded me six instances that occurred at Trump rallies: three in which journalists were assaulted, two in which journalists appeared to be wrongfully arrested, and one where a group of journalists was tear-gassed.
In addition, Stern says, the United States has dropped to fifty-fifth place on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. The index measures press freedoms annually in 180 countries based on five factors: economic, legal, political, safety, and social. In 2024, the United States matched its lowest-ever rank, which represents a ten-place drop since the 2023 Index. The United States has declined on the index each year since 2016, when it was in forty-first place. Stern is concerned about recent Biden Administration policies—the bill to ban TikTok, the extension of the authority of intelligence agencies under FISA—that could pave the way for more serious press crackdowns in a second Trump Administration.
Press freedom is declining globally, says Clayton Weimers, executive director of the U.S. office of Reporters Without Borders, and the biggest driver is on the political score. “Political conditions for journalism are getting more complicated and more hostile,” he tells me. “Politicians are increasingly comfortable denigrating the news, the news media, and journalists individually.”
“There is, in fact, a burgeoning political movement that considers the media the enemy and is openly hostile to journalists,” he adds. “That has had a deleterious effect on their safety because it lowers the bars for violence. It makes it harder for them to do their jobs and a lot easier to push propaganda because the general public increasingly distrusts the media.”
After Trump won the presidency in 2016, a slew of books were published that examined dictatorships and whether one could arise in the United States. All of these offer insight into our current political reality, but Cass Sunstein’s Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America, from 2018, is particularly comprehensive. The essay collection begins with one by University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, titled “The Dictator’s Handbook, U.S. Edition.” In it, Posner imagines what it would take for Donald Trump to usurp our checks and balances and become a dictator. His focus: our institutions. For Trump to succeed, Posner writes, he would have to destroy Americans’ faith in or co-opt our press, Congress, intelligence agencies, the courts, the bureaucracy, and civil society—all of which Trump continues to attack and delegitimize.
Two of Posner’s points are particularly prescient. The first is his assertion that for a dictator to succeed, it’s crucial that he surround himself with “yes men.” “To control the federal government’s vast civil service,” he writes, “Trump needs to appoint loyalists to leadership positions.” This brings to mind Project 2025, which would make appointing loyalists much easier. In Posner’s discussion of our institutions, he notes how each one depends on the others for strength, so attacks on them all are what we should be most wary of. “Could steady pressure against all of these institutions, all at once, cause them to crumble because they cannot rely on each other for support?” he writes.
If we don’t have faith in our elections, we don’t have a democracy.
In the end, our institutions are only as strong as our confidence in them. And confidence is falling. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, only 32 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media, which ties the previous low from 2016. Yet the later poll is more alarming—a record portion of Americans, 39 percent, said they did not trust the media “at all.” Faith in the legal system is also hitting record lows, with, as of 2022, just 25 percent of Gallup poll respondents reporting “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in it. And an AP/University of Chicago poll conducted in June 2024 found that only 16 percent of respondents said they had “a great deal” of confidence in the Supreme Court.
But most troubling of all is Americans’ declining faith in the fairness of our elections. A CNN poll conducted in July 2023 found that nearly 70 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believed Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was illegitimate—despite numerous audits, losses in sixty-three lawsuits, and even an investigation by Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr. Indeed, the bad-faith claims of widespread election fraud by Trump and his allies are the most antidemocratic of all of the MAGA right’s attacks. If we don’t have faith in our elections, we don’t have a democracy.
It is true that U.S. institutions are fallible and must be subject to public criticism. It is also true that there has been unethical behavior by members of these institutions that can’t be ignored. The actions of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—the Christian nationalist flags flown outside of Alito’s homes and Thomas accepting millions of dollars in gifts—have been execrable. Yet MAGA Republicans are weaponizing bad-faith potshots at legitimate proceedings and agencies in an effort to dismantle institutions altogether. Even Judge Juan Merchan’s tiny contribution of $15 to President Biden was enough to generate a perceived conflict of interest and open the door to widespread cries of bias.
A public perception of an eternally bifurcated media, corrupt judiciary, and partisan federal officials is precisely the political climate that Donald Trump is aiming for—because if the citizenry believes our institutions are so deeply compromised, then truth becomes whatever he says it is.
Trump, says Protect Democracy co-founder Justin Florence, has “followed the authoritarian playbook used by aspiring autocrats around the world to corrupt elections, seize and centralize power, scapegoat minorities, and quash dissent.”
If Trump wins a second term, Florence says he would be an even greater threat to the rule of law, pointing to Trump’s “concrete promises and plans” to dismantle our system of checks and balances and, as Project 2025 shows, to “centralize absolute power in himself.”
As to the declining faith in democratic institutions, Florence notes that this has become a global problem as autocrats around the world, including Trump, have exploited the legitimate upheavals of recent years—the pandemic, globalization, technological and media shifts—to erode faith in them. One important step in strengthening our institutions and protecting democracy, Florence says, “is for all of us to get better at differentiating between genuine political disagreement and authoritarian behaviors.” He adds, “Healthy democracy has room for disputes—even ugly, angry fights. But it’s important that we can identify and separate left vs. right from democracy vs. authoritarianism so we can find the common ground on which we stand.”