The 2024 presidential election puts the United States in uncharted territory—and the rest of the world with it. An insurrection in case Trump is defeated and an institutional coup in case he is elected are likely possibilities. This turbulent and dangerous situation highlights the challenges for liberal democracies in Europe too.
A lot can still happen between now and November, especially with the legal trials Donald Trump has to face and a very instable international situation in the Middle East. But compared to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, whose result was largely unexpected, including for Donald Trump, things will be very different this time. Trump and his team have been preparing for four years since their defeat in 2020. In case President Joe Biden is reelected, street violence against the result of the election and dissidence from some Republican-run states against the federal institutions is the most probable scenario. Two-thirds of Republicans say the 2020 election was stolen, and a large part of the Trump electorate and of the party’s establishment will refuse to recognize the result if he loses again.
Because the United States is a federal state with strong sociospatial differences and a history of civil war, there may be symbolic gestures of secessionism. This year, there have already been such tensions in Texas over the issue of the border with Mexico, with the state’s authorities, supported by 25 other Republican-run states, refusing to follow orders from the Supreme Court.
Should Trump be elected, his second presidency will be totally different from the first, shaped by his supporters preparedness for taking power and by revanchism against those who served in the Biden administration. Project 2025—prepared by the Heritage Foundation with about 80 other conservative organizations participating, and funded by many big names on the reactionary scene, such as the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo—is an impressive attempt at doing the groundwork for institutionalizing Trumpism once in office.
Project 2025 is moving Trumpism away from being a populist strategy to gain power to a coherent political doctrine accompanied by policy implementation. Trump has been resentful toward the institutional checks and balances that hampered his power during his presidency. While his 2016 election campaign was a populist one against the traditional “establishment,” his current campaign is an anti-democratic and anti-liberal one directly targeting U.S. institutions.
The establishment of unchecked presidential power and the weakening of the federal administration—what Trump calls the “deep state”—is central to Project 2025. This would target especially the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Justice, but it would also eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce. This announced dismantlement of some federal institutions will be complemented with strong attacks on progressive organizations and those defined as “woke culture warriors.” Even if Project 2025’s 900-page plan may not be implemented whole, the scale of the vision gives an idea of the scope of the revisionism at work.
To make sense of this revolution that could surge in the United States, one has to capture the depth of the profound transformations of American society—especially through three key factors.
First, socioeconomic factors are the bedrock of these transformations. Socieconomic inequalities have been growing, especially geographic income inequality, which has risen by more than 40 percent between 1980 and 2021. Blue-collar America feels, for good reasons, abandoned by a technocratic expert class that claims a false de-ideologization of politics. Second, polarization and culture wars have been tearing society apart. The gap in values and worldviews has been growing over the years, with now more two-thirds of citizens regarding the other political side as immoral (the share is almost three-quarters among Republicans). Third, the United States’ power projection has been challenged and it has had to learn the painful lesson that being the only superpower does not result in the rest of the world complying with its preferences.
Whatever one thinks of its content, Trumpism offers discursive solutions to these issues. The Make America Great Again slogan is fed by retrotopia—the projection of a utopian future based on a return to the past, in this case that of the supposed Golden Age of the 1950s with a White and prosperous United States. The America First slogan supposes not only the return of isolationism as the backbone of foreign policy but also, implicitly, the idea of a world that would conform to the United States’ vision of what the international scene should be. Society is in tune with this fear of decline: between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans say that, by 2050, the country’s economy will be weaker, its politics more divisive, and wealth and income inequality worse, and a majority believe that decline is already happening and that life was better 50 years ago.
Trumpism also advances broader answers to society’s evolutions. More than just being populist in its denunciation of the “elite,” the “establishment,” and the “system,” it proposes an authoritarian transformation in the name of efficiency against a representative democracy that it perceives as opaque, partisan, and inefficient. American society’s demand for authoritarianism and “law and order” has to be put into the context of a strong decline in citizens’ trust in institutions such as the judiciary, the media, and schools.
Trumpism also operationalizes the desire of part of society to slow down cultural transformations, and for the most radical part to revert them, which simultaneously is fed by and feeds fears of demographic decline for Whites and of moral decay for Trump voters who do not share his pro-White stance. Trumpism is thus giving birth to a new grand narrative of belonging. In this regard, it should be understood as the mirror of the progressive ideology and as the conservative version of the identity politics that dominate the U.S. political landscape. Once morality and identity define stances, and perceptions of reality are entrenched into antinomic interpretive frameworks based on a “post-truth” logic, it becomes challenging for citizens to identify shared values that make them part of the same polity.
While the United States is quite a unique case in its political bipolarization and the risks of an insurrection or coup that would transform fundamentally the established institutions, Europe is experiencing a similar malaise in its relationship to the meta-ideology of Western modernity. There too, liberalism, individualism, progress, and universalism are challenged under different combinations and radicalities, even if no political project of transformation on such a scale has been as electorally successful as Trumpism has.
But the Europe Union’s construction and its fragile equilibrium between nation-states and supranational institutions, as well as a more unstable geopolitical environment to its east and south, make it more at risk. It would not take a revolution on the scale of Project 2025 to weaken the EU. What is more, with many predicting the June 2024 European Parliament elections to see a far-right surge, a Trump win in November would mean societies on both sides of the Atlantic have moved in the same illiberal direction.
Welcome to a world where even the near future is not written.
Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, “Why Do Millions of Americans Believe the 2020 Presidential Election Was ‘Stolen’ from Donald Trump?,” The Conversation, March 3, 2024, https://theconversation.com/why-do-millions-of-americans-believe-the-2020-presidential-election-was-stolen-from-donald-trump-224016
U.S. Department of Commerce, “Geographic Inequality on the Rise in the US,” June 15, 2023.
Andrew Daniller, “Americans Take a Dim View of the Nation’s Future, Look More Positively at the Past,” Pew Research Center, April 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/americans-take-a-dim-view-of-the-nations-future-look-more-positively-at-the-past/
Philip Bump, “A lot of Americans embrace Trump’s authoritarianism,” Washington Post, November 10, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/10/lot-americans-embrace-trumps-authoritarianism
Marlène Laruelle is a research professor of international affairs and political science and director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at the George Washington University. She was a guest at the IWM in 2024.
