[Itse]

The whole debate over constitutional details is... not totally irrelevant, but not super relevant either.

First of all, Trump is probably not going to even last 4 years, he's already in fairly obvious cognitive decline that should disqualify him just like it did with Biden.

So however this plays out, Trump is unlikely to be in power in 2028, regardless of whether he's still technically the president at that point, and the GOP certainly aren't going to sell another Trump term.

Second: when governments stop being rules by law and democracy, the technicality of political positions becomes a secondary concern. Putin was just as much in power as a PM as he was as a president. When you have enough power and a ruthless unwillingness to give it away, there are literally limitless ways to dress that power up in whatever roles and titles you want. You can still have all the roles stated in the constitution, just without them having real power.

Here's an example for the US... US senate and congress are already borderline non-functioning entities, I don't think it would take that much to just permafreeze them. Then you replace all the necessary people in civil service, the police, the military leadership, and federal agencies with party loyalists, and then all you need is a president who won't stir up trouble and a supreme court who keeps saying that everything is going according to law.

The only issue that point is how do you make sure your cadre of party loyalists stay in place, and you probably want to legally solidify the transfer of power away from democratically elected people to those elected by the party, but that's an extremely solvable issue if you have the presidency and the supreme court.

Especially if you have a president who's kinda dumb to begin with, growing old, easily distracted, and just doesn't care as long as he believes it's in his interest.

So the threat to democracy is not Trump 2028. It's not even really a single dictator seizing power. The much more realistic and really extremely likely threat is the ultraconservatives seizing power in a way which severely limits what elections even mean.

(You can of course always manufacture a crisis to postpone elections or change how they are run "temporarily".)

The threat is the US turning into some variation of a Russian style oligarchy, a Iranian style theocracy and a Chinese style single-party rule. All of those countries have elections, people can still vote. Voting just has very limited significance to the government.

It's unlikely that we'll be all the way there yet in 2028, that kind of transformation takes a long time, but it is very likely that after the Project 2025 people have been in power, the US could so far down that path that it's likely to end up as non-democracy through sheer momentum.

Once concentration of power starts to gather momentum, positions of power in the country rapidly start to fill up with people who see what's coming, and want to get in on the action. People who believe in democracy and want to protect the system will over time get pushed out and replaced by extremely cooperative bootlickers who want a part of that sweet authoritarian power. When that starts happening, its borderline impossible to root it out through that same system of democracy, you basically need some kind of a revolution, but you can't have a revolution before the country is already a dictatorship.

That's why countries going to the precipice of authoritarian rule but turning back are extremely rare.

Just in general: it's extremely naive to think that a system of governance will not be fundamentally changed if it's being run by people who want to change it. It doesn't matter what the laws say or tradition says or the constitution says, if those in power explicitly want to end democracy, they will find a way.



For dictatorships to topple, you very often need a shift in generations, because the population that got into the problem is not the one that can get you out of it.