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Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 triggered the greatest challenge to American democracy in my lifetime and one of the biggest assaults on American democratic institutions in the history of the republic. Last week’s Election Day, however, marked a turning point in a two-year campaign of democratic resistance to Trump’s autocratic ways. His autocratic project is now winding down. The Democratic Party’s massive victory in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and governorships around the country now ensures that any future Trump attempts to undermine democratic institutions over the next two years will fail. Democracy in America bent but did not break. One week on, it’s clear that a new era of democratic renewal has begun.

During his first term, Trump tried to undermine many democratic practices in the United States, culminating most tragically in the events of January 6, 2021, when he incited his loyal followers to storm the Capitol and deploy violence to try to interrupt the certification of the presidential election that he lost. To this day, Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election.

When Trump won reelection in 2024—complete with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and a Supreme Court stacked with conservative justices (three of whom were Trump appointees)—the future of American democracy seemed bleaker than ever. Trump tried to leverage his electoral mandate and deference from the legislative and judicial branches to ignore democratic norms. He launched aggressive assaults against the media, the courts, law firms, and universities. Instead of the rule of law, Trump preferred rule by law, most shockingly trying to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, indicting former FBI Director James Comey, and seeking criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Trump’s administration also executed purges of personnel in the military, the State Department, the FBI, and the Department of Justice that more closely resembled the practices of the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia than those of a democratic government. In a bid to stay on the right side of Trump, big business—especially the CEOs of many (not all) major tech companies—acquiesced to or eagerly embraced his authoritarian agenda, giving him gifts measured in millions of dollars for his inauguration parties and vanity projects such as building a ballroom at the White House. As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, two of the most respected democracy scholars in the world, wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month, “The United States crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism during Donald Trump’s second presidency.”

Not everyone, however, went along with Trump’s authoritarian project. Many Americans—millions and millions of them—resisted. Their mobilized resistance helped create the permissive conditions for the free, fair, and peaceful elections this month. And when given the chance to ratify Trump’s agenda or reject it, American voters said enough was enough. In a blue tsunami, they overwhelmingly rejected Trump and his Republican Party candidates. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That is democracy in action.

Several institutions and individuals played an important role in protecting American democracy and safeguarding the electoral process.

First were the courts. Courts challenged many of the steps Trump took toward autocratic rule. And let’s not use the passive voice here. Fighters for democracy like Norm Eisen and his Democracy Defenders Fund, or Ian Bassin and his organization, Protect Democracy, the ACLU, and many, many others brought these fights to the courts, and then independent judges defended the rule of law and the Constitution. Importantly, several of the Trump administration’s attempts to subvert the electoral process were rebuffed—including by the Supreme Court, which rejected an emergency request to set aside 20,000 ballots in California that the administration alleged were cast by noncitizens.

Second was the free press. Trump went hard against journalists and news organizations who challenged him, calling them collectively “fake media,” and restricting White House access to news outlets he didn’t like, such as CNN, Politico, and MS Now. CNN has since been acquired as part of Paramount’s massive merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, led by David Ellison, son of longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison. Trump publicly welcomed the deal, which gives the Ellison family significant influence over American news media. At his basest, Trump has also resorted to ridiculing and name-calling journalists, particularly women, who dared to ask him tough questions.

Six Thoughts About a Big Night for Democrats and Democracy

But Trump’s broader campaign of intimidation and subjugation has not worked. Instead, journalists and commentators remained relentless in their reporting of Trump’s autocratic actions, as well as allegations of corruption involving Trump and his close associates. Amazingly, corruption emerged as a top concern for voters in the midterm elections, thanks in part to the work of those journalists who brought these allegations to light. I say amazingly because corruption is hard for journalists to investigate and harder for voters to track. It has rarely been such a prominent electoral issue in the United States—but it was last week.

Third was civil society. Over the last two years, countless acts of non-violent civic resistance sprouted, often spontaneously, in reaction to Trump’s agenda. Citizens organized protests outside Tesla stores in response to Elon Musk’s efforts to slash federal spending during his time at DOGE. Millions of Americans joined successive nationwide “No Kings” protests, including more than 3,000 rallies across 50 states in March, according to organizers. Most courageously, the citizens of Minneapolis mobilized to resist the occupation of their city by ICE agents. Tragically, ICE officers killed two of these protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January 2026. For me, these wrongful deaths marked the darkest moment in America’s democratic backslide during the second Trump term. It seemed like authoritarianism was winning. I had seen this movie before in other countries I have lived in and now study as a professor. But then the tide turned, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities. Mass mobilization to defend democracy worked.

The most recent manifestation of civil society strength was the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts, organized by groups such as America Votes, the NAACP, Indivisible, MomsRising, Black Voters Matter, and the Vamos a Votar coalition. Although the final figures are not yet available, Michael McDonald of the University of Florida’s respected Election Lab estimates that the election saw one of the highest turnouts for the midterms in more than a century, surpassed only by the 50.05% turnout recorded in the 2018 midterms. Incidentally, the 2018 elections were also widely regarded as a referendum on Trump’s first two years in office.

Fourth was election administration. Thankfully, the American system for administering elections is very decentralized, making it hard for Washington to manipulate election results. Last week, there were some problems, as there always would be in a country with over 200 million registered voters. But more impressively, this election was administered in a peaceful, normal manner and is now being counted mostly the same way. All the worst-case scenarios that analysts discussed with deep anxiety in the run-up to these elections—ICE intimidation at polling stations, violence to disrupt the voting and counting process, lawsuits to contest the winners in courts—have not happened. And the Democratic Party’s margins of victory are so overwhelming that Trump’s planned action of contesting the results in the Senate race in Alaska no longer matters. Nor will we have to anxiously wait to see if the House clerk will seat those who won. (That was a scenario that I heard discussed numerous times in the last several weeks). The scale of the Democratic win—winning 255 seats in the House of Representatives—eliminates any potential for such shenanigans.

The United States is not a dictatorship. The United States remains a democracy. The ability to hold free and fair elections, despite Trump and his team’s efforts to disrupt them, is overwhelming evidence of the resilience of American democratic institutions.

Of course, big challenges remain. Trump is now a lame duck president, but some fear he will keep fighting—and the promotion of the hardline Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff is a sign he may be choosing the latter option. The damage done to American democratic practices during the last two years, especially the erosion of voting rights, will take years to reverse. Moreover, the deeper flaws in liberal democratic rule in the United States that I wrote about in Autocrats vs Democrats remain.

But the specter of democratic collapse and autocratic rule haunting America over the last two years has receded. Last week’s voting process and election results delivered the autocratic project a devastating blow. American democratic institutions bent but did not break. Americans across the political spectrum committed to democratic principles proved stronger than their autocratic challengers, a coalition led by the president of the United States and his billionaire backers. For those like me who want deeper democratic renewal in the United States, much more work remains in the coming weeks, months, and years.

But for now, let’s celebrate this victory for democracy!

Michael McFaul is a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is the author ofAutocrats vs. Democrats (2025). He writes atMcFaul’s World on Substack.

A version of this piece was originally published on Michael McFaul’s Substack, McFaul’s World.

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