Global Democratic Backsliding, and the Ascent of Donald Trump

Robert H. Wade connects the dots between global democratic backsliding, Trump's personality and the new normal.

For those who experienced Trump’s first term, we are now, six months into the second and re-familiarised with his words, decisions, actions. It is deeply alarming to think that in November 2024 over 77 million Americans voted for him as their president, when his moral character was already well known. 

This short essay begins with an overview of the forces that have been causing a global “democratic recession” or “democratic backsliding” for more than a decade, and places Trump’s ascent in that global context. It goes on to summarize some psychiatrists’ and psychoanalysts’ assessments of his personality, which help us understand what has earnt him devoted loyalty on the part of a large minority of Americans. It concludes with a reminder that Trump’s government and policies are an extreme version of an emerging new “normal”.   

Global democratic backsliding 

Beginning in the 1970s the number of democratic regimes began to grow; the number of dictatorial regimes began to fall. The growth crested in 2012 with 42 liberal democracies including 18% of world population (data from V-Dem, a monitoring organization based in Sweden: Bokat-Lindell 2022). By 2022 the numbers had fallen to 34 liberal democracies (a number last reached on the way up in 1995), and 13% of world population. 

The mechanism of democratic reversal has not been coups or revolutions, but actions of (more or less) legitimately elected politicians who rig elections to ensure future re-election and sustain their stamp of legitimacy. Orban, Putin, Erdogan are obvious cases. The rigging of elections goes in-hand with curbing civil liberties, curbing media freedom, and subjugating the judiciary – replacing “rule of law” with “rule by law” or “law of rule”.  In addition to the cases just cited, Modi’s India, Marcos’ and Duterte’s Philippines and Trump’s USA.

The common causal sequence goes like this: 

First, intensification of societal polarization, caused by some combination of persistent cost-of-living increases, squeeze on middle-class consumption, immigration, rising concentration of income and wealth at the top of the distribution, food and water insecurity, and natural disasters. The combination produces a backlash against social change and rising social distrust. 

Second, this produces a bottom-up desire for “strongmen”, populist outsiders, who promise to confront the causes of the changes, seen as “the threat from within” - for example, “the deep state”, “Democrats”, “Muslims”, “gang members” or “illegal immigrants”.

Third, the populist leader tries to suppress the other side of the polarization, granting “special status” to “my side” and undercutting institutions that block his side’s assertion of dominance, including the judiciary and media. 

Fourth, the populist leader adopts policies which generate higher concentrations of income and wealth at the top, harvesting support from the wealthy. The state shrinks the provision of many public goods, including health, education and food assistance. 

Fifth, the millions harmed by the actions and non-actions of the populist leader take comfort in group identity, and support the strongman-saviour who promises to boost their group against others. This easily turns into religious hatred against others. Modi pushes India from a secular state towards a Hindu state. Netanyahu intensifies hatred of Palestinians and Muslims. 

Trump’s base of support

It must be stressed that Trump’s victory was not “a political victory that our country has never seen before”, as Trump claimed; it was not a “huge landslide” or a “historic landslide” as congressional Republicans claimed. His margin of victory over Harris was only 1.6 percentage points, a smaller margin than that of every winning president since 1888 with just two exceptions, Kennedy in 1960 and Nixon in 1968. If just 116,000 voters across the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had switched to Harris, she would have won the electoral college and the presidency. It was that close (Hasan 2024).

The MAGA (Make America Great Again) support base, as of April 2025, comprises a little more than a third of registered voters, including 71% of registered Republicans (NBC News poll 14 April 2025). It is not a diverse group. At least 60% are white, Christian and male. Around half are retired, over 65 years old, and earn at least $50k per year. About 30% have at least a college degree. This implies that about half are “middle-class” by income and a third “middle-class” by education. 

The signs are that as the Trump administration undercuts basic principles of liberal democracy, the MAGA base remains loyal to him personally. He receives a powerful current of support from evangelical and Pentecostal Christian churches. After the first assassination attempt (13 July 2024) he announced that “Many people have told me that God spared my life … to save our country and to restore America to greatness” (Maqbool 2024). His supporters wear caps declaring, “JESUS is my savior TRUMP is my president.”

He also reaps mass support by intensifying fear and hatred of “immigrants” and “the deep state”. The “big, beautiful bill” (BBB) approved by the legislature on 4 July 2025 slashes public spending on healthcare, education, food assistance, clean energy, medical research and more, while it adds $175 billion to immigration enforcement. Trump has already moved many thousands of law enforcement staff at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and U.S. Marshals Service from investigating crime to enforcing immigration deportations. The BBB makes ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) the single biggest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the US. ICE has become, according to Edward Luce of The Financial Times, “Trump’s de facto private army – his security state within the state.” (Luce 2025). The MAGA base cheers.    

The dangerous personality of Donald Trump 

Nine months into Trump’s first term, Newsweek magazine (6 October 2017; Lee 2017) published a set of assessments of Trump at-a-distance by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. The title was, “The most dangerous man in the world?  Some prominent experts put Donald Trump on the psychiatrist’s couch and come up with really scary observations …”. Here is a short summary of their conclusions: 

“A persistent loss of reality”, by Lance Dodes, training and supervising analyst emeritus at Boston Psychoanalytic Society: 

Dodes says that Trump has been a very public figure for many years, so we know his speech and actions and can assess them against the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders. Using the manual’s criteria, he concludes that Trump shows: 

• Profound sociopathic traits: lack of empathy for others; lack of remorse; lying and cheating.
• Persistent loss of reality: for example, insistence on the truth of matters proved to be untrue.
• Rage reactions and impulsivity: many examples of sudden decisions and actions.

In conclusion, there have been other American presidents who were narcissistic, but 

“none have shown sociopathic qualities to the degree seen in Trump …. The need to be seen as superior and a lack of empathy or remorse for harming other people are in fact the signature characteristic of tyrants …. Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable and create a profound danger for America”. 

“The insurmountable trust deficit” by Gail Sheehy, author and journalist. 

Sheehy remarks that the bedrock of human development is a capacity to trust, which children normally absorb between birth and 18 months. The nonmedical definition of paranoia is the tendency towards excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others.

She quotes Trump boasting of his lack of trust. “People are too trusting. I’m a very untrusting guy.” “The world is a vicious and brutal place. Even your friends are out to get you. They want your job, your money, your wife.” “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” His father trained him to be a “killer”, the only alternative to being a “loser”. 

Sheehy says, “We hear repeatedly that Trump as a manager likes chaos.” She says, “To the dismay of even conservative observers, Trump appears totally indifferent to the truth.”  She quotes Trump, “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.”

She concludes, 

“Beneath the grandiose behavior of every narcissist lies the pit of fragile self-esteem. What if, deep down, the person whom Trump trusts least is himself? The humiliation of being widely exposed as a ‘loser’, unable to bully through the actions he promised during the campaign, could drive him to prove he is, after all, a ‘killer’.” 

“A frightening Venn diagram” by Philip Zimbardo & Rosemary Sword. Zimbardo is professor emeritus at Stanford, best known for his Stanford prison study.  

Zimbardo and Sword say that Trump’s Venn diagram has three overlapping circles. First, extreme present hedonism. Second, narcissism. Third, bullying behavior. The circles overlap to create “an impulsive, immature, incompetent person who, when in the position of ultimate power, easily slides into the role of tyrant, complete with family members sitting at his proverbial ‘ruling table’”. 

They compare video interviews of Trump from 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, with more current ones. They note (1) a significant reduction in use of essential words; (2) increase in adjectives like “very”, “huge”, “tremendous”; (3) and incomplete, run-on sentences that don’t make sense. They suggest these indicate movement towards dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, which Trump’s father suffered from. 

They conclude, “We believe Trump is the most dangerous man in the world.” 

“The many signs of danger” by James Gilligan, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry and adjunct professor of law at New York University, expert in violence, former director of mental health services for Massachusetts prisons, consultant to Clinton, Blair, Kofi Anan, World Court, WHO, WEF.

Gilligan starts by saying that one does not have to be mentally ill to be “dangerous”.  “Trump is extremely dangerous – indeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our lifetimes.” Gilligan gives examples:

• Trump asks what is the point of having thermonuclear weapons if we can’t use them.
• He urges the government to use torture or worse against prisoners of war, including waterboarding.
• He urged that five innocent African-American youths be given death penalty for sexual assault, years after it had been established beyond reasonable doubt that the assault was committed by someone else.
• He boasts of his ability to get away with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity status and power.
• He urges followers at rallies to punch protestors in the face and beat them so badly they have to be stretchered off.
• He urges followers to consider assassinating Hilary Clinton or at least throwing her in jail.

Gilligan concludes that it is incumbent on psychiatrists to warn of the mistake of treating Trump “as if he were a ‘normal’ president or ‘normal’ political leader. He is not, and it is our duty to say so.”

Trump is an extreme version of the emerging “normal” 

There is a problem in focussing narrowly on Trump as a singularity, an anomaly. We saw earlier how his pattern of authoritarian rule - as though a national CEO (or even a king) rather than an elected president - is part of a broader global pattern of “democratic recession”. Trump is following in the footsteps of quite a few others. 

Another case in point is his hostility to multilateral organizations like the World Trade Organization, and his flagrant violation of WTO rules. Here too Trump’s actions are a more extreme version of a broader pattern. China was the first major economy to use trade as a tool for achieving political goals, including employment, foreign policy, national security. Many western countries followed – and for good reasons. Import penetration from China and other countries raised imports and reduced domestic output causing unemployment. The WTO and the bulk of the western economics profession has not accepted that as long as an economy is not at full employment the case for free trade is considerably weakened. In practice, though not in the models, free trade globalization has delivered insecurity, alienation and very unequal income distribution. In response, many governments have been practicing covertly managed trade, against WTO rules. Trump and his officials have taken the same response to extremes. 

But the fact that he and his team are managing the government of the most powerful country in the world means that their extremes bring great dangers. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times can have the last word, as of July 2025: 

“In just under six months …Trump has made huge strides in his war on everything that made the US successful. Only the Maga base, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping should feel happy” (Wolf 2025). 

Robert H. Wade is professor of global political economy at the London School of Economics.

Photo by cottonbro studio

References

Bokat-Lindell, S. 2022, “Is liberal democracy dying around the world?”, New York Times (International), 30 September

Economist, 2025, “Lexington: the looking-glass wars”, 5 July

Hasan, M. 2024, “Donald Trump didn’t win by a historic landslide. It’s time to nip that lie in the bud”, Guardian, 3 December

Lee, B. (ed.) 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, macmillan publishers 

Luce, E. 2025, “Trump’s ominous ICE security state”, Financial Times, 8 July

Maqbool, A. 2024, “’Anointed by God’: The Christians who see Trump as their saviour”, BBC InDepth, 16 November

Newsweek, 2017, “The most dangerous man in the world?”, 6 October 

Wolf, M. 2025, “Trump’s assault on American greatness”, Financial Times, 9 July