U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog

A just-released annual report on the global state of democracy makes for depressing reading. But what's even more depressing is what might appear in next year's edition.

Or rather, what might not appear in the 2026 volume: an old democracy, by some measures the world's oldest; a superpower that long circled the globe professing to spread freedom.

"If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

"If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months." 

His project includes 31 million data points for 202 countries, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 different attributes of democracy.

Lindberg happens to be in the U.S. this week presenting this year's report — which only includes data through the end of 2024.

Some grim milestones were breached this year.

The number of autocracies (91) has just surpassed democracies (88) on this list for the first time in two decades, and nearly three-quarters of humans now live in an autocracy — where one person has unconstrained power — the highest rate in five decades.

The latest report finds Canada and the U.S. in the "Electoral Democracy" tier, the second-highest.

The report adds an important caveat: this year's version does not include events in 2025, meaning it does not cover the start of Donald Trump's latest presidential term.

But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress.

In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones. 

He's just called his predecessor's pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it's still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard.

It's not just the scope of what Trump's done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It's also the speed.