BY JIBRIL TURE

Three new reports paint the gloomy picture of Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle U.S. democracy at an “unprecedented” rate.

An annual report published by V-Dem, an institute of the Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, has reached the conclusion that U.S. democracy has been so damaged by Donald Trump that the country’s democracy has dropped from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries. The new ranking puts the United States between Slovakia and Greece, the V-Dem institute founded in 2014 says. More than 4,000 scholars have contributed data to the report, the largest of its kind.

Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S., said, “The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid.” He added, “It’s the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.”

V-Dem has earned a reputation for the “Democracy Indices by V-Dem” [Varieties of Democracy],” an annual report that describes qualities of different democracies. It boasts datasets of 50 indices and more than 50 specific indicators focusing on both qualitative and quantitative measurements of democracy.

For its part, a U.S.-based organization similar to the V-Dem institute has a report out that also rings the alarm on Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. democracy.

Bright Line Watch, a non-partisan academic watchdog entity founded in 2017 by renowned political scientists to set “bright lines” for when democratic practices are violated, has titled its latest report “Violence, redistricting, and democratic norms in Trump’s America.”

The organization says it has fielded parallel surveys of 703 political science faculty at American colleges and universities (whom they refer to as “experts”) and a representative sample of 2,750 Americans (whom they refer to as “the public”). The expert survey was fielded from September 5–17, 2025 and the public survey from September 5–16, 2025.

Among other things, Bright Line Watch writes that “the Trump administration has continued to challenge executive branch norms as well as legal and constitutional limits on the powers of the presidency, including dramatically expanding the capacity and activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deploying the military to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.”

In the brand-new report scheduled to be published next week—to which more than 500 American scholars have contributed—the organization has concluded that “the U.S. system now falls nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship.”

In reference to the United States, the report points out among its key findings “an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people’s ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration’s moves to undermine anticorruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change.” The United States, the report says, has lost 3 points on the report’s 100-point scale, bringing its net decline since 2005 to 12 points, more than any other country rated Free during the same period except for Nauru and Bulgaria.

In its own report titled “Freedom in the World 2026, The Growing Shadow of Autocracy,” Freedom House, a U.S.-based, nonpartisan nonprofit organization founded in 1941 that advocates for democracy, political rights, and civil liberties worldwide, notes that global freedom has declined for the 20th consecutive year. Among its key findings as far as the United States is concerned, Freedom House points out “an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people’s ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration’s moves to undermine anticorruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change.