The strength of democratic institutions cannot be measured solely by their formal mechanisms. This is one of the lessons that Donald Trump’s return to the United States presidency in January 2025 imposes on comparative political analysis. While American constitutional procedures formally withstood the pressures of both Trump administrations, citizens’ trust in federal institutions, established media, and the judiciary continued to erode, revealing a growing gap between formal institutional robustness and effective democratic legitimacy. 

This article argues that this gap is not an American specificity, but the symptom of a structural fragility common to Western liberal democracies. By examining in turn what the American case reveals about the conditions of democratic resilience, the limits of dominant European interpretive frameworks, and the lessons European democracies should draw for themselves, it seeks to show that Trumpism functions less as an exception to be observed from a distance than as a revealing lens for dynamics already at work in Europe. 

I.  What Trump’s return reveals about American institutions 

Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 reignited, across Europe, a debate that had seemed provisionally settled: that of the robustness of American democratic institutions. Yet a careful reading of recent events invites a displacement of the question. What matters is not so much whether institutions « held, » but what their resistances and their limits reveal about the structural conditions in which American democracy now operates. 

At first glance, the institutional record since 2021 appears reassuring. Following the January 6 assault on the Capitol, the certification of electoral results followed its constitutional course. All legal challenges contesting the 2020 election were rejected on their principal claims: of 194 individual rulings recorded across 42 post-electoral cases, 86% ruled against the Trump campaign’s demands, including 98% of decisions rendered by federal judges, twelve of whom had been appointed by Trump himself (Wheeler, 2021). The Department of Justice subsequently brought criminal charges against a former president, an unprecedented act in American history attesting to the formal independence of federal institutions. By conventional standards, the separation of powers functioned. 

And yet, these same institutions did not prevent the return to power of the very individual they had called to account. This apparent paradox calls for a fundamental analytical distinction: that between the formal solidity of institutions and the legitimacy citizens accord them. An institution may operate according to its procedures while simultaneously being perceived, by a growing fraction of the population, as partial, inaccessible, or instrumentalized. This disjuncture connects directly to the work of Tom Tyler (Why People Obey the Law, 1990, p. 7), who demonstrates that the mechanical application of rules does not guarantee legitimacy if citizens perceive a deficit of « procedural justice, » particularly through a lack of neutrality or a structural bias of authority. According to Pew Research Center data, trust in the federal government reached one of its historically low points in 2025, with only 17% of Americans declaring they trust it « most of the time, » a level comparable to the trough recorded during the 2008 recession (Pew Research Center, Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025, 2025). This distrust extends beyond the executive branch to established media, federal agencies (FBI, CDC, IRS), and the judiciary, the very institutions that constitute the foundation of democratic checks and balances. Claudia Deane’s analyses (2024) document this erosion, revealing growing suspicion toward national media, polarization around expert agencies such as the CDC, and a historic rejection of the Supreme Court. Gallup’s annual confidence index confirms this trend: in 2025, only 27% of Americans expressed high confidence in the Supreme Court, down from 50% in 2001, while confidence in Congress stood at 10% (Gallup, Confidence in Institutions, 2025). 

It would be mistaken to interpret this phenomenon as the conjunctural product of a single political personality or electoral cycle. Contemporary American polarization is a structural phenomenon whose roots long predate the emergence of Trump and which his return contributes more to revealing than to producing. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, 2012, rev. ed. 2016, p. 58) document a growing asymmetry between the two major parties dating back to the 1980s, noting in particular that within the 112th Congress, the Republican Study Committee alone counted 166 members, representing nearly seven-tenths of the Republican caucus; while Levitsky and Ziblatt (How Democracies Die, 2018, p. 148) identify the erosion of informal norms, more than formal rules, as the principal vector of democratic fragility, highlighting that between the immediate postwar period and the 1980s, partisan obstruction of presidential nominations was exceptional, whereas under Obama’s presidency alone, more than 60 such blockages were recorded. This dynamic is amplified by a fragmentation of the media landscape that has progressively replaced shared information spaces with ideologically siloed ecosystems. According to the Reuters Institute (Suárez, 2024), 43% of Americans report actively avoiding the news, a proportion that is revealing of a rupture in the bond between citizens and a common public sphere.

This analysis suggests an uncomfortable but necessary conclusion: institutional resilience cannot be measured solely by its formal mechanisms. It depends, equally and decisively, on the degree of trust citizens place in those mechanisms and their willingness to accept their outcomes. Van Ham and van Elsas (2024) document this empirically across 17 European democracies between 2002 and 2022, showing that when perceived legitimacy gaps remain unresolved, institutional support becomes progressively politicized, aligning with partisan cleavages to the point where institutions cease to function as a shared framework and become themselves the object of political conflict. It is precisely on this terrain that American democracy reveals its deepest fragilities, and it is here that Europe should direct its attention, rather than reassuring itself with the solidity of constitutional texts that few citizens read and a growing number contest. 

II. Dominant European interpretative frameworks and their limits 

Faced with Trump’s return, European reactions have oscillated between concern and condescension. While the concern is legitimate, given the real implications for collective security and the liberal international order, the interpretive frameworks mobilized by European political and intellectual elites reveal as much about their own blind spots as about the American situation itself. 

The first dominant reading might be termed the « exceptionalism reading, » whereby the Trump phenomenon is understood as the product of a specifically American context, including extreme polarization, a rigid two-party system, and a particular relationship to authority and firearms, with no structural equivalent in Europe. This reading, reassuring in its logic, runs up against several empirical counterexamples that are difficult to dismiss. 

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán methodically transformed a democratic regime into a hybrid system in less than a decade, precisely using the formal instruments of democracy, including parliamentary majorities, constitutional reforms, and media control, to hollow it out from within. Scheppele has named this logic « autocratic legalism, » whereby elected leaders use their mandate to dismantle through law the constitutional system they inherited, not by abolishing institutions but by turning them against themselves (Scheppele, 2018, pp. 549-550). This is precisely what Levitsky and Way anticipated when they described an authoritarianism that does not erase democratic forms but subverts their substance (Levitsky & Way, 2010). In Poland, the Law and Justice Party pursued from 2015 a systematic offensive against judicial independence, drawing on Hungarian methods to seize control of ordinary courts through the management of appointments (Scheppele, op. cit., pp. 552-553), ultimately compelling the European Commission to trigger, for the first time in the Union’s history, the procedure under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (Petit, 2018, pp. 146-147). In France, the fragmentation of the political landscape and the sustained rise of the Rassemblement national, which received 37% of votes cast in the first round of the 2024 legislative elections according to data from the Ministry of the Interior (Résultats des élections législatives 2024, 2024), reflects an institutional distrust that resonates clearly with the American dynamic. To posit European impermeability would thus be to confuse a difference of form with a difference of nature. 

The second reading, symmetrical to the first, consists in concluding from the American case that the Western democratic model is structurally broken, condemning Europe to anticipate inevitable collapse. This reading, which sustains an abundant literature on the « decline of liberal democracy » (Mounk, The People vs. Democracy, 2018, pp. 99-131), suffers from the opposite flaw. By absolutizing the crisis, it tends to neglect the adaptive capacity of democratic institutions and to underestimate the diversity of national trajectories. The fact that Poland, cited above as a paradigmatic case of democratic backsliding, managed through the sole mechanism of the October 2023 elections to lead the European Commission to conclude that there was « no longer a clear risk of a serious breach of the rule of law » and to close an Article 7 TEU procedure opened seven years earlier (European Commission, 2024), says something essential about the self-corrective capacity of consolidated democracies. Democratic resilience is not uniformly distributed, and declinist determinism itself constitutes an analytical obstacle. 

The third reading, perhaps the most prevalent in European diplomatic and media circles, reduces the phenomenon to its spectacular dimension: Trump as a disruptive personality, Trumpism as a passing deviation of a fundamentally sound system. This reading, by focusing attention on the individual rather than on the structural conditions that made his return possible, precisely prevents the drawing of relevant lessons for Europe. It obscures the fact that the grievances fueling American institutional distrust, whether the sense of economic abandonment among the middle and working classes, the perception of a democracy captured by disconnected elites, or mistrust toward official expertise, are phenomena that European societies know to varying degrees. Norris and Inglehart (Cultural Backlash, 2019) have shown that this distrust toward representative institutions constitutes a long-term structural phenomenon common to Western democracies (p. 421), driven by a growing gap between less educated cohorts attached to traditional values and progressive-leaning elites (pp. 87-91). 

What these three readings share is the tendency to treat the American case as an external object of observation rather than as a revealing lens for shared dynamics. By projecting onto the United States the fragilities they struggle to identify at home, European democracies risk underestimating vulnerabilities that are in fact common to them all. 

III.          What Europe should retain for its own democratic resilience 

If European readings of the Trump phenomenon too often err on the side of analytical distance, it is partly because they avoid the most uncomfortable question: that of the lessons European democracies should draw for themselves. The American case functions as a revealing lens for dynamics that traverse all contemporary liberal democracies, at different stages and in different forms, but according to logics sufficiently convergent to warrant sustained attention. 

The first lesson concerns the distinction, too often neglected, between formal institutional robustness and effective democratic legitimacy. Endowed with the oldest written constitution still in force, whose system of checks and balances has long served as a model in Western democracies (Balthazar, 2008, p. 21), the United States has nonetheless seen trust in its institutions reach historically low levels. This paradox invites a reconsideration of a widely held assumption in European institutional debates, namely that the solidity of constitutional texts and formal procedures constitutes a sufficient guarantee of democratic resilience. Yet, as Robert Dahl argues, a democracy cannot ultimately rely on its constitutional institutions alone to preserve its freedoms; it depends on the beliefs and shared culture of its elites and citizens (How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, 2001, p. 99). When this substrate erodes under the effects of growing inequality, a sense of political dispossession, or distrust toward elites, even the best-designed procedures become shells emptied of their democratic substance. For Europe, this means that resilience cannot be reduced to the preservation of existing institutions. It demands an active reconquest of their legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. 

The second lesson concerns the conditions under which disinformation and alternative narratives proliferate. The European temptation is to treat this phenomenon as a technical problem, solvable through the regulation of digital platforms, as evidenced by the adoption of the Digital Services Act in 2022, or through media literacy programs. These instruments are necessary but insufficient, as they address symptoms rather than causes. The research of Kate Starbird et al. (Disinformation as Collaborative Work, 2019, pp. 9 and 15) shows that information operations do not create from scratch the divisions they exploit. They insert themselves into pre-existing political and community cleavages, amplify them, and progressively cultivate an epistemology of distrust toward established institutions and media. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (Network Propaganda, 2018, pp. 23-24) complement this picture by highlighting that vulnerability to informational manipulation is unequally distributed according to the structure of the media ecosystem. Where a dense, partisan media network impervious to the corrective norms of professional journalism has taken hold, alternative narratives circulate and reinforce themselves independently of any external orchestration. Both analyses suggest, without formulating it as a conclusion, that informational resilience cannot be reduced to measures of detection and suppression of problematic content, and that it also requires acting on the structural conditions, particularly the quality of public debate and the level of institutional trust, that determine the receptivity of democratic societies to such narratives. 

The third lesson, perhaps the most difficult for European institutions to integrate, is that the dynamics of democratic erosion are not exogenous phenomena imported from abroad, but processes that are largely endogenous to the societies concerned. The V-Dem democracy index, which annually measures the state of democracies worldwide, recorded in 2025 episodes of autocratization in seven European Union member states as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States (Nord et al., 2026, p. 4). Slovakia, where the coalition government formed in 2023 around Robert Fico’s SMER-SD engaged in a nationalist-populist trajectory marked by Euroscepticism and criticism of sanctions against Russia (Világi, 2024), demonstrates how dynamics similar to those observed in the United States, namely the concentration of executive power, the weakening of checks and balances, and the delegitimization of independent media, can develop at the very heart of the European democratic space. Romania, where nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu came first in the first round of the November 2024 presidential election amid controversies over foreign interference through social media (Higgins, 2024; von Wyl, 2026), constitutes another warning signal that European institutions cannot afford to dismiss as an isolated anomaly. 

These three lessons converge toward a single conclusion: democratic resilience is not an achieved state but a continuous process, one that demands that institutions reform themselves permanently to maintain their legitimacy, and that societies actively cultivate the educational, mediatic, and economic conditions that make democracy desirable rather than merely available. 

IV.           Conclusion 

The three lessons developed in this article converge toward a single finding. Democratic resilience is not an achieved state but a continuous process, reducible neither to the solidity of constitutional texts nor to the effectiveness of formal counter-power mechanisms. It depends, equally and decisively, on the trust citizens place in those mechanisms, on the robustness of the informational ecosystems in which they form their political judgments, and on the capacity of societies to recognize the dynamics of democratic erosion as endogenous phenomena rather than as threats imported from without. 

This point deserves particular attention. The European temptation to treat Trumpism as an American exception, or the Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian cases as peripheral anomalies, proceeds from the same defensive reflex that itself constitutes an obstacle to resilience. The empirical evidence mobilized in this article suggests on the contrary that the structural conditions of democratic fragility, whether institutional distrust, the polarization of media ecosystems, or the political instrumentalization of popular grievances, are present to varying degrees across all Western democracies. To ignore these signals on the grounds that they have not yet reached the visibility threshold of the American case would be to confuse the absence of declared crisis with the absence of vulnerability. 

Democratic resilience therefore demands, first, a capacity for self-diagnosis that European democracies would do well to strengthen. It demands next an active reconquest of institutional legitimacy, one that depends less on procedural reforms than on a reduction of the gap between the promises of representative democracy and the daily experience citizens have of it. It demands finally a serious engagement with the structural conditions, educational, mediatic, and economic, that make democracy desirable rather than merely available. The question is therefore not whether Europe will one day experience its own version of Trumpism, but whether its democracies will prove capable of identifying and addressing the deep causes of distrust before they durably undermine their legitimacy. 

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Marwa Chelkha, Associate researcher at the CERMAM 

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