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The 2024 presidential election is over – and Donald Trump is the winner. There is no doubt about the legitimacy of the election: Trump is on track to win the Electoral College by a wide margin and potentially win the popular vote for the first time.

But while the election itself was clearly on par, what comes next may not be on par. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to implement his long-proposed plans to undermine American democracy from within.

Trump and his team have laid out detailed plans to turn the federal government into an extension of his will: a tool to carry out his oft-promised “retaliation” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and anyone else who has defied him. Trump's inner circle, purged of almost anyone who might challenge him, is ready to impose his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him broad immunity from his actions in office.

In almost every conceivable way, a second Trump administration is likely to be more dangerous than the first, a term that ended with over a million deaths from Covid-19 and an insurrection at the Capitol. A predictable crisis—a president consolidating power in his own hands and using it to punish his enemies—is on the horizon, and many unpredictable crises are likely waiting in the wings.

But as dire as the situation is, America has reserves it can draw on to withstand the impending onslaught. Over the course of the country's long democratic history, it has built robust systems to control abuse of power.

America's federal structure gives blue states control over key powers like election administration. The independent judiciary remained strong during Trump's first term. Its professional, apolitical military is likely to defend itself against unlawful orders. The politically active population has demonstrably the ability to take to the streets. And America's world-leading media will fiercely resist any attempt to threaten its independence.

No country at America's level of political-economic development has ever fallen into authoritarianism. There are some reasonably similar modern counterparts, most worryingly modern Hungary, but they too differ in crucial ways.

This is not an argument for complacency or naive optimism. On the contrary, the next four years will be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War; If it survives, it will surely be battered, bruised and battle-scarred.

But this realism should not be a reason for despair. As dire as the situation feels now, it is possible that if people take the gravity of the threat seriously, the Republic will emerge unscathed on the other side.

Trump's frightening second-term agenda, explained

We don't know exactly why America's voters chose to put Trump back in high office. The data is not yet fully available, let alone analyzed in detail. But as bleak as the electoral picture remains, certain elements of the political future are crystal clear. Trump's own comments, his campaign's statements, and related documents such as Project 2025 give us a relatively coherent picture of what the next Trump administration's agenda will be.

Much of this is similar to what you would see from any other Republican president. Trump will put corporate allies in charge of federal agencies, where they will work to cut regulations on issues ranging from workplace safety standards to environmental pollution. He has already proposed regressive tax cuts without offsetting increases that would increase the federal deficit in the same way as George W. Bush's fiscal policies. He is likely to take steps to restrict access to abortion, end federal efforts to curb abusive police power and crack down on federal protections for transgender people – all examples of how his agenda will further harm certain groups of people, typically already vulnerable ones would others.

Trump's biggest breaks with his party in traditional policy areas will likely come in the areas of trade, immigration and foreign policy. Trump has proposed a “universal” tariff on imported goods, a mass deportation campaign holding suspected “illegals” in camps and a weakening of American commitment to the NATO alliance. Together, these measures would be a recipe for economic decline, domestic unrest and global chaos at an already chaotic time.

But perhaps the most dangerous Trump policy will impact an area that traditionally transcends partisan conflict: the nature of the American system of government itself.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has shown that he is obsessed with two ideas: personal control of the federal government and demanding “retaliation” against the Democrats who challenged him and the prosecutors who indicted him. His team graciously provided detailed plans for both.

That process begins with something called “Schedule F,” an order that Trump was able to issue at the end of his first term but was never able to implement. Appendix F reclassifies a large portion of the professional civil service—probably more than 50,000 people—as political appointees. Trump could fire these impartial officials and replace them with cronies: people who would follow his orders, no matter how dubious they might be. Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F “immediately” upon his return to office, and there is no reason to doubt that.

With a new compliant bureaucracy and leadership ranks purged of critical first-term voices like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump is unlikely to face resistance as he tries to implement policies that threaten basic democratic freedoms.

And Trump and his team have already proposed many of them. Notable examples include investigating leading Democrats on questionable allegations, prosecuting local election officials, using regulatory powers to retaliate against companies that get in his way, and shutting down public broadcasters or turning them into propaganda pamphlets. Trump and his allies have claimed unilateral executive authority to take all of these actions. (It remains unclear which party will control the House, but Republicans will hold sway in the Senate for at least the next two years.)

Ultimately, all of these executive activities are aimed at turning the United States into a larger version of Hungary – a country whose leadership and policies are regularly praised by Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and Project 2025 head Kevin Roberts.

Hungary still has elections and a nominal right to freedom of expression. There are no tanks on the streets or concentration camps for dissidents. But it is a place where everything from the national electoral agency to state arts agencies has been twisted to punish dissent and spread government propaganda. Every aspect of government is dedicated to ensuring that national elections are contests in which the opposition never stands a chance. It is a kind of covert autocratization that maintains the veneer of democracy while simultaneously hollowing it out from within.

This is why the second Trump presidency is a threat to American democracy to the point of extinction. The government agenda that Trump and his allies have explicitly laid out is a systematic attempt to turn Washington into a Budapest on the Potomac and to intentionally and quietly destroy democracy from within.

It is important to remember that, as dire as the situation is, the United States is not Hungary.

When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he commanded a two-thirds majority in the country's parliament – one that allowed him to adopt a new constitution that twisted electoral rules in his party's favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority and the US Constitution is hard to change.

America's federal structure also creates numerous checks on the power of the national government. Election administration in America is done at the state level, making it very difficult for Trump to wrest control of it from Washington. Much of the prosecution is being carried out by district attorneys who are unaccountable to Trump and may be resisting federal intimidation.

The American media is much larger and more robust than its Hungarian counterparts. One way Orbán galvanized the press was by politicizing government advertising purchasing, a source of income that the American press, for all our problems, does not rely on.

But most fundamentally, the American people have something the Hungarians didn't have: advance warning.

While the form of subtle authoritarianism introduced in Hungary was new in 2010, it is now well understood. Orbán managed to seem like a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump comes into office with about half of voters prepared to see him as a threat to democracy and to oppose him as such. He can expect strong resistance to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but also from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society and the people themselves.

This applies to despair.

As bleak as things may seem now, little in politics can be taken for granted – especially not the outcome of a battle as gigantic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have developed since leaving office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now it's time to start deploying.

Trump has won the presidency, giving him enormous power to make his anti-democratic dreams a reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how prepared Americans are to fight.