The American democratic republic, a modest British colony that transformed itself into the world’s richest country and greatest military power despite persistent violence and unresolved internal divisions, has died.
It was 236 years old.
No official announcement was made of the end of the long-enduring republic, which was launched in 1789. No autopsy has been scheduled.
The proximate cause of death appeared to be America’s decline in democratic governance. This was one of world history’s most rapid such declines, but there were warnings. In March 2025, the director of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), the Sweden-based think tank that monitors the world’s governments, cautioned that the U.S. was on the verge of losing its status as a democratic republic within months.
The American democratic republic is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship in grave danger of descending into political violence and civil war.
Ending the democratic republic was an explicit goal of the American dictator, Donald Trump. In 2020, near the end of his first term, he led a failed coup against the republic. Later, as a candidate to return to the office, he pledged to “terminate” the constitution, first drafted in 1787, that had been the republic’s foundation. He also declared that, in a second term, he would govern as a dictator, ruling by decrees known as executive orders.
Trump’s assertion of dictatorial power — and widespread acceptance of such power among political and business leaders and across American society — fatally broke the republic’s structure.
From the beginning, the U.S. Constitution, a pre-modern document, was deeply flawed. It originally permitted slavery, a grievous error rectified only after generations of bondage and a civil war that killed more than 600,000 people. And it did little to check the ravages of capitalism, systematic discrimination, or the republic’s genocide against North America’s Indigenous people. Even as the American republic sold itself as a worldwide protector of democracy, its constitution never established an explicit right to vote.
Yet the republic endured because of its central organizing principle: the separation of powers. No one person could run the United States — it was a republic made up of three co-equal branches of government. Congress, as the legislative branch, made laws and decided how to fund government. An executive branch implemented Congressional decisions. The judicial branch resolved disputes all over the country, including questions of how the executive and legislative branches operated.
But over time, the executive branch, and the presidency, grew exceedingly powerful. The two world wars of the 20th century emphasized the president’s commander-in-chief role, in which there were few constraints on his power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without the Congress declaring war, as the constitution required. The presidency won more emergency powers. And with Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.
Upon taking office in January 2025, Trump quickly removed limits on his power. Using a billionaire tech oligarch and an illegal department named for a cryptocurrency, he seized control over agencies that were explicitly independent of his authority, dismantled vital whole departments, and fired or removed tens of thousands of government workers in violation of civil service protections and union contracts.
Trump didn’t stop with his own branch. He also attacked Congress’s foremost power — to appropriate funds — by breaking law, constitution, and court precedent that said the executive must spend what Congress appropriates. And in dismantling much of the government, he effectively stripped Congress of its authority to create and oversee agencies and determine how they’re put together.
Trump also made war on the courts that make up the judicial branch. His appointees explicitly challenged the power of judges to block his decisions, and issued threats against those judges who dared to stop his lawbreaking. Trump maintained that, as president, he could do as he wished. “He who saves the country does not break the law,” he maintained.
Following that mantra, Trump, himself a convicted felon, governed in way that drew comparisons to the Mafia. The American government’s main tool became extortion. It routinely threatened other governments — both overseas and American states and local governments — with financial ruin if they did not bend to Trump’s will. The government used similar threats against civil society institutions — universities, nonprofits, media — and against some private companies, notably law firms.
Those institutions that fought back by asserting their constitutional rights learned quickly that the government no longer recognized those rights. Harvard University, within hours of declining to turn itself over to the dictator’s control on the theory that it had First Amendment protections, was stripped of more than $2 billion in federal funding.
Congress — both Trump’s own party and the minority Democrats — were unable and unwilling to defend civil society, or themselves. Ironically, the highest court of the judicial branch, the U.S. Supreme Court, sanctioned Trump’s lawlessness even before he took office, with a 2024 decision putting the president explicitly above the law, and immune from criminal punishment for actions taken while in office.
By embracing that court-sanctioned dictatorial power, Trump ended the republic.
Few Americans were aware of the republic’s death. Confusion and fear of violence reigned among those who recognized the loss. The prospects for the republic’s revival were bleak, at best uncertain. Some opposition figures pointed to future elections as a way to overturn the dictatorship, but the Trump regime had previously issued edicts that would make elections unfair and unfree.
A few voices called not for saving the old republic, but for designing a new American experiment for the centuries ahead. California seemed likely to be the center of any effort. America’s largest state was leading resistance to the dictatorship. And it had a long history of considering more dramatic changes in governance, going back to the early 20th century Progressive Era.
Just last year, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, published a book, No Democracy Lasts Forever, calling for a convention to write a new constitution.
“Our government is broken and our democracy is at grave risk, but I don’t see any easy solutions,” he wrote, adding: “We need to stop venerating a document written in 1787 for an agrarian slave society and imagine what a constitution for the twenty-first century should look like.”
Funeral services for that first constitution, and the country it made, are pending. In lieu of flowers, Americans can honor the deceased by taking Chemerinsky’s advice and creating a new republic.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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