There are moments in history when a political system changes because an institution fails, a war is lost, an economy collapses or a revolution overturns the old order. And then there are moments when something stranger happens: The system continues to exist, but the assumptions that made it intelligible begin to disappear. That is the feeling I have watching the United States in 2026.
It is tempting to call it nostalgia. I have been watching American politics as an independent journalist since 1981, long enough to remember presidents whose policies I disliked, administrations I distrusted and political periods that were ugly, dishonest or frightening. America has never been the innocent republic of civics textbooks. It has lied, spied, invaded, discriminated, imprisoned and abused its power.
So this is not an argument that America was once perfect.
It is an argument that something about the political operating system has changed.
And the best metaphor I know for what has happened comes not from political science but from Isaac Asimov.
Call Me the Mule
Donald Trump is not literally the Mule. But politically, he resembles Asimov’s Mule in one profoundly important respect: He is an anomaly capable of making the assumptions on which the system depends stop working.
In Asimov’s Foundation, Hari Seldon’s psychohistory is built on the idea that the behavior of enormous populations can be predicted statistically. Individual human beings are too unpredictable to model reliably, but billions of people, taken together, become more predictable. The system works because individual irrationality is supposed to disappear into the mathematics of the crowd.
Then comes the Mule.
The Mule is different. His extraordinary ability to manipulate human emotions allows one individual to exert an influence that psychohistory did not properly account for. The problem is therefore not simply that he is powerful. The problem is that his existence invalidates the assumptions of the model.
That is why the metaphor is useful.
Trump's significance may not ultimately be that he is the most powerful president America has ever had. It may be that he has demonstrated how much of the American political system depended on assumptions that were never written into the Constitution.
Presidents were expected to accept certain limitations. Political parties were expected to restrain their leaders. Congress was expected to defend its institutional prerogatives. Courts were expected to be obeyed. Elections were expected to be accepted when they were lost. Allies were expected to be treated as strategic partners rather than customers who had failed to pay their bill. A president was expected to distinguish between the interests of the United States and his own political interests. And perhaps most importantly, there was an assumption that reality itself imposed a limit on political rhetoric.
Trump has repeatedly tested all of those assumptions.
That does not mean that everything he does is illegal. It does not mean every criticism of him is justified. And it certainly does not mean that everyone who supports him is irrational. It means something more interesting. He has discovered how far a modern democratic system can be stretched before its institutional vocabulary becomes inadequate to describe what is happening.
The evidence is no longer merely anecdotal.
V-Dem, one of the world's major democracy-monitoring organizations, reported in 2026 that the United States' Liberal Democracy Index fell from 0.79 in 2023 to 0.57 in 2025, bringing the country back to approximately its 1965 level on that measure. V-Dem identified executive overreach, declining legislative constraints, and pressure on media and civil liberties as major components of the deterioration. Its assessment was unusually stark: the decline in American democracy during 2025 was the fastest it had recorded in modern U.S. history.
That does not prove that the United States has ceased to be a democracy. It proves that serious comparative scholars are measuring a substantial deterioration.
Pew Research Center's review of multiple democracy indicators reached a similar conclusion. It found that the U.S. democracy rating had declined sharply and that checks and balances on executive power had fallen to their lowest levels in more than a century according to V-Dem's measurements. In March 2026, 68 percent of Americans told Pew that the United States used to be a good example of democracy for other countries but has not been in recent years. Only 24 percent said it remains such an example.
That last number may be more revealing than any political speech.
Do we live in a Dadaistic nightmare?
A democracy is partly an arrangement of institutions. But it is also an arrangement of expectations. People must expect that elections matter. They must expect that losing is possible. They must expect that the courts have authority. They must expect that Congress can say no. They must expect that journalists can investigate the government without becoming enemies of the state. Once those expectations become uncertain, democracy can remain formally intact while becoming psychologically weaker.
This is where the word "Dadaist" begins to make sense.
Dada emerged from the wreckage of World War I, when European civilization confronted the peculiar absurdity of a supposedly rational modern world producing industrialized slaughter. The Dadaists responded by attacking conventional meaning itself. If the civilized world could produce Verdun, perhaps the civilized world's definition of sanity required reconsideration.
Something faintly similar is occurring in American political life.
A president can announce an extraordinary policy, generate outrage, deny the obvious implications, move on to something else, and then return to the original claim days later as if the argument had never happened.
The public argues. The media argues. The White House argues. Social media produces ten million interpretations. Another controversy arrives. The first disappears. Then the cycle begins again. The effect is not necessarily that people believe every falsehood. The effect may be more dangerous. People begin to doubt whether there is any reliable mechanism for deciding what is true.
This is the paradox of the information age.
We have more information than any civilization in history. We have satellites, databases, cameras, leaked documents, independent journalists, government records, intelligence disclosures, scientific institutions, fact-checkers and millions of people capable of publishing evidence within seconds. Yet an abundance of information can create a shortage of certainty.
Propaganda once depended on controlling information. Today it can work by overwhelming it.
You do not necessarily have to convince a citizen that your version of reality is true. You can simply persuade him that the other side is lying too. That is why the political battle increasingly resembles an epistemological battle.
What happened? Who said it? Was the video real? Was the document authentic? Was the intelligence manipulated? Was the journalist biased? Was the government lying? Is the fact-checker partisan? Is the correction itself propaganda? Eventually, the citizen reaches a psychologically convenient conclusion: Everybody lies. And once everyone is presumed to lie, evidence loses some of its political power.
This is particularly dangerous because democracy does not require citizens to agree about what should happen. It requires them to retain enough agreement about what happened to have an argument about it.
A democratic society can survive disagreement. But it cannot easily survive the disappearance of a common factual floor. The American election system offers a particularly vivid example.
Trump has continued to make election integrity and alleged vulnerabilities central political issues, while his administration has pursued major changes affecting voter registration, mail ballots, election administration and redistricting. Those efforts have generated lawsuits from states and intense arguments over the constitutional division of authority between Washington and the states.
The Supreme Court's August decision temporarily allowed restrictions on mail-in ballots to take effect while litigation continues. The Court did not finally resolve the underlying legality of the administration's policy, but the decision illustrated the extraordinary constitutional conflict now surrounding federal intervention in election administration.
That is not evidence that an election has been stolen. It is evidence that the machinery by which Americans decide who governs them has itself become an arena of political warfare. And that is precisely the kind of thing that changes the baseline.
A correction, by all means...
There is another important correction to make. It is fashionable to ask how roughly 77 million Americans can possibly fail to see what critics of Trump see. But that question contains a false premise. Trump did receive roughly 77 million votes in the 2024 election. That is an enormous number. But it does not mean that 77 million Americans endorse every Trump policy, every statement or every institutional confrontation. By 2026, his support is much less monolithic than that number suggests. A January Pew survey found that 56 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents supported all or most of his policies, down from 67 percent a year earlier. By August, Reuters/Ipsos put his overall job approval at 33 percent.
Pew's political typology is even more illuminating. There is a hard-core group it calls the "No Apologies Right," whose members remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump. Ninety percent approved of his job performance in Pew's spring 2026 survey. But other Republican-oriented groups were considerably less enthusiastic, and among the "Pragmatic and Polite Right," nearly two-thirds disapproved of his performance. So the question is not why 75 million people cannot see Trump.
Some see him and admire him. Some see him and dislike him. Some see him as a necessary wrecking ball. Some regard him as the only politician willing to confront institutions they already distrusted. Some care far more about immigration, inflation, abortion, cultural change or foreign policy than presidential decorum. Some believe the American system was already broken before Trump arrived. And some simply do not share the same information environment. That last point hurts.
A journalist can look at the same event and see institutional danger. A voter who has spent years being told that those institutions are corrupt may see exactly the opposite: a president finally fighting the people who corrupted them. The difference is not necessarily intelligence. It is the difference between two maps of reality. That is why calling Trump's supporters stupid is analytically useless. It also misses the historical danger.
The most consequential political movements are rarely built by persuading everyone that one man is perfect. They are built by persuading enough people that the existing system deserves to be broken. And Trump has been exceptionally successful at that.
He did not invent the distrust. America was already deeply polarized, economically unequal and institutionally suspicious. The Iraq War damaged public confidence. The financial crisis damaged faith in elites. Social media destroyed traditional gatekeepers. Cable television fragmented the news. The 2020 election intensified partisan distrust. The pandemic accelerated conspiracy thinking.
Trump entered a house; the door was open, the building full of cracks. He simply discovered how to make them load-bearing.
This is also why the foreign-policy dimension matters. America's postwar power rested not only on military strength. It rested on an architecture of alliances, institutions, economic relationships and expectations about American reliability. That architecture is now under visible strain. The Pentagon is conducting a review of U.S. troop deployments in Europe that could produce significant changes to the roughly 80,000 American troops stationed there. NATO governments are watching the process closely, concerned that reductions could alter the strategic balance of the alliance.
Again, this does not prove that Trump is "destroying NATO." It demonstrates something more precise: an American strategic commitment that once seemed structurally durable is now being reconsidered at the highest levels of government.
Now, that's different.
Journalism should not confuse prediction with fact. But neither should journalism pretend that structural change is insignificant simply because the final outcome is not yet known.
The same principle applies to democracy.
Trump has not abolished American democracy. The courts still exist. Congress still exists. States still possess substantial authority. Elections still occur. Journalists still publish investigations. Opposition politicians still campaign. Americans still protest.
Those facts are important. But so are the countervailing facts. Democratic institutions can be weakened without being abolished. Norms can disappear without a constitutional amendment. A president can acquire more practical power without becoming a dictator. And a population can become accustomed to political behavior that would once have been regarded as extraordinary.
That last transformation may be the most important of all. Because normality is not a law. Normality is a habit. And habits can be changed.
This is where I return to Asimov
The Mule is frightening because Seldon's system is not prepared for him.
But there is a deeper lesson. A system that depends upon predictable human behavior will eventually encounter a human being who refuses to behave predictably. The question is not whether such a person is good or evil. The question is whether the system contains enough redundancy, institutional strength and social consensus to absorb him.
America may be discovering the answer. Not only with Trump, though, but also with a wave of new politicians that come from the Left side of the spectrum with an agenda based on fair redistribution of wealth, not authoritarian lies.
And I've got to tell you something here, cause I will forget it, and you can blame it on my nostalgia. Trump is such a temporal joke that it feels to me like he is some kind of leftover Soviet asset from the days of the Cold War that was programmed to burst one day in American political life and destroy the Foundations of Western Civilization. Like a secret waepon, a valuable KGB Spy in a Stratego game. But I could be wrong...
Now, back to our Mule. Perhaps Trump will ultimately be remembered as a temporary aberration, a historically peculiar president who pushed the system toward its limits and was eventually contained by it. Perhaps the institutions will reassert themselves. Perhaps voters will tire of permanent confrontation. Perhaps Republicans will eventually decide that Trumpism is electorally unsustainable. There are already signs that some Republicans are becoming more cautious. With Trump's approval rating at historic lows, some Republican candidates in competitive races are beginning to reduce their association with him, even while recognizing that his endorsement remains powerful within the party.
But there is another possibility. Perhaps Trump is not the destruction of the American model. Perhaps he is the stress test that reveals what was already wrong with it. That may be the more uncomfortable conclusion. Because if one president can so rapidly alter the expectations surrounding elections, executive power, alliances, political language and institutional restraint, then the problem cannot be explained entirely by the personality of one man.
The system was vulnerable. Trump found the vulnerability. And then he kept pressing it.
This is why I do not think the most interesting question about Trump is whether he is crazy, evil, brilliant, stupid, authoritarian, populist or some combination of all six.
The more important question is what happens to a democracy when its citizens can no longer agree on the boundaries of political reality.
When extraordinary becomes ordinary. When contradiction becomes a political asset. When information becomes so abundant that certainty becomes scarce. When every institution has a partisan interpretation. When one side believes the government is being saved and the other believes it is being dismantled. When both sides increasingly believe the other cannot be trusted with power.
At that point, the danger is no longer merely Donald Trump. The danger is the environment that makes Donald Trump possible. That is the true meaning of the Mule. He does not have to destroy the galaxy himself. He only has to demonstrate that the old equations no longer work.
And perhaps that is what we are witnessing in America. Not the end of democracy. Not yet. Something subtler. The moment when an old political reality discovers that it has become unable to predict the new one.
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