Is Trump overseeing the collapse of Western liberal democracy?

President Donald Trump’s second term has proven to be drastically different from his first. Over two months since his inauguration, Trump has issued stacks of controversial executive orders that aim to change the essence of the American Republic. Some fall within the historical, ideological differences between the Republican and the Democratic parties; the former wants a small government that has little influence over states and individuals, while the latter sees a broader role for the government, especially in providing essential services to the underprivileged in society.

But Trump has gone even further. The newly established Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by the unelected multi-billionaire Elon Musk, is bulldozing its way into federal departments and agencies, closing some and downsizing others, like USAID. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order to shut down the Department of Education. Tens of thousands of federal employees have already been fired in a bid to save the government tens of billions of dollars.

These measures have polarised an already divided American society. Issues like expelling immigrants en masse, eliminating environmental agencies, imposing tariffs on foreign goods, deregulating the oil and gas industries, and the possibility of privatising essential services like social security have created a popular backlash and uncertainty among investors.

But the biggest concern today is Trump’s attack on the judiciary, which has suspended some of his most controversial decisions and those of DOGE. Trump has called for the impeachment of federal judges who have opposed his moves, calling some unconstitutional. In his view, a president who has received more than 80 million votes has the mandate to do whatever he wants.

He also called for the closure of liberal media outlets and attacked late-night talk show hosts who were critical of him. The term radical left has become a stigma that the president and his supporters are quick to associate with opposing voices.

Trump, a populist and isolationist businessman-turned-politician, was seen as a phenomenon when he first ran for president in 2015. His victory was described as a test of American democracy, one that pundits believed would end in a return to business as usual four years later. Indeed, Joe Biden’s victory was considered a triumph for traditional American values, Western liberalism, and the welfare state.

But then Trump made the biggest comeback in modern US politics. This time, he was bent on leaving his mark on American society for a long time to come.

Dismantling the federal government and appointing like-minded far-right ideologues with ultraconservative social, cultural, economic, and religious agendas is now Trump’s lasting legacy. At stake are the liberal values of freedom of expression, open borders, religious tolerance, and free trade.

Trump is no longer a phenomenon in today’s world. His view of the world and of how America should look has inspired others, from Argentina’s Javier Milei to Hungary’s Victor Orban. The European far right now has a friend in the White House, and so does Israel’s far-right government. Trump’s close associate, Musk, triggered sharp reactions when he spoke at a victory rally of Germany’s far-right party, the AfD. The US Vice-President JD Vance met with the AfD’s party leader when he visited Germany two months ago.

A buoyant Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is now implementing Trump’s playbook in challenging the judiciary in a bid to boost the executive branch’s role and limit the court’s oversight. Critics warned that Netanyahu was overseeing the end of Israeli democracy and fomenting civil war.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already clamped down on independent press in Turkey and rounded up most of his critics. Last week, he ordered the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, his main rival in the 2028 presidential elections. He was charged with corruption and ties to terrorism.

In 1989, historian Francis Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as humanity’s endpoint, and it finally triumphed over other ideologies. In his “The End of History?” Fukuyama believed that the end of the Cold War saw the culmination of ideological evolution. Four years later, Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilisations” argued that cultural and religious identity, rather than ideology or economics, will dominate global conflict in the 21st century. On one side will be the West with its liberal and democratic ideals, and on the other, there will be non-Western powers: Islam, China, India.

None predicted that the friction would come from within the Western world and from the United States itself, of all countries. While conflicts persist across the world, the West itself is witnessing the biggest change as it turns its back on some of its most core ideals.

But will Trump’s attempt to change the political DNA of the United States work? Will his plan to disengage the US from world politics, give up on America’s soft power, and reign in the judiciary, which most Americans see as the last barrier before the Trump avalanche, succeed? The whole world is watching.

- Osama Al Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman