Guardrails consistently held up, despite super strong pressure over the last 8 years.
Prokop 24 – Senior Politics Correspondent at Vox.
Andrew Prokop, “If Trump wins, what would hold him back?,” Vox, 05-20-2024, https://www.vox.com/politics/24159069/trump-guardrails-authoritarian-democracy-second-term
The guardrails protecting democracy had, it seemed, held.
This pattern recurred during Trump’s presidency. The president ordered or considered something outrageous. He faced pushback in response. And he usually, ultimately, ended up constrained. Sometimes Trump would eventually end up with a scaled-back version of what he wanted: a retooled travel ban, made less blatantly discriminatory, did eventually get court approval. Sometimes he’d manage to go quite far — as in his attempt to steal the 2020 election — before being thwarted. But often he’d fail entirely.
All this has led to a sort of complacency among many Americans about what a second Trump term would bring. There’s a mentality of: “It won’t be that bad — we got through it last time, right?”
We did get through it last time. But that wasn’t for lack of Trump’s trying. It was because of the guardrails: those features of the political system, both formal and informal, that so often prevented Trump from actually doing the undemocratic things he tried to do.