If you want to understand how the U.S. government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred. A Colorado jury convicted her last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

In December, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to federal crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president; she remains incarcerated.

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of “How Democracies Die.” “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

Haphazardism is, by its nature, a very confusing style of governance. It is one in which traditional rules of democratic politics, like the rule of law, no longer fully bind the chief executive. Yet, at the same time, that chief executive is not using the powers he is accumulating in any kind of effective or coherent way — leading not only to poor policy but also a failure to systematically prevent meaningful political competition from the opposition.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he recently published a new piece with coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case.

Unlike Levitsky, I think that it’s still more accurate to call the United States a democracy. I have a hard time describing a country that still has reasonably free and fair elections, in which the incumbent party loses and departs office, as anything but.

We agree on the basic haphazardist account of the Trump presidency — that it is taking authoritarian actions without effectively changing the operating logic of the system to sustain an unfair lock on political power.

Ultimately, these tricky categorization questions are less important than the question of America’s political trajectory, which is whether democracy is likely to survive his second term. Trump’s haphazardism gives us some reasons for hope.

While 2025 has been an undeniably bad year for American democracy, the haphazardist pattern that has emerged shows that Trump’s authoritarian project may be self-limiting.

In a country such as the United States, with such a long democratic history and established institutions, it takes a lot of planning and ingenuity to overcome the forces standing in their way. Some modern authoritarians, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, possessed this kind of authoritarian vision and talent from the moment they took office. Trump seemingly didn’t.

It’s not impossible to overturn a democracy haphazardly. But doing it in the United States is an altogether different, and tougher, task.

This does not mean the survival of American democracy is assured. Trump is persistent in pushing democratic limits, and the American presidency is an extraordinarily powerful office.

But, it does mean that the limits of the administration’s current strategy are very real — and coming into sharper focus.

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad.

https://www.pilotonline.com/2026/01/04/column-trumps-war-on-democracy-is-failing/