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An American and his English friend went on a visit to Niagara Falls. “Isn’t it just amazing to see that huge mass of water dashing over that enormous cliff,” said the American, who was much impressed by the sight. “But what is to stop it?” asked the phlegmatic Englishman in reply.
I am gripped by a similar feeling of astonishment – mixed with horrified disbelief – as democracy disappears over a political cliff in the US, with nothing effective being done to prevent its fall. As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches next year, its political system increasingly resembles the elective autocracies of Hungary and Turkey.
With Donald Trump’s second presidency, we are watching the very worst features of American political and social life spread and establish dominance. For instance, the US has always had a culpably high incarceration rate, imprisoning 1.8 million adults, compared with 1.7 million in China, where the population is four times larger. Yet the Trump administration is now to expand vastly the number of prisoners, spending $45bn (£33bn) on detaining undocumented immigrants, estimated to number 14.8 million, according to the Centre for Immigration Studies.
Prison camps are to sprout all over the US in the next four years. An arrest quota of 3,000 people a day has been set for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In pursuit of this target, ICE is already detaining categories of people it had previously left alone, such as high school students, farm workers and those attending court hearings.
A sinister aspect of the demonisation of immigrants, many of them in the US for years, is the cruelty with which they are taunted by Trump and his acolytes. He expresses childish joy at a deportee camp nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” in the swamps of the Everglades west of Miami, praising it as “so professional, so well done… we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, if they escape prison”.
A new American-style “Gulag Archipelago” of detention camps will soon dot the US, officially holding 116,000 inmates at any one time but designed to imprison a million people in the course of a year. Those running this system will be greatly expanded in numbers, as ICE hires 10,000 extra agents, bringing its total up to 30,000 – considerably more than the FBI, making ICE the largest federal police force in the US.
A Trumpian counter-revolution
This is a pivotal moment in American history. A Trumpian counter-revolution demolishing crucial features of US democracy is well under way. It is a counter-revolution against many of the progressive developments in the US since president Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal nearly a century ago in 1933.
But there are echoes also of earlier conflicts and deep divisions dating back to before the US Civil War. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for instance, gave slave owners the right to demand that local law enforcement in non-slave states help them capture runaway slaves. This is not so different from the Trump administration’s insistence that local police help ICE pursue and detain immigrants, who can be picked up off the street with no legal protection.
Trumpism is sometimes seen as the American variant of a worldwide phenomenon whereby “spin dictators”, controlling or manipulating the media, first win elections, but then take over all other power centres. There is some truth in this, but the origins of Trump’s seizure of the American political system lie also in the classic issues that have divided American political culture since 1776 exploded into violence in the Civil War between the Confederacy and the Union. Trump recently restored the names of seven US army bases previously called after Confederate generals.
The mobilisation of anti-immigrant feeling, key to Trump’s political success, plugs into a broader racist appeal in which anti-discrimination measures like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are caricatured as discriminating against white people.
“The United States was founded in an act of accommodation between two fundamentally different societies,” writes Andrew Delbanco in his book, The War Before the War, on the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Civil War was not solely about slavery, but about preserving democratic government – as Abraham Lincoln repeatedly declared. The continuing toxic potency of this historic schism makes Trumpism a distinctly American phenomenon. These long nurtured hatreds explain the speed and venom with which Trump and his followers are battering long-established American institutions into submission.Trump specialises in whipping up fear and hatred of immigrants or anybody who can be pilloried as a stranger.
In his 2024 election campaign, he produced a fantasy picture in which America is at the mercy of a migrant-fuelled crime wave, though the murder rate in 2024 and early 2025 was the lowest ever in the US, while the rate for violent crime is the lowest since 1968.
Perhaps the foreign autocrat who most closely mirrors Trump is president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Before the abortive military coup d’etat that almost overthrew him in 2016, the Turkish leader had, like Trump in his first term, been constrained by powerful Turkish institutions such as the army, judiciary, parliament and the media. But the failed coup gave him his opportunity, as did Trump’s re-election, and he systematically purged all who opposed him, facing little resistance.
Autocratic control of the White House expands by the day
Trump has acted similarly since he began his second term in the White House. Resistance either failed to materialise or swiftly crumbled. The division of powers between great American institutions, considered the great obstacle to monarchical pretensions by any individual, proved a paper tiger because the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate together with the Supreme Court. The latter has curbed the ability of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions to block Trump’s executive orders. Parts of the judiciary still fight back but the autocratic control of the White House expands by the day and ICE can do whatever it wants.
Opponents of Trump drew some solace from the surprise victory in New York City of the young, radical Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for mayor. But I was reminded of the Turkish opposition leader Ekrem Imamoglu, elected mayor of Istanbul in 2019 but arrested and removed from office earlier this year.
Trump-type rulers do not tolerate dissent, even when it exists only in their own imagination. According to a report by The New York Times, former director of the FBI, James Comey, was followed by law enforcement and his exact movements tracked through his phone, because he posted an image of an arrangement of stones on a beach which was interpreted by Trump supporters as a bizarre call to assassinate the President.
The demolition of American democracy continues apace with – like that unstoppable mass of water plunging over Niagara Falls – no convincing reason why its destruction should come to a stop.
Compare the significant but still limited cost of the Government U-turns on benefit cuts with the torrent of state funding poured yearly into the half-abandoned HS2 high speed rail project.
A curious feature of vastly expensive debacles in the UK like HS2, or PPE procurement during the Covid-19 pandemic, is that a great deal is known about what went wrong. Public inquiries and expert studies are full of fascinating details, though they never quite identify – nor does anybody else seek to punish – those who took predictably disastrous decisions to go ahead with some huge scheme that was against common sense from the beginning. And not just in hindsight.
It should have been clear that HS2 was unnecessary and likely to prove gigantically expensive because Britain is a small, heavily built up island in which all train journeys are fairly short in distance and time, so it was absurd to opt for a high-speed rail link like that between Beijing and Shanghai.
Back in 2006, the Eddington Transport Study concluded that the UK’s transport system was broadly adequate for national needs with no need for mega-projects like high-speed rail. A far better return in terms of cost-benefits would come from improving the existing road and rail network.
In 2013, the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee published a report saying that the Treasury should not allow HS2 to proceed “until it is sure the cost-benefit analysis for HS2 has been updated”. None of these objections appear to have impeded HS2, drifting forward under its own huge momentum, like a giant iceberg which has become unstoppable.
The project swiftly became Britain’s biggest and most expensive can of worms, further damning details of which were revealed by a Sunday Times analysis of 80,000 payments to 1,643 suppliers, who have worked on HS2 since 2009.
Some 13 construction companies each received more than £1bn for a total of £27bn. The overall cost so far for HS2 is £38.8bn – and the project is only 60 per cent complete. The Ministry of Transport was entirely out of its depth as it signed contracts in which it took responsibility for cost over-runs over which it had no control.
Why do these giant projects keep failing in the UK? One explanation may be that they are doomed by their very size, which has too many moving parts for anybody to control. Too much money will have been spent on them for central government to admit failure and cancel them until it is very late in the day.
Beneath the Radar
The death of Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s key lieutenant for most of her time in Downing Street until 1987, was greeted with a slew of admiring obituaries. An early proponent of right-wing populist nationalism, Tebbit was an example of the type of person who has since come to dominate the Tory party.
If you want to see Tebbit’s monument – as was said of Sir Christopher Wren and St Paul’s Cathedral – look around you in modern Britain. If the country is broken, then Tebbit and Thatcher did much of the breaking. Privatisation of water, electricity and railways proved a disaster. Large parts of the country have never recovered from de-industrialisation; and the sell-off of council houses produced an insoluble housing crisis.
Martin Wolf, the chief economic commentator on the Financial Times, says that a starting point for economic revival in the UK “must be recognition that the Thatcher experiment failed: it did not transform the underlying performance of the economy for the better. This must now be admitted. Too much of the post-Thatcher performance was unsustainable. This was, in good part, because it was the fruit of a global credit bubble, in which the UK was a leading actor.”
Cockburn’s Picks
Trump pretends that there is a crime wave in the US led by illegal immigrants, but violent crime is in sharp decline. The number of murders fell by 20.1 per cent from 2,621 in the first four months compared to 2,095 over the same period in 2025 according to the Real-Time Crime Index.
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