I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story,
where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
We are more than three months into Donald Trump's second term as president,
and there's a question that's coming up a lot.
What is the state of American democracy?
Last year, at a Fox News town hall campaign event,
Trump insisted he would be a dictator, but only for one day.
There's energy.
We're going to drill, baby, drill.
After that, I'm not going to be a dictator.
After that, I'm not going to be a dictator.
Now,
many scholars say the U.S. is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy and towards some form of authoritarianism.
It is certainly reversible.
But we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.
We are very certain that the United States is moving in the direction of autocratization.
I think we're on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism.
That was Stephen Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, Shabnam Gamushu,
a political scientist at Middlebury College, and Kim Lane Shepley, a Princeton sociologist.
Of course, there are scholars who disagree with them.