Let's clarify one important issue up front:  Progressives do not believe in democracy.  They use the term frequently as a Pavlovian bell to whip useful idiot activists into a frothing frenzy, but there is no measure by which they have proven they care about Democracy or even know what it is.  And since this is the case, we have to ask - What do they really mean when they use the word?

If we consider the traditional definition of "majority rule", then this is clearly not what leftists support.  That is to say, they only support majority rule when they represent the majority.  In the case of the 2024 election Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, which means he does in fact represent the majority.  Yet, Democrats and their ilk continue to accuse him of being a "threat to democracy", and they have openly and actively refused to accept the will of the people.

Therefore, one can only conclude that leftists want something other than democracy.  And, given their track record over the last four years in which they attempted mass online censorship and a global authoritarian coup using pandemic hysteria as a weapon, there is little doubt who the true autocrats really are.  

The hypocrisy is overwhelming when these same people accuse conservatives of authoritarianism.

Such is the case in light of a newly released annual report on the global state of democracy published by a "global watchdog" called the Varieties of Democracy project, or V-Dem.  Headed by Staffan Lindberg of Sweden's University of Gothenburg, the group boasts that it is one of the largest social science data collection projects on democracy in the world.  V-Dem's report covers the state of democracy around the world up until the end of 2024.  However, Lindberg provided special notes on Donald Trump, claiming that the President could lead America to lose its democracy status by 2026.

"If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data...If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months." 

Lindberg says Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster.

"It's the pace...He's trying to do in a few months what it took them eight to 10 years to achieve.… It's very dire."

Canada's state funded CBC (the CBS receives almost 70% of its funding from the Canadian government) was quick to jump on the V-Dem bandwagon in a rambling and mostly biased expose on the report and its implications for the Trump Administration.  

"The latest report still ranks the U.S. as a "Liberal Democracy," the highest of five tiers, one higher than Canada, which is classified as an "Electoral Democracy." 

The report adds an important caveat: this year's version does not include events in 2025, meaning it does not cover the start of Donald Trump's latest presidential term.  But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress."

V-Dem warns that the US may fall from the graces of their democracy list into the frightful category to "electoral autocracy".  Meaning, people are still basically free to do all the things one does in a democracy, but the threat of retribution or retaliation is present.  In other words, it's a lot like life in the US under the Biden Administration. 

It's hard to see how Trump's audits of the federal government and his cuts to government waste and NGO fraud are a "threat to democracy" unless you view democracy as progressive authoritarian boondoggle.  Biden pardoned his criminal son and most of his family retroactively back to 2014 under suspicious circumstances, with some insiders claiming that Biden's unelected wife and son were running the White House behind the scenes while Biden was turning into a vegetable.

We don't hear the leftists complaining about that act of autocracy.  Trump pardoning people who were politically railroaded and thrown in prison for up to 20 years for protesting is nothing in comparison.  

It's also incredibly disingenuous to label the military brass under Biden as "apolitical" when they were entirely political and devout proponents of DEI. 

Finally, Trump's federal cuts are exactly what he campaigned on and what the American people voted for him to do.  Democrats want to call the will of the people "autocracy", but this only holds weight with low intelligence legacy journalists that simply don't want to accept that they are in the minority.  

It should be mentioned that the V-Dem Project gets it's funding from a variety of interesting sources, including The World Bank, George Soros' Open Society Foundation, and, yes, you guessed it - USAID.

So, it's not surprising that Trump's cuts to agencies that money launder for leftist institutions have triggered V-Dem into a hostile response.  Trump is threatening their money train.  The new Administration is catching so much flak because they're directly over the target.