Author: Pravar Petkar, Head of Strengthening Democracy Desk
Donald Trump will be the 47th President of the US, having crossed the threshold of 270 votes required from the Electoral College and having won the popular vote in the 2024 US elections. The Republican Party has also crossed a majority in the US Senate and currently holds a plurality of seats in the House of Representatives. Trump has promised to make a number of policy changes immediately upon entering office, many of which are encapsulated in the ‘Project 2025’ policy wish-list. In addition to the domestic policy changes proposed, the results and the manner of campaigning have implications both internationally and for the robustness of US democracy. In particular, the US-India relationship is set to continue across various sectors, the UK will be prompted to calibrate its own approach to China and there are reasons to be sceptical about the robustness of democracy in the face of misinformation and corporate control of technology.
The US-India relationship will continue
Trump’s presidency is unlikely to alter some aspects of the US-India relationship. There is a bipartisan consensus in the US at present that China is the principal geopolitical threat to US national interests. Trump’s approach to US-China relations – and to foreign policy in general – is hyper-realist: his overriding motivation will be to protect US national interests in whatever way he sees fit. Given this, India will retain its role as a geopolitical and economic ‘shield’ for the US, and an important collaborator in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad will not be suddenly disbanded, nor is Trump likely to renege on existing defence and intelligence sharing agreements as long as they continue to serve his aims. However, there are questions around the continuation of the US-India Climate and Clean Energy partnership launched in 2021, especially considering Trump’s desire to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement. The imposition of higher tariffs on trade with India cannot be ruled out either, despite the apparent camaraderie between Trump and PM Modi. Yet as Trump seeks a decoupling from China, and with the US running a significant trade deficit with India, there are good reasons for the Trump administration to pursue a closer relationship.
The UK needs a clear strategy on China
Given the importance the Trump administration will place on tackling the threat it perceives that China poses to US interests, the UK’s own strategy on China will be critical in future US-UK relations. Over the last decade, the UK has had a much more open approach to China than the US has, with collaboration under the 2010 coalition government replaced with greater wariness in recent years, especially concerning China’s imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong, its use of force around Taiwan and concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet. The Labour Government’s review of UK-China relations thus comes at a critical moment. Economic benefits for the UK currently appear to be top of the agenda, though there will undoubtedly be pressure from the Trump administration to fall in line with the US approach, with possible tensions between the two emerging if the US seeks a more detached relationship in trading terms. As well as being a litmus test of Labour’s ‘progressive realism’ strategy, the UK’s approach to relations with China will have knock-on effects elsewhere, including for the UK-India relationship: given the tensions between India and China, any ‘Himalayan strategy’ the UK develops will impact the UK-China picture in the round.
‘Offline’ misinformation is still an issue in the online world
Concerns were raised in early 2024 about how emerging technology – including generative AI and its potential to churn out deepfake video and images – would affect the integrity of some of the world’s most important elections. The 2024 US elections show that ‘offline’ misinformation – falsehoods uttered by politicians in campaign speeches – remain a challenge. The most prominent example was Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs, despite having no evidence to support this. The remark was challenged in real time by the moderators, but this may not be enough in today’s climate, for two reasons. First, short clips from televised political debates are routinely shared on social media, often without full context or with sections – including the moderators’ response – cut out. Second, the polarisation of US political debate, along with the perception that it is less and less grounded in objective fact, impairs moderators’ legitimacy and ability to intervene. Some Republicans had claimed that the that the ABC moderators were biased against Trump, especially in what one Senator termed “so-called fact-checking”. Further innovation in fact-checking – especially for online platforms – will be necessary going forward to restore the shared information base that is necessary for democracies the world over the flourish.
Corporate control of the public sphere erodes democracy
Figures released earlier this year by Pew Research Center indicate that 59% of X (formerly Twitter) users in the US get their news from there. With over 100 million active X users in the US, this is a sizeable number. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has described it as the world’s “global town square”, which ought to be a space where people can freely exchange views and deliberate without national boundaries. However, as Marietje Schaake argues in her book The Tech Coup, corporate control of major tech platforms (especially in respect of content moderation) creates a significant accountability gap. National governments seem unable to regulate big social media companies such as Meta and X on which the public sphere is increasingly constructed. With Musk having donated significant amounts of money to the Trump campaign, and having been praised as a “star” in Trump’s victory speech, X is no longer a neutral public space. The bounds of free expression and the availability of information on which citizens make decisions about how their society is run is now controlled by private actors to a far greater extent than in the pre-social media age. Corporate control of the public sphere erodes democracy by taking power out of the state’s hands and constructing new guardrails for public discourse in which citizens have no say.
Independent guardrails are set to fall
Project 2025 is not simply Trump’s manifesto for each policy area in his administration, but a much more far-reaching attempt to control the US state apparatus. An executive order issued in October 2020 (known as ‘Schedule F’) that would allow Trump to dismiss civil service workers ‘disloyal’ to him may be reactivated. This paves the way for the civil service reforms of Project 2025, which will put in place personnel at all levels who will carry forward Trump’s agenda. The new Trump administration will not simply seek to evade independent accountability from the bureaucracy but dismantle the very prospect of it. Proposals to abolish the Department of Education will have a much more far-reaching impact: cutting federal funding for schools “pushing critical race theory or gender ideology” and certifying teachers who “embrace patriotic values” attempts to co-opt the force of the state to shape societal values and what future generations will accept. This entrenches the values of Project 2025 by shutting down criticism of those values on a mass scale. Trump’s victory may also affect his various civil and criminal convictions, with the prospects of a constitutional challenge on whether state judges can sentence a president and the dismissal of the special counsel who brought federal criminal cases against Trump in Washington, DC and Florida. Although Trump cannot directly issue a pardon to himself on some matters, the state apparatus is now at his disposal should he attempt to evade personal accountability.
Re-alignment and re-imagining
Trump’s election victory will have significant implications for how our societies are governed and interact with each other. The increasingly multipolar international order is set to become even more so, especially if Trump’s support for NATO wanes until European defence spending increases. The UK may have to re-align its approach to China, with consequences for other countries too, including India. New mechanisms for ensuring the availability of objective information in a landscape controlled by large corporations will need to be developed to ensure the future strength of democracy as a system of governance. We have reached an inflection point of sorts: the path towards a sustainable future will require rethinking and re-imagining some of the foundations of our world.
