Trump has gone a long way toward hindering democracy in other countries

The last time a Republican won the popular vote for president, the winning candidate declared that the spread of democracy was central to American security.

“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” said George W Bush in his second inaugural address in 2005.

For most of the last 30 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy promotion has been a mainstay of American foreign policy. Republicans and Democrats, in Congress and the White House, have embraced the notion that democracies make good allies – and that the US plays a central role in spreading democratic government around the world.

Not any more.

After four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, that consensus has been stretched to breaking point. Trump himself repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of America’s own democratic process claiming – without evidence – that several million illegal votes were cast against him in 2016.

He has frequently undermined public confidence in mail-in ballots and cast doubt on whether he will even accept the results of next week’s elections. On Monday he once again tweeted as part of his long-running campaign of disinformation to curtail vote-counting: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.”

The tweet was so egregiously false – and potentially illegal – that Twitter hid the president’s statement behind a public warning that it might be misleading about how to vote, along with a link to its own civic integrity policy.

For the institutions that promote American democracy around the world, this is a deeply challenging time: when American elections are being questioned by an American president, whose own politics and preferences align him more closely with authoritarian leaders than democratic allies around the world.

Much of the work of democracy promotion is handled by two groups aligned with American political parties: the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). For 25 years, the IRI board was led by the late senator John McCain, while the NDI board is chaired by Madeleine Albright, who served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.

Drawing on taxpayer funding, and with explicit mandates to steer clear of domestic politics, both organizations walk warily around the minefield of the state of American democracy. The IRI’s board features Trump loyalists including senators Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst.

“Freedom fighters in places like Hong Kong and Belarus are not waiting on us to perfect our democracy – they want our help now,” said Dan Twining, IRI president. “We have been working on our democracy for nearly 250 years, and while there is always more work to be done, the struggles we have overcome here are relevant to best practices we can share with partners at different stages of democratic development.”

His counterpart at the NDI acknowledged the current election’s challenges but insisted they were not affecting its work overseas. “So far NDI has not found that what is happening in the United States is affecting our ability to do democracy support work around the world,” said Derek Mitchell, NDI president.

“There is no doubt the US example matters, as many countries look to the United States as a touchstone of democratic practice. But wherever it exists, democracy is imperfect and forever a work-in-progress. US democracy is no different, and NDI has never asserted otherwise. We believe other nations can learn lessons from the challenges currently facing US democracy, just as they may learn from its strengths.”

However, the challenges facing US democracy promotion have clearly grown through the Trump years.

The Trump administration proposed gutting the $2.3bn budget for overall democracy promotion by 40% in 2019, covering activities ranging from election support to judicial reform and human rights. The cuts including a 60% reduction for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that funds democracy promotion.

Freedom House, an independent and non-partisan non-profit group promoting democracy since 1941, said Trump’s proposed cuts would reduce US security. When Trump suggested last month that he would not accept the results of next week’s election, Freedom House – which normally assesses the state of democracy and freedom around the world – condemned the president’s statement as “an unacceptable threat to the continuity of American democracy”.

At the same time, authoritarian leaders around the world have made no secret of their opposition to US support for democracy promotion. The NED has come under repeated fire from the Russian and Chinese governments. Russian state media accused it of organizing the 2015 uprising in Ukraine that ousted its pro-Moscow leader, and banned them from operating inside Russia. Beijing has claimed the NED worked alongside the CIA to promote the Hong Kong protests last year.

To be sure, the 2020 election is not the first challenge to American credibility in democracy promotion. While conservatives drew a straight line from the cold war to the war on terror, the reality of the US record since the second world war has been contradictory in both supporting and overthrowing democratically elected governments. Ending tyranny was not the goal: opposing Communism was.

Still, Trump’s presidency – and his frequent attacks on the election process – pose unique threats to democracy promotion, according to Max Bergmann, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“We have lost a ton of credibility and it’s in part because we have a president that isn’t walking the talk of democracy promotion. If we were analyzing ourselves as if we were a foreign country, we would say it’s incredibly problematic that he describes his opponents as criminals. It’s his behavior in places where democratic allies have been treated as though they are adversaries, and autocrats are treated as though they are close allies,” Bergmann said.

Joe Biden has proposed hosting a Summit for Democracy in his first year in office, gathering together “the nations of the Free World” with the aim of “defending against authoritarianism, including election security.” The summit would include civil society groups that have been targeted by authoritarian regimes, as well as businesses including technology and social media companies.

However, conservative analysts say Democratic concerns about next week’s election are overblown – despite the president’s comments – and will not harm democracy promotion overseas.

“I don’t really think we are struggling. I think that is an awful lot of frothing at the mouth that relates much more to politics than fact,” said Danielle Pletka, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “There are certainly instances which you can cite that are discouraging in defending democracy, but those who suggest that somehow this moment is over for the US to promote democracy, or stand for democracy, seems to me to be overstated.

“There are lots of things that Donald Trump says that he shouldn’t say. But if you go back pretty much regularly – if not every two years, every four years – there’s some sort of hysteria about polling places and voter suppression.”