Trump's America Is Not Immune: What History Teaches About How Regimes Fall

THE FALL Part 1: A new series on how regimes fall, and what it means for Trump's America in 2026.

A few weeks ago, while walking along Portugal’s Atlantic coast, I started talking with three Americans. They were hiking the Fisherman’s Trail, a long path through the wild coastline south of Lisbon. We chatted about the sea, the cliffs, and the small fishing villages. Eventually, our conversation turned to where we were from.

“How does this end?” one of them asked. She wasn’t asking about the trail.

What followed was a long conversation, the kind that only happens when you’re walking and there’s nowhere else to be. We talked about the economy, about protests, about soldiers, and illegal orders. I shared what I had seen in Europe over the years. They asked questions and shared insights into their own country that I, as a European, couldn’t fully understand from the outside.

Trail friendships are something special; before we parted ways, all three of them subscribed to The Planet. So, welcome. This series is partly the answer I kept thinking about after we said goodbye on that trail.

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The question before the question

My previous series, After the Fall, examined five countries that survived authoritarian periods and then had to decide what to do with those responsible. Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the post-communist countries of Central Europe, and Portugal itself. What does accountability look like? What does a society owe its victims?

The response from readers was clear. Many of you asked the prior question: before accountability, before reconstruction, before anything, the regime has to fall. And how does that actually happen?

That’s what this series is about.

The Fall looks back in time. It asks what history can teach us about the moment just before collapse—the crack, the day when a regime that seemed permanent suddenly was not.

I want to explain why this matters for Americans today. The United States in 2026 is not a failed state. Its institutions are damaged but not destroyed. Courts still work, the media still reports, and civil society is still active. But there is a real shift toward authoritarianism, and the signs are clear. The question those Americans asked on the trail was not paranoia—it was recognizing a pattern.

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Five triggers

Political scientists who study how regimes collapse have found a set of common triggers. Erica Chenoweth at Harvard has conducted detailed research on hundreds of resistance movements over the last century. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, mapped out the patterns that come before a collapse. Their work, and others in the field, show that no single trigger is usually enough. Regimes tend to fall when several triggers happen at the same time.

The first is an economic crisis. When a regime can no longer deliver basic material welfare, its social contract breaks down. People accept a great deal when they feel economically secure. When that security disappears, the bargain collapses. This is not just about poverty. A middle class that expected stability and gets instability is more dangerous to a regime than a poor population that has never known anything else.

The second is elite fracture. Every authoritarian regime depends on a coalition: business leaders, military officers, party officials, and media owners. As long as that coalition holds, the regime holds. When members of the inner circle start calculating that the regime is a liability rather than an asset, cracks begin to form. Defection at the top is often the first visible sign that a regime is in trouble.

The third is mass mobilization. Street protests alone rarely topple a government. But sustained, large-scale, peaceful protest changes the calculus for everyone else. It signals to elites that the population will not simply accept what is imposed. It signals to the military that following orders to suppress crowds comes with a price.

The fourth is military defection. This is often the decisive factor. A regime can survive economic crisis, elite fracture, and mass protest if the security apparatus remains loyal and willing to use force. When soldiers and officers refuse orders, everything changes. Portugal 1974. The Philippines 1986. East Germany 1989. In each case, the security apparatus either defected or stood down. That was the moment.

The fifth is international pressure. Isolation, sanctions, loss of diplomatic recognition, and economic exclusion. No regime operates in a vacuum. When the international community withdraws support, the pressure on internal actors to break ranks increases.

These five triggers rarely operate alone. What the historical record shows is a threshold: when three or more converge simultaneously, regimes that looked permanent fall within months. Sometimes weeks.

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Looking at America in 2026

I’m not going to predict what will happen to the Trump administration. History doesn’t follow a set schedule.

But I can describe what is visible.

Economic anxiety is no longer abstract. Over the past weeks, Americans have been paying sharply higher prices at the gas station, a direct consequence of Trump’s military adventure in Iran. Tariffs, inflation, market volatility, the disruption of long-standing trade relationships — the material reality of ordinary life is getting harder. Americans who expected stability are getting instability. The economic trigger is not fully activated. But it is pushing.

Elite fracture has begun. It is early and partial. But the midterm elections are approaching, and against the backdrop of an unpopular war, the calculus for Republican politicians is shifting. Some business leaders who initially accommodated the administration are recalculating. Some officials have resigned or been fired for insufficient loyalty. Defection is not yet significant. But the pattern is recognizable, and the midterms may accelerate it considerably.

Mass mobilization is underway. The No Kings protests have been sustained and geographically widespread. The absolute numbers are impressive. But here in Europe, watching from the outside, I notice something the American press rarely says plainly: as a percentage of the total population, those numbers fall well short of what we saw in some of the successful uprisings I closely followed in European capitals. American protesters often cite Chenoweth’s finding that 3.5% of the population participating in sustained civil resistance has historically been sufficient to bring down a regime. That threshold has not been reached. Reaching it, or something close to it, is what historically makes the difference.

Military loyalty is contested. The administration has worked hard to install loyalists in senior military positions and remove those seen as insufficiently committed. During our conversation on the trail, I mentioned a moment that crystallized this anxiety: a video released by six Democratic lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds, including Arizona senator and former Navy captain Mark Kelly, that calmly reminded service members, ‘Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders.’ The response was instantaneous and furious. Trump labeled the video ‘seditious’ and ‘punishable by death,’ his defense secretary opened an investigation into Kelly that could lead to a court‑martial, and the Justice Department began probing the group now dubbed the ‘Seditious Six.’ Regimes that are confident of military loyalty don’t need to spend so much energy securing it. That effort tells its own story.

International isolation is accelerating. The relationship with Canada has deteriorated to a point that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The claim on Greenland, a NATO ally’s sovereign territory, produced a rupture with European partners that has not healed. Trade wars and withdrawal from international agreements have produced something new: an America diplomatically alone in a way it has not been in living memory. These are not small things. They cut the ropes that have long anchored American power internationally.

None of these triggers has reached critical mass. And they have not yet converged. But all five are in motion.

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What this series will examine

In the next few weeks, I’ll look at each major case study one by one: Portugal in 1974, the Philippines in 1986, East Germany in 1989, Czechoslovakia in 1989, Romania in 1989, Chile in 1988, and South Korea in 2016-17.

I’ll also look at the failures: Hungary in 1956, Belarus in 2020, and Iran in 1979, where the revolution led to something worse than what came before. This last case is especially important given the current relationship between the United States and Iran. These examples matter as much as the successes. If the Trump administration collapses, it doesn’t guarantee a healthy democracy. History shows that many countries have simply traded one kind of authoritarianism for another.

Each case study will look at which triggers were present, which were missing, what the turning point was, and what lessons, if any, might apply to America in 2026.

I want to be clear about the limits of comparing history. The United States is not Portugal or East Germany. I won’t claim that a few quick comparisons can capture what makes America unique—they can’t. History doesn’t give us a step-by-step plan. It gives us patterns, and those patterns help us see where we are.

The Americans I met on that trail had watched what their country had become, and they wanted to know whether history offered any reason for hope.

I believe it does. But hope alone is not a strategy. Understanding how regimes fall is.

If my American friends are reading this now: hello. This one’s for you :-)

Stay inspired,

Alexander

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I am an independent journalist based in Europe, and I write about democracy, nature, and the intersection of politics and society. The Planet 🌎 is a reader-supported publication for those concerned about democratic backsliding and environmental collapse. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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A new newsletter: The Curious Wanderer

The Portuguese trail where that conversation happened — the cliffs, the fishing villages, the wind off the Atlantic — is the subject of my travel writing in The Curious Wanderer. I walked the Fisherman's Trail in March 2026 and still write about it in detail: the landscape, the history, and the people I met along the way. If the Portugal in this piece made you curious about the place itself, that's where to go next.

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Trail of Tides, Part 2: Ian Fleming, Exiled Kings, and the Road That Became a Bond Film

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For those who want More

A quick word about More, my other newsletter. If you enjoy these stories and ever want to go deeper, that’s where the rest of it lives. A few recent examples:

Do you remember the hummingbird video? More explains why those colors aren’t pigment at all — it’s physics. Stacked nanostructures in the feathers act like a natural optical instrument, shifting from magenta to black to brilliant pink as the angle of light changes. The male times the flash deliberately.

Do you remember the baby bird that looked like a toxic caterpillar? More goes into the full science: Batesian mimicry in birds is nearly unheard of, and this chick pulls it off with both appearance and movement — bobbing slowly like a living insect — while surviving a predation risk of 80%.

Do you remember the border collie that found a pencil by smell alone? A reader sent me something even more extreme: the same breed locating a car key thrown into water. More explains exactly what the dog’s nose is reading in the air above the surface.

Do you remember the swan video from the Bishop’s Palace in Wells? More tells the full story. The bell on the gatehouse has been rung by swans since the 1850s. The current male, Gabriel, learned it within days of arriving and now teaches the cygnets each season — social learning, passed down through generations.

Do you remember the Nazaré waves? More explains what creates them: a submarine canyon 170 kilometers long and 5,000 meters deep that funnels and amplifies Atlantic swells until a normal four-meter wave arrives as thirty.

And if the Aristides de Sousa Mendes name in The Planet’s After the Fall series meant something to you, More tells the full story. In June 1940, he defied Salazar’s explicit orders and signed visas for everyone who needed one — thousands of Jewish families, royal families, stateless people — working around the clock for days. He saved more people than almost anyone else in that war. Portugal buried his story for decades. He died with nothing.

That’s More: the rest of the story, every week. Join here:

Celebrating Five Years on Substack: the Hummingbird Article Where it all Began

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Notes:

On the five triggers and regime collapse:

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). The source of the 3.5% finding and the most rigorous statistical analysis of civil resistance campaigns across the twentieth century.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018). The essential framework for understanding democratic erosion from within. Chenoweth’s more recent Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a shorter and very accessible companion.

Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start (Crown, 2022). Walter focuses on a different endpoint than regime collapse, but her analysis of the conditions that precede democratic breakdown is directly relevant to the framework in this piece.

On authoritarian resilience and why regimes survive:

Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A rigorous examination of how authoritarian regimes maintain power — essential background for understanding what has to give before they fall.

On the American situation specifically:

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Doubleday, 2020). A European perspective on why educated people choose autocracy. Personal and analytically sharp.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). Short, direct, and draws heavily on European historical experience. Written in the first Trump term but more relevant now than when it was published.

On “After the Fall”:

To catch up with the previous series, start at the first of this series of five: