This Is How Many Days One Oxford University Historian Predicts The US Has To Save Its Democracy, And It’s Bleak

Sep 19, 2025 | Politics

Lee Moran

Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, predicted in a new essay for the Guardian that Americans have only 400 days to save their democracy.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on Air Force One
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“Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so,” admitted Garton Ash. “But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of U.S. democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault.”

Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office
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All “democrats, irrespective of party or ideology, must hope the Democrats regain control of the House” in the 2026 midterms “not because of the Democrats’ policies, which are a muddle, or their current leadership, which is a mess” but because the currently GOP-controlled Congress has to “start doing its job again” and keep the White House in check, he said.

Anti Trump demonstrators stage a protest during President Donald Trump's second state visit to the UK
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Any economic harm caused by Trump’s controversial policies may be offset, he continued, by the possibility that the president may “do a pre-election cash handout to voters, perhaps presented as compensation for the ‘temporary difficulties’ of the transition to a MAGA economy.”

President Donald Trump talks at a press conference
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Democrats have to relentlessly “bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters,” not just “by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars,” he urged.

President Donald Trump talks at a press conference
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

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