A recent letter from a concerned friend—

Democracy in crisis

Hi Patrick,

Once young and vibrant, American democracy now looks as frail and vulnerable as the 81-year-old man who struggled to defend it at last week’s US presidential debate.

I was in Atlanta for the duel where Joe Biden’s stumbling, raspy-voiced performance allowed his rival, convicted criminal Donald Trump, to spew a torrent of lies on national television almost unchallenged. The former president sought to shift blame for the deadly January 6 2021 insurrection and hedged on whether he would accept the election result in November.

When the torment was over, Republicans flooded the post-debate spin zone. Glowing and gleeful, Trump’s potential vice-presidential picks strained to outdo each other with ever more grandiloquent claims of victory. Democrats took longer to emerge, had less to say and are now in a paralyzing panic.

The timing could not have been worse at a moment when democracy is under attack from all sides. Last week the rightwing supreme court narrowed the scope of federal bribery law, made it harder to charge US Capitol riot defendants with obstruction and curbed the regulatory power of the government on the environment and other issues.

Then, on Monday, the court ruled that presidents have immunity from prosecutionfor “official acts”, making it virtually certain that Trump’s January 6 case will not go to trial before the election. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

With public trust in the court at an all-time low, and with the White House and Congress at stake in November, watched closely by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other autocrats around the world, this is a break-the-glass moment for American democracy.

No media organization is more committed to exposing the multiplying threats to our democracy and holding power to account than the Guardian. Your support helps us to go on not only reporting on the daily vicissitudes of Biden and Trump but the structural flaws and dark money pushing the world’s superpower towards minority rule.

Thank you.

Yours,

David