Policy Briefs and Reports Books Journals

Global Challenges to Democracy Report  No.238

Report No.238: The Sultanization of US Politics

Wolfgang Merkel

August 05, 2025

Image: The White House / Wiki Commons

This report examines the terminology applied to the second presidency of Donald Trump. It has been called ‘fascist’, a ‘descent into fascism’ or a ‘revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court’. The US itself has been described as a ‘flawed democracy’. What are the arguments for describing Trump's USA as a plutocracy or fascism? Don't we rather see the bizarre features of a form of rule described one hundred years ago by the German sociologist Max Weber as patrimonial, or more precisely, sultanistic?