Recently, I concluded a four-session seminar on freedom at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. It was a blend of Socratic dialogue and Harvard Business School case method — an exploration of journalism, fake news and the First Amendment in the age of AI, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. In the last session, the participants, a group of brilliant people from the Upper Valley, after a moment of stunned silence, spoke up passionately, robustly and fearlessly when they looked at the question on the screen: “Who Is The Greatest Threat To American Democracy? AI, Elon Musk Or Donald Trump?”
After intense discussion, the consensus developed that all the three, in one way or the other, were a serious menace to American democracy. With the midterm elections a few days away, many Americans are being asked to consider these two ideas at once. That our democracy is fragile, and that it is strong enough to withstand some of the most powerful forces ever pressed against it.
Critics of Donald Trump have sounded alarms for years. Former Rep. Liz Cheney warned us that the country was “sleepwalking into dictatorship.” Robert Kagan, a neoconservative scholar, warned that a second Trump presidency raised the peril of an “irreversible descent into dictatorship.” But so far into Trump’s presidency, these sensational forebodings have not come true because, as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz argued, the nation’s institutions would constrain Trump and, moreover, history “provides scarce evidence of democracies deteriorating into dictatorships without the cooperation of the military, government bureaucracy, business world, media, and universities…”
But what if you combine the executive overreach, one might say “the shadow powers” of the American presidency, which Trump is exercising now, with the limitless resources of a trillionaire? Elon Musk has spent roughly $366 million on this election cycle, as Reuters reported. Of that amount, $276 million came since July, likely making him the biggest single donor of the 2026 races. Let’s not forget that Musk owns the social media platform X, which, unlike the traditional media, has no legal constraints and no gatekeepers.
Musk’s apologists say that political spending is lawful speech, but what happens to the marketplace of ideas when one man controls the megaphone during the elections? At an October 2024 Pennsylvania town hall, Musk argued that those who call Trump a threat to democracy are the real threat.
And then there is the power of AI speech, and New Hampshire has already seen it. As my seminar participants discussed the case at length, in January 2024, robocalls imitating President Biden’s voice urged voters to skip the primary. The calls were later traced to a political consultant, Steve Kramer, who said he wanted to publicize the dangers of AI deepfakes, and that he was being patriotic in the tradition of Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, and for him it was an act of civil disobedience to highlight the dangers of AI in politics, according to media reports. The court ruled that Kramer’s AI robocall speech during elections was protected under the First Amendment. The slow, messy process of American democracy grinds on.
One might hope that the rules being written in state capitals would decide how the most disruptive technology of our generation would develop. Or Congress might see the danger of AI to our electoral democracy and rise above partisanship and take some meaningful action. But hope should not be naive. Institutions move slowly and technology does not. The same money that funds campaigns can also shape the information voters see, and the elections meant to hold powerful people accountable are being influenced by those same people. Whether court rulings are obeyed, whether lawmakers will cross their own party lines, and whether voters trust the electoral count are not questions of law alone. They are questions of the nation’s character.
Of course, Trump has other ideas. In order to win the AI race against China, he doesn’t want to handcuff Silicon AI overlords. On Dec. 11, Trump signed an executive order preventing states from regulating the AI industry. As MIT Technology Review reported, Trump “vowed to work with Congress to establish a ‘minimally burdensome’ national AI policy, one that would position the US to win the global AI race. The move marked a qualified victory for tech titans, who have been marshaling multimillion-dollar war chests to oppose AI regulations, arguing that a patchwork of state laws would stifle innovation.”
American democracy now faces an existential stress test, driven not by a single adversary, but by three converging forces that threaten to dismantle its system of checks and balances.
First is an imperial presidency without bounds, an executive branch increasingly eager to bypass constitutional norms and consolidate authority. Compounding this challenge, as Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman argued in Foreign Affairs, is the rise of the trillionaire technocrat, a new breed of private sovereign whose immense wealth grants them foreign policy clout traditionally reserved for nation-states.
Finally, Silicon Valley’s AI titans press for unbridled freedom, demanding little regulatory oversight in a high-stakes race toward artificial general intelligence and global dominance. When unchecked executive power, super-wealthy geopolitical actors, and autonomous tech oligarchs align, the fundamental question for the republic is no longer how it will govern these forces, but how much of democratic institutions can survive. Perhaps the midterm election results will show which way the wind blows.
Narain Batra is the author of “The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation.” He lives in the Upper Valley.