No, Trump can't cancel the 2028 election. But he could still weaken democracy.

President-elect Donald Trump is now — once again — President Donald Trump, and in the roughly 24 hours since he has taken office, he has very publicly claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of executive power: He issued more executive orders on Day 1 than any previous president, including one to end birthright citizenship (a right guaranteed in the Constitution) and one blocking the enforcement of a ban on the video streaming app TikTok that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. He also pardoned rioters who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Even before these latest actions, a significant number of Americans were worried about the U.S. becoming less of a democracy and more of an authoritarian state under Trump's second term. A Dec. 3-5 poll from Marist College found that 73 percent of adults thought there was a serious threat to the future of our democracy. And according to an Ipsos/Public Religion Research Institute poll from last August-September, 49 percent of Americans thought there was a real danger that Trump would use the presidency to become a dictator.

But when people think of Trump becoming a dictator, they're probably thinking of something akin to him going on TV one day and declaring himself president for life. (For instance, host Nikki Glaser memorably joked at the Golden Globes about there not being a next election.) There are a myriad of legal and practical reasons why that is extremely unlikely to happen — but that doesn't mean he won't pose a threat to democracy. Political scientists who have studied the erosion of democracy in other countries emphasize that it's a gradual, even subtle process that often leaves the trappings of democracy in place. In fact, those experts say, U.S. democracy was already eroded under Trump's first term — and the most serious danger is that his second will see more of the same.

Let's get one thing out of the way: No, Trump cannot run for a third term or cancel the 2028 election. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution says, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice," and even if Trump tries to defy that, he would almost certainly be universally rebuffed by the courts and election officials. Even Trump's allies, such as Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, have flatly stated that he cannot run for president again unless the Constitution is amended. (And it won't be. Constitutional amendments must pass the Senate and House with two-thirds majorities — which Republicans don't have — and be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures. Republicans control the legislatures in just 29 of the 50 states, including Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature.)

And the 2028 election will definitely take place, whether Trump wants it to or not. "The president has no authority over the way in which we run our elections," Joshua Douglas, an election law expert at the University of Kentucky, told 538. Instead, elections are run by the states. "We don't really have one presidential election," Douglas said. "We basically have 51 presidential elections that all occur at the same time." States can't cancel their elections unilaterally either; they have a constitutional obligation to cast electoral votes for president every four years, and the date of the election is legally set by Congress.

While Congress could change the date of the election in extraordinary circumstances, it's virtually impossible to imagine them voting to delay it at Trump's urging (as recent events have shown, there are still plenty of Republicans willing to break with Trump over much smaller potatoes). But even if they do, Trump's term as president will constitutionally still end on Jan. 20, 2029, and if there is no president- or vice-president-elect at that point, whoever is next in the presidential line of succession would become president.

But Trump doesn't have to do something dramatic like cancel the election in order to erode democracy. The relationship between democracy and autocracy is a spectrum, not a binary; for example, countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Turkey and Hungary still hold elections, but their leaders aren't held meaningfully accountable by them (or by other mechanisms like the courts). A more realistic concern is that the U.S. will slide into what political scientists call "competitive authoritarianism," in which democratic institutions still exist but they are regularly abused. Maybe the chief executive can't just abolish the other branches of government, the free press and other tools of accountability for fear of being seen as illegitimate, but he can find ways to weaken or circumvent them. And while the incumbent party still must face elections — and can even lose them — it makes every effort to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.

In that vein, Susan Stokes, a University of Chicago political scientist who is writing a book on democratic erosion, is looking out for attacks on institutions that could potentially criticize Trump or rein him in. She pointed out that Trump has already sued media outlets like the Des Moines Register, which could scare the press into treating Trump with kid gloves. Aspiring autocrats in other countries have also made life difficult for universities. In India, the government has revoked the licenses of thousands of nongovernmental organizations. In Poland, the previous administration stacked the judiciary with loyalists, turning it effectively into a rubber stamp for the ruling party.

Trump could also retaliate against other politicians or government employees who don't agree with him. He has said he wants to purge the federal bureaucracy of civil servants who he believes oppose his agenda. Many observers also fear that Trump's Justice Department will prosecute his political opponents — not just Democrats, but also Republicans who are perceived as disloyal.

And at Trump's direction, Republican legislators could push laws that make it harder to vote in response to Trump's unfounded concerns about voter fraud. Douglas is expecting the SAVE Act, which would require people to present an ID proving their citizenship when registering to vote, to be a priority for Congress this year, and for Republican-controlled states to enact new voting restrictions as well. While research doesn't really support the idea that Republican candidates benefit from these restrictions, they can lead to lower turnout overall, which is obviously not very democratic. And one thing that could help Republicans win future elections is to interfere in what should be the nonpartisan administration and certification of elections.

Of course, some of these things wouldn't be new for Trump. During his first term, he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. He purged the Republican Party of his critics by endorsing their opponents in primaries. And of course, he sowed distrust in the results of the 2020 election and attempted to overturn former President Joe Biden's win. But that's just the point: According to some political scientists, Trump's actions during his first term already meet the definition of democratic erosion.

And his next act could go further. According to Stokes, Trump is likely to take many of the same sorts of anti-democratic actions that he took in his first term — just "with more confidence and fewer guardrails." For instance, now that many members of the Trump administration have four years of experience under their belts, they could be more competent at doing things they struggled to do in 2017-21. With the nation's highest courts also populated by a full term of Trump appointees, the judiciary may be less willing to provide a check on him than during his first term. And since a majority of Republican senators and representatives joined Congress after Trump was first elected in 2016 — many running on an explicitly pro-Trump platform — there are fewer traditional Republicans than ever to check and balance him in the legislative branch too. "The big danger isn't someone like Trump," Rob Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, told 538. "It's all the other people in his party going along with it."

In conclusion, said Stokes, "I expect there to be a significant continuation of democratic erosion in the second term."

All the same, there's an important nuance to keep in mind here. While real threats do exist to American democracy — and it could very well be further weakened over the next four years — that doesn't necessarily mean that democracy in the U.S. is doomed to end. A study by political scientist Melis Laebens found that most democratically elected leaders who try to consolidate power in undemocratic ways actually fail, and other research has found that it's rare for democracies, especially rich ones, to slide fully into autocracy.

Of course, democratic erosion is a problem all on its own; few Americans want to live in one of those hybrid regimes halfway between democracy and autocracy. There are countless definitions of democracy, but virtually all Americans agree on several core criteria: free and fair elections, checks and balances, peaceful transfers of power, free speech. While it's unlikely we'll wake up one day and find ourselves in an authoritarian state, there are several realistic actions Trump could take that would move the U.S. further away from these values.

No, Trump can't cancel the 2028 election. But he could still weaken democracy. originally appeared on abcnews.go.com