Key Takeaways

• Democratic accountability depends on enforceable limits on power, meaningful elections and the ability to challenge government without retaliation.
• Economic insecurity can make political resistance harder, particularly when housing, health care and employment depend on institutions people cannot afford to confront.
• The 2035 scenarios below are conditional warnings. Court challenges, public pressure, legislation and collective action can still change the outcome.

By Michallie K. Harrison | Opinion

The future I warned about deserves another look—with the executive orders, court decisions and economic projections that help explain what is at stake.

About a month after Donald Trump returned to the White House, I wrote an article imagining America in 2035 under the growing influence of fascism and oligarchy.

I described a country where elections continued but meaningful accountability disappeared. Where wealth bought political influence, ordinary people struggled to afford basic necessities, and entire communities found their rights dependent on whether those in power considered them worthy.

I wrote it as a warning.

Now, revisiting that warning in October 2026, I can attach government documents, court decisions and federal projections to several of the dangers I described. Other parts remain speculative and should be treated that way. Predicting the future carries a responsibility to distinguish what has happened from what we fear could happen next, and that distinction strengthens the argument.

The America I fear in 2035 could still have shopping malls, football games, presidential speeches and an election calendar. People could continue going to work while quietly calculating which opinions, relationships or medical decisions might cost them their livelihood. A nation can retain familiar routines while becoming a profoundly less free place to live.

America in 2035: How Fascism and Oligarchy Intersect

These words deserve more care than a political insult.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes fascism as an authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political philosophy that rejects democratic pluralism and individual equality. Its characteristics include exclusionary ideas about national belonging and the acceptance of violence in service of the nation.

Oligarchy concerns the concentration of power among a small group, often connected through wealth and influence.

The two can reinforce each other. Political leaders can cultivate loyalty by promising protection from supposedly dangerous outsiders. Meanwhile, wealthy interests can benefit from weakened oversight, diminished worker power and privileged access to decision-makers. That is the danger I see in the United States.

It also predates Trump. Concentrated wealth, discriminatory institutions and intrusive surveillance did not suddenly appear in January 2025. Recognizing that history makes the present more troubling: An administration seeking greater control can inherit systems already capable of delivering it.

By 2035, the question could be how much of that power has become permanent and who inherits it.

Democracy can survive on paper while losing substance

In March, the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute reported that the United States’ score on its Liberal Democracy Index fell 24% during 2025. The researchers identified a rapid concentration of presidential power and weakening institutional checks.

That is an assessment using V-Dem’s methodology, not a declaration that every democratic institution has collapsed. Its election-specific indicators were unchanged because those measures are reassessed during national election years. The report identified the 2026 midterms as a critical test. The pressure surrounding that test is already visible.

Reuters reported Oct. 17 that Trump threatened imprisonment for California officials amid a dispute over ballots issued to more than 20,000 people his administration alleges are probably noncitizens. California officials questioned the federal government’s methods and resisted its demands. Trump wrote that the officials would “go to jail for a long period of time.”

Allegations require evidence. Election disputes require lawful resolution. A president’s public threats add intimidation to that process.

There is a similar struggle over access to information. This month, a federal judge extended an order blocking the administration from excluding CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from the White House. The Associated Press reported that the judge found unlawful viewpoint discrimination.

The judicial intervention matters. It demonstrates that resistance within the system remains possible. My concern is what happens if officials increasingly learn that defending an independent decision brings threats, professional consequences or years of litigation. By 2035, elections could remain competitive in theory while the people responsible for administering them face relentless pressure to satisfy those already in power.

Democracy needs people who can say no and institutions capable of protecting them when they do.

When wealth becomes governing power

The economic foundation of oligarchy is easier to see in numbers. Federal Reserve estimates for the second quarter of 2026 show that the wealthiest 1% of households held approximately $60.3 trillion in net worth, combining the Fed’s two highest wealth groups. The bottom half held about $4.3 trillion.

Wealth alone does not establish that someone controls government. However, enormous differences in resources create enormous differences in the ability to finance campaigns, sustain litigation and influence public debate.

Federal campaign-finance rules permit super PACs to accept unlimited contributions from eligible individuals, corporations and labor organizations. Those are funds for independent political activity; they are not unlimited direct contributions to candidates. That distinction matters legally. The imbalance still matters politically.

An ordinary voter can support a candidate. A billionaire can help finance an entire political operation. At the same time, an honest warning must acknowledge economic improvements. Census Bureau figures released in September showed that inflation-adjusted median household income rose in 2025 and the official poverty rate fell. A claim that every economic measure is deteriorating would be false. But higher annual income and concentrated ownership can coexist.

The 2035 danger is a country where prosperity becomes increasingly disconnected from public power. People may earn enough to keep participating in the economy while having diminishing influence over the rules governing their lives.

Workers who cannot afford to object

Economic insecurity can become a form of political restraint. Consider a worker who fears losing health insurance, cannot cover a month without pay and has no effective organization behind them. Challenging an employer or participating in sustained protest carries a different cost for that person than for someone protected by substantial wealth.

The federal minimum wage has not been abolished. The Department of Labor explains that it remains $7.25 an hour for covered workers, and federal law generally requires overtime pay after 40 hours for covered, nonexempt employees.

Nevertheless, collective bargaining has faced direct pressure. Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order sought to exclude broad portions of the federal government from federal labor-relations protections, invoking national security.

That order concerns federal employment. It does not establish that every American worker has lost organizing rights. It does show how an administration can portray organized employee power as an obstacle to its objectives.

If that approach spreads and endures, the workplace of 2035 could leave more people formally free to object but financially unable to survive the consequences. A society should not require personal financial ruin as the price of standing up for fair treatment.

Housing as shelter or permanent dependence

My original warning imagined corporate ownership swallowing entire neighborhoods. The evidence calls for a more precise account.

A March 2026 Government Accountability Office report examined six metropolitan areas. Large institutional investors owned between 4% and 22% of single-family rental homes in those markets in 2024. Their share of all single-family homes was much smaller, ranging from less than 1% to 3%. Those six markets were not a nationally representative sample.

Corporate landlords do not own every neighborhood. They are also not the only explanation for unaffordable housing.

Even so, concentrated ownership in particular rental markets warrants scrutiny. A family experiences housing through the options available where it actually lives.

There has also been a policy response. GAO reported in July that Congress had passed housing legislation containing restrictions on institutional investors’ purchases of certain single-family homes. That development belongs in this account because it shows that political choices can push against concentration.

The question for 2035 is whether those choices produce lasting access to stable housing. If they do not, more families could spend decades paying for someone else’s asset while struggling to build security of their own. An eviction notice would carry consequences for employment, education and participation in community life.

Housing policy is part of the argument about freedom.

Health care: The consequences extend into the 2030s

Some of the most consequential evidence already reaches almost to the year in my original headline.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Medicaid provisions of the reconciliation law enacted July 4, 2025, would increase the number of people without health insurance by 7.5 million in 2034, compared with its baseline. That is a projection of the law’s effects, not a count of people who have already lost coverage.

It is still a staggering policy choice. Behind a coverage projection are people deciding whether they can afford an appointment, a prescription or an examination of symptoms they have been trying to ignore. By 2035, the consequences could include families carrying greater medical debt and workers feeling even less able to leave a job. People with money would retain alternatives that others could not reach.

I consider that a moral failure.

A wealthy country should measure its success partly by whether people can obtain care without sacrificing their financial stability. Government projections showing millions more uninsured deserve scrutiny before those consequences arrive.

Education and the power to question authority

An authoritarian future becomes easier to sustain when people have fewer opportunities to examine it critically.

On March 20, 2025, Trump directed the education secretary to facilitate closing the Department of Education to the extent permitted by law. The order described returning authority to states and local communities and also required continuity in services, programs and benefits. That directive did not, by itself, abolish public schools.

But it raised questions that cannot be answered with a slogan about shrinking Washington. Who will preserve access when a family lacks influence? Who will ensure that promised services remain available? What happens when a parent must challenge a powerful institution on a child’s behalf? Those questions become more urgent in the America I imagine in 2035.

Families with resources could purchase additional instruction, legal assistance and access. Families without them could be told to accept whatever remains. Education would increasingly determine who gets to exercise power and who is expected simply to live under it.

Public education should equip people to examine government, understand history and challenge the claims of powerful institutions. That purpose deserves protection.

Black and Brown Americans: Rights require enforcement

For Black and brown communities, a warning about unequal citizenship has a long history behind it. The danger includes the weakening of systems intended to make existing rights enforceable.

In May 2025, the Justice Department announced that it would seek dismissal of police-reform lawsuits in Louisville and Minneapolis, close the underlying investigations and retract findings of constitutional violations. The department argued that the investigations were flawed and the proposed consent decrees would impose excessive federal control and expense.

Those were the administration’s stated reasons. Communities still have reason to ask what happens when federal oversight retreats.

Immigration enforcement presents another example. In September 2025, the Supreme Court paused restrictions on certain immigration stops in Southern California. In a separate concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said apparent ethnicity could be considered alongside other factors, while emphasizing that ethnicity alone could not justify a stop. That was an interim ruling, and his reasoning should not be confused with a blanket authorization for racial profiling.

Even with those legal distinctions, the concern is serious: How much suspicion can attach to a person’s appearance, language or occupation before ordinary life becomes a recurring demand to prove belonging? By 2035, unequal treatment could become more difficult to challenge even while formal promises of equality remain.

A right loses practical value when the person whose rights were violated cannot obtain an effective remedy.

Women: Autonomy with a price tag

The country already provides a concrete example of rights varying sharply by geography. As of Oct. 16, KFF’s tracker listed 13 states with abortion bans and six more with early gestational limits between six and 12 weeks. Exceptions varied substantially; eight of those 19 states lacked exceptions for rape or incest.

There is no basis here for claiming that abortion is already prohibited nationwide. The existing restrictions are consequential enough.

A person who can pay for transportation, lodging, child care and time away from work has options unavailable to someone who cannot. Geography and money can determine whether a legal option elsewhere is a practical possibility. Women also retain federal workplace protections, including prohibitions on pregnancy discrimination and accommodation requirements for covered employers. Those protections should be defended and enforced.

The 2035 danger is that reproductive restrictions, inadequate support and financial dependence reinforce one another. Women could face expanding government control over pregnancy while receiving little help with the economic consequences.

Calling that arrangement “family values” would not make it just. Women deserve authority over their lives, meaningful economic independence and a government that treats them as full participants in society.

LGBTQ+ Americans: Exclusion through ordinary government decisions

A person can be pushed out of public life through decisions that initially look administrative. In January 2025, Trump ordered federal agencies to recognize only male and female sexes as defined in the order and directed changes involving identification documents, records and federal policy.

Then, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on certain medical treatments for transgender minors against the equal-protection challenge before it. That decision concerned a particular law and legal claim; it did not ban all gender-affirming care nationwide. Precision matters because the actual restrictions deserve scrutiny on their own terms.

By 2035, further restrictions could make ordinary decisions increasingly difficult: obtaining accurate documents, finding care, attending school safely or keeping a family together in a community where it feels welcome. The burden would extend beyond the people directly named in a policy. Parents, partners, teachers and medical professionals would also have to navigate its consequences.

A society should not make a minority’s ability to participate in public life depend on the comfort of the political majority.

Immigrants and the expansion of detention

The detention expansion is written into federal law. Section 90003 of the 2025 reconciliation law appropriated $45 billion, available through Sept. 30, 2029, for adult immigration detention capacity and family residential-center capacity. That appropriation does not prove every allegation about detention conditions. It does establish the scale of the government’s commitment to expanding confinement.

We should examine that commitment alongside the safeguards available to the people who encounter it: access to counsel, meaningful review, humane conditions and accountability for mistakes.

At the same time, my original scenario of birthright citizenship simply disappearing has encountered a significant constitutional barrier. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Trump v. Barbara that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. That ruling mattered because it shows why treating every institution as already defeated is both inaccurate and damaging.

The 2035 danger is a system in which increasingly expansive enforcement operates with increasingly weak accountability. People could become afraid to report exploitation, seek assistance or participate in their communities.

Immigrants are human beings. Their treatment should never become a test of how much cruelty the public can be persuaded to accept.

Disabled and older Americans: Dignity cannot depend on productivity

My original essay imagined a future in which older and disabled people were treated as disposable. The strongest evidence today concerns the decisions governments face over income and care.

The 2026 Social Security trustees’ report projected that the retirement and survivors trust fund would exhaust its reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032. Without changes in law, continuing revenue would then cover 78% of scheduled benefits. The separate disability fund was projected to remain able to pay full scheduled benefits through at least 2100. Those figures describe a financing problem that lawmakers can address. They do not establish that Social Security will disappear.

The stakes are enormous. Census estimates indicate that Social Security kept 28.8 million people out of poverty in 2025 under its supplemental poverty measure.

By 2035, failure to protect adequate income and accessible care could leave more families choosing between employment and unpaid caregiving. Older people could face deeper insecurity after decades of work. Disabled people could have fewer resources to live independently. Their dignity should not depend on whether a spreadsheet classifies them as economically productive.

A government’s treatment of people who need assistance tells us something fundamental about the society it is building.

Surveillance can make people police themselves

The surveillance systems an authoritarian administration might exploit have been developing across administrations.

A 2023 Homeland Security inspector general report found that Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service had failed to follow privacy requirements before procuring and using commercial telemetry data. The findings included failures involving required privacy-impact assessments.

Private employers also possess substantial monitoring capabilities. A 2025 GAO review examined tools including cameras, computer-monitoring software and location trackers. It found potential safety benefits alongside risks involving anxiety, injuries and flawed performance assessments that could affect workers’ employment.

These findings do not establish that the government reads everyone’s messages or maintains a single, all-knowing database. They do establish why collection, access, retention and oversight deserve public attention.

Related coverage: Police Can Collect Your Phone’s Data Even When You’re Not the Target

In the 2035 scenario, expanding surveillance could combine with weakened legal protections and economic dependence. People might begin avoiding a meeting, a protest or a difficult conversation because they cannot determine who will learn about it or how the information will be used.

That uncertainty can produce its own form of compliance. Privacy gives people room to think, associate and disagree. A society that steadily eliminates that room becomes less free.

The future is still being decided

These dangers do not operate independently.

A worker facing eviction has less capacity to sustain a strike. A family worried about detention may hesitate to seek help. A patient struggling to obtain care has less time and energy to challenge the policies that made it difficult.

Meanwhile, institutions capable of challenging power can be weakened one at a time, with each change presented as a separate administrative decision.

That is how I believe the America of 2035 could become a nation unraveled by fascism and oligarchy.

The evidence does not establish that this outcome is inevitable. The court decisions and legislative responses described here show that opposition can have consequences. Institutions can hold when people use them, defend them and insist that officials respect their limits.

The work is specific: protect lawful voting and election administration; support independent reporting; defend workers’ ability to organize; demand accountable policing; insist on meaningful privacy protections; and preserve access to health care, education and a secure old age.

It also requires solidarity before the threat reaches our own front door.

We cannot build a durable defense of freedom while treating somebody else’s rights as expendable. Nor can we assume that removing one leader will automatically undo powers and incentives that successors can inherit.

When I first wrote about America in 2035, the purpose was to make people consider where the country’s choices might lead.

That remains the purpose now.

Every decision that concentrates power, weakens accountability or makes people’s rights conditional deserves scrutiny while we still have the ability to challenge it.

The question is: What will we do to stop it?