Democracy's Destruction? Changing Perceptions of the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and the Senate after the 2020 Election

Abstract Did Trump and his Make America Great Again followers inflict damage on American political institutions via election denialism and the assault on the U.S. Capitol? Although most pundits and many scholars find this a question easy to answer in the affirmative, to date, little rigorous evidence on Trump's institutional consequences has been adduced. Based on surveys of representative samples of the American people in July 2020, December 2020, March 2021, and June 2021, this detailed analysis examines whether American political institutions lost legitimacy over the period from before the presidential election to well after it and whether any such loss is associated with acceptance of the “Big Lie” about the election and its aftermath. My highly contrarian conclusion is simple: try as they might (and did), Trump and his Republicans, in fact, did not succeed in undermining American national political institutions. The empirical evidence indicates that institutions seem to be more resilient than many have imagined, just as legitimacy theory would predict.