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Democracy and the rule of law can only defend themselves within limits.

Given the right framework, they can defend themselves against their opponents if they come from outside or from below.

But they are not made to withstand attacks from above.

So it was always an exciting - and extremely important, if not decisive - question of who would bend whom: Donald Trump the political system of the United States?

Or America’s system for the president, who made little secret of his disdain for the traditional separation of powers?

One could hope that the system would prove to be stronger.

But in the United States in living memory, nobody in the United States wanted to subdue the state apparatus as much as Trump, so there are no empirical values ​​from America.

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And a look at other countries has made it clear, especially in recent years, how unresilient political systems are towards an "enemy within" - one only has to look to Russia, Hungary and Turkey.

Now the USA may be more stable than countries whose democratic and constitutional traditions go back only a few decades or even a few years.

But the historical experience is sobering: "Nothing about freedom is natural," says the Turkish-American top economist Daron Acemoglu after years of research on the subject.

“Societies do not move towards it according to natural laws, on the contrary.” Countries that wanted to maintain democracy and the rule of law always move in a “narrow corridor”, says Acemoglu.

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America, which shows Trump's concession to vacate the Oval Office after the election of Joe Biden by the electoral college, has remained in the narrow corridor.

It had to be clear to every observer for years that Trump would not simply admit defeat in the election.

It was also to be expected that he would look for ways to stay in office.

Now he's going.

Apparently not out of respect for the political rules he learned late - but simply because none of the three strands of the political separation of powers found sufficient support for his attempt to unruly shift the election result in his favor.

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In their national anthem, the Americans sing about the defense against the British onslaught on Baltimore in 1814 - and the huge stars and stripes that torn after a hard night, but still proudly wafts over Fort McHenry.

The approaching end of the Trump era is a reminder: "The flag is still there."