Is Trump the death knell of American democracy as we know it?

The chamber declined to call time on American democracy, No winning by a dozen points, but the more telling shape here is generational, and it isn't a straight line. Both the youngest voters and the over-65s leaned towards "yes", while the broad middle — thirty-five to sixty-four, the bulk of the electorate on the platform — was the most sceptical of the alarm, rejecting the premise roughly two to one.

That U-shape cuts against the usual assumption that anxiety about democratic backsliding rises steadily with distance from Trump's base. Instead it was the pensioners, old enough to remember Watergate and the Cold War's ideological stakes, and the youngest cohort, who've known nothing but a polarised, permanently-online politics, who were readiest to entertain the "death knell" framing. Gender barely registered by comparison — men split much as the chamber did overall, women split down the middle exactly.

The result mirrors the wider transatlantic argument about institutional resilience: whether courts, elections and the press are proving Trump's second term a stress test survived, or merely a stay of execution. That the middle-aged and middle-class core here were the most confident democracy would hold suggests less complacency than a generational memory of institutions absorbing shocks before.

If there is a verdict in the noise, it is that alarm about American democracy on this platform is a horseshoe, not a slope.