The vice president of research at Freedom House, which is mostly funded by the U.S. taxpayer via the State Department, attended a panel ahead of the 2024 presidential election in which he accused Donald Trump of promoting a “dangerous” ideology that “assumes a level of violence,” and compared the then-former president to Vladimir Putin.
The online panel, unearthed by the Foundation for Freedom Online, was conducted a little under two months before the 2024 presidential elections, when polling analysis predicted a Trump win.
The panel’s topic of discussion was “Is Democracy a Democratic Form of Government?” Hosted by Georgetown University, the discussion focused on the success of populist parties and politicians around the world.
Freedom House, founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, has been supported by the U.S. federal government through most of its existence. In 2024 alone, it received $80 million in taxpayer funds, per Reuters.
In 2025, the Trump Administration’s USAID funding freeze caused it to suspend much of its global operations.
In 2024, however, Freedom House was still going strong – and its VP of research, Adrian Shahbaz, did his best to condemn Donald Trump’s political platform.
Shahbaz stated:
And it’s either taking back power from billionaires, or it’s taking back power from these international bodies, whether that’s Brussels or the United Nations or the WTO, or it’s taking back power from immigrants, essentially, or these others within the LGBTQ community. You know, there are all of these conspiracies about all of these actors working in unison with one another somehow to reject the power of the majority. And I think it’s really interesting to see, starting with somebody like Viktor Orban in Hungary, but also Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, is they’re using this similar narrative, and it’s something that is picked up by Vladimir Putin in Russia and used to connect with right-wing audiences around the world.
Shahbaz went on to say that President Trump’s ideology was “dangerous” and potentially “violent” against minorities and institutions, before claiming that the U.S. has undergone “democratic backsliding” – the same label Freedom House has pinned on other countries with successful populist movements, like Hungary and Brazil.
And I find that ideology quite dangerous because it assumes a level of violence against the other. It assumes a level of violence against institutions, right? And we saw that with January 6th and with election denialism, where the populism comes from almost this myth that this national leader reflects the will of the people, despite the level of backsliding that we are seeing in many democracies.
It’s still rather rare for a, let’s say, a consolidated liberal democracy to slide all the way down into autocracy, particularly those countries that have had a free status for a long time. But that said, you know, we certainly never know. And there are important reasons why we are genuinely seeing democratic backsliding in places like the United States and Europe and Brazil, other democracies.
Other panelists offered no disagreement with Shahbaz’s comments, and went on to call for regulation of social media platforms to prevent “disinformation.”
“how do we operate democracy in a marketplace of political ideas that’s full of sewage?” complained the panelist, before arguing that the government would make better stewards of social media platforms than Big Tech CEOs.
“I don’t know why Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is to be preferred to Joe Biden or Merrick Garland,” mused the panelist, University of Alabama law professor Ronald Krotoszynski.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
