Inside liberal circles Trump's return to the presidency of the US has rekindled uneasy questions about the health of "democracy". For them the word comes without adjectives, but we need to qualify it with "bourgeois". His farewell gesture from his first administration in January 2021 — inciting a reactionary horde to storm Capitol Hill, resulting in ransacking and murder — made it clear, if more clarity was needed, that the leader of the MAGA movement had a "flexible" interpretation of the formal respect due to bourgeois institutions.