They can be inconsistent with their use of democracy because their conception of democracy is empty and purely formal and abstract. So it is easy for them to reinterpret political reality as ‘still democratic’ at the moment because their conception is very empty and has therefore relatively little to do with concrete, substantive democracy.

Also because Trump in no way upset the material basis which they actually use to decide if there is democracy or not, namely whether or not the capitalist class whose views they express and interests they support saw their class power undermined, which of course they did not under Trump.

To give an example of this: I was unfortunately in a conversation with a bourgeois liberal the other say, and they said that Russia is a ‘totalitarian society’. I asked why they thought that, instead of simply saying that it is a fairly authoritarian nationalist state with a form of highly state-directed capitalism, and they said that it is because they apparently ‘use arbitrary political power to violate private property’. Which is not only a bizarre criterion for totalitarianism, but also revealed how liberals think about political and social freedom and democracy.