Sobering read: Trump's authoritarian style is remaking America

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/02/14/trumps-authoritarian-style-is-remaking-america/

By Ishaan Tharoor

Feb. 14, 2020 at 12:00 a.m. EST

Over the course of his presidency, there have been myriad warnings about President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. He has played to the fears of his critics by blowing past the republic’s increasingly creaky system of checks and balances. And with the aid of a right-wing echo chamber, he has pushed forward a narrative that conflates national interest with his personal gain, patriotism with unflinching loyalty to the occupant of the Oval Office.

As Trump embarks on a reelection campaign and basks in the aftermath of the Senate impeachment trial — in which, thanks to a Republican Party wholly captured by Trumpism, acquittal was seemingly always a fait accompli — he is adding to the strains on America’s polarized democracy. His calls this week for prosecutions of his perceived enemies and public attacks on federal judges and prosecutors involved in cases against his allies were so abnormal that it led to an unlikely rebuke from Attorney General William P. Barr, a Cabinet official largely viewed by Trump’s opponents as shamefully acquiescent.

The Washington Post’s White House reporters described a president “simmering with rage, fixated on exacting revenge against those he feels betrayed him and insulated by a compliant Republican Party.” He is willing to test the rule of law even further and is comfortable doing so, they reported, “to the point of feeling untouchable.”

“If a president can meddle in a criminal case to help a friend, then there’s nothing that keeps him from meddling to harm someone he thinks is his enemy,” Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney, told my colleagues. “That means that a president is fully above the law in the most dangerous kind of way. This is how democracies die.”

</snip>

[trusty elf]

1. "This is how democracies die."

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Is anyone, who lives in a white flight community, surprised by Trump's

boldness with his autocratic style, using public positions to benefit himself, his family and his friends?

[llmart]

3. I fear many Americans don't think it could happen here.

That last, bolded paragraph is frightening.

[Dennis Donovan]

4. What makes this even MORE frightening is that he's getting WORSE since the trial 9 days ago

What will he be like this time next week??? 😳😬

[struggle4progress]

5. We have several advantages in this fight: we outnumber them; we're right and they're wrong; and

maybe they can fool many people sometimes and some people most times, but they won't always fool everybody

The basic truths that narcissists and sociopaths overlook is that many minds are better than few, that facts eventually triumph over ideology, and that nobody is ever as smart as they think they are

They will suddenly discover that friends come and go but real enemies inexorably accumulate