This is a great, great...great read-

[DemocratSinceBirth]

How to Build an Autocracy
The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.


...




Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.




Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/#article-comments

[world wide wally]

1. Putin's marching orders for Trump:

"Destroy America and its institutions from within."

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. That is an awesome piece.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

3. It was crystal clear that by even considering Trump for the presidency

a large swath of American citizens lacked, "an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them."

For me, the "not meant to be a factual statement" incident was one of the many red flags. It was easy to laugh about , yet seriously un -amusing.

Of course, the masterfully devious RW propaganda apparatus purposely muddied these waters by fraudulently portraying Dems, particularly Obama and Clinton as dishonest and corrupt.