One of the joys of last week was watching Vice President Kamala Harris deftly criticize former President Trump for his affinity for dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“It’s completely public knowledge that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to become president again because it’s clear that they can manipulate you with flattery and favor,” Harris said. If Trump won a second term, she said, he would be willing to hand Ukraine over to Putin “for favor and for what you would consider to be friendship … with a dictator.”
In his rambling response, Trump repeated his dubious claim that Russia would never invade Ukraine under his administration and added that Putin has nuclear weapons “and ultimately, he will probably use them,” Trump said.
I’m talking about Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian leader and popular favorite. I’d love to quote him exactly, but I couldn’t extract a single meaningful sentence from Trump’s comments about Orbán.
Trump has always hinted at the idea of authoritarianism, but now those hints have become reality: He is using the Department of Justice as a weapon against his political opponents, gutting the civil service and replacing professional federal employees with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quell protests, reinstating the Muslim immigration ban, and threatening to put millions of immigrants in detention camps.
If you think he’s not serious, then you’re in denial.
Trump had already tried to coerce state officials to overturn the results of a free and fair election. When that failed, his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his loss to Joe Biden. Even before that, a former Secretary of State called Trump “the first anti-democratic president in modern American history.”
And like most dictators and would-be dictators, he is cruel, deriding those who gave their lives for their country, mocking the disabled, and separating children from their families.
To say democracy experts are worried would be an understatement.
“I believe Trump poses a very serious threat to American democracy,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of numerous books on democracy. “He has repeatedly demonstrated through his words and actions that he does not value democracy, does not respect constitutional norms, will not accept the results of a democratic election he lost, and only values friendship with autocrats like Orban and Putin, not with our democratic allies.”
It’s July 2019, two and a half years into Trump’s presidency, and he has just published “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency,” a disturbing look at the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. An entire chapter, titled “The Decline of American Democracy,” is devoted to Trump.
“The president’s vulgarity and crudeness can be tolerated,” Diamond wrote. “Bad policies can be challenged and reversed. But the threat Trump poses to America’s democratic institutions and norms is unprecedented.”
And the threat has only grown more serious, Diamond told me in an email from Taiwan on Thursday, especially since a bedrock American ideal is that “no one is above the law.”
“He is far crazier now than he was when he ran for president in 2016 or 2020, and I genuinely fear he will abuse his presidential power and use it as a weapon against his opponents,” Diamond wrote. “Especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions that have expanded immunity from prosecution to virtually any act a president takes while in office that can be claimed to be official business.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of Trump’s popularity is his supporters’ willingness to embrace a president with unlimited powers.
A February Pew Research Center survey of global opinion on authoritarianism found that roughly one-third of Americans support a system in which “strong leaders are able to make decisions without interference from legislatures or courts.” (Not surprisingly, this roughly matches the share of Americans who genuinely want a second term for Trump.)
Diamond has repeatedly stated that democracies with strong protections for civil liberties and the rule of law do not die suddenly of a heart attack, but rather die slowly, poisoned to the core by the fear and anger sowed by demagogues like Trump.
“People say we lost,” he said in Arizona last week, during one of his usual whinings about 2020. “But we didn’t lose, and we’re going to make sure that never happens again in our country.”
Pay attention, he tells you exactly what he plans to do.
