– Donald Trump, April 13th.
That Maya Angelou quote about believing people when they show you who they are gets tossed around quite a bit in reference to the 45th President of the United States, but it seems like no matter how many times Donald J. Trump beats us over the head with the message, there are still a lot of people who don’t quite get it.
So allow me to translate: Trump and his allies within the GOP ecosystem are hostile to democracy. Their response to the COVID-19 outbreak clarifies existing authoritarian trends within the regime and the broader Republican coalition and provides a pretext for accelerating them. Most recently, Trump fired both the Inspector General for the intelligence community who complied with the law and passed on a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s attempt to strong arm Ukraine to Congress, and the Inspector General originally responsible for overseeing over $2 trillion in pandemic bailout funds. (We’ll return to these offenses.)
In How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide a checklist of authoritarian behavior which weaken and eventually destroy democracies. They include: Undermining the legitimacy of elections; denying the legitimacy of political opponents; tolerating or encouraging violence and attempts to curtail civil liberties, including or especially the freedom of the press. The Trump administration checks every box. Continue reading.