In a one-hour phone call on Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021 with Georgia election officials, President Trump insisted he won the state and threatened vague legal consequences if the officials did not act. This audio has been edited to remove the name of an individual about whom the president makes unsubstantiated allegations.
[Source: Washington Post]
impeachment
Authoritarianism experts warn time is running out to stop Trump
“The Republican Party is betraying democracy,” a Yale professor and expert on facism told Insider, adding that “someone has got to push back.”
If Americans are concerned that President Donald Trump and Republicans are moving the US toward becoming a one-party, authoritarian state, they are running out of time to stop them, experts warned.
Trump has exhibited autocratic impulses since his 2016 campaign and from the moment he entered the White House.
The president has attacked virtually every democratic institution in the US when he’s felt its actions were unfavorable to his agenda or public appearance. Meanwhile, he pushed traditional US allies away while openly embracing many of the world’s most repressive leaders.
These trends have raised concern among top experts on authoritarianism, fascism, and democracy, but they’ve often said that the robust political system in the US, with its checks and balances and constitutional norms, has prevented Trump from becoming a full-blown authoritarian and doing whatever he wants.
Since Trump was acquitted in the Senate earlier this month after being impeached in the House over his dealings with Ukraine, there’s been a White House purge of impeachment witnesses, and Attorney General William Barr has intervened in the trial of a close associate of the president, Roger Stone. And the experts’ tone has changed dramatically.
‘Someone has got to push back’
“The system is enabling Trump,” Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who wrote “How Fascism Works,” told Insider.
America was its own worst enemy. Now we are our own best hope.
Writer and scholar Sarah Kendzior argues freedom is about what it means to be human, so we must protect it at all costs.
One of the most common refrains when a democracy collapses into an autocracy is that no one could have seen it coming.
The motivation behind this myth is the absolution of the powerful. After all, what cannot be predicted cannot be prevented, and therefore the failure of officials to safeguard our freedoms should be forgiven. This is the story we hear as Donald Trump approaches a possible second term and the U.S. plunges into unprecedented turmoil.
The premise, of course, is a lie.
What “No one saw it coming” tells you is who the powerful consider to be “no one.” “No one” are the multitude of marginalized Americans who warned in 2016 that their rights had always been on the line and would be even more so now. “No one” are the people who knew that a future American autocracy was possible because their ancestors had been subject to past ones: slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, and other forms of legal subjugation that were destroyed only through decades of defiant demands for their eradication.
George Conway: Republican senators run the risk of being shamed by Trump himself
They should think twice before short-circuiting his removal trial.
Dec. 19, 2019 at 7:00 a.m. EST
If anything has cheapened or trivialized the process by which Trump was impeached, it was House Republicans’ refusal to treat the proceedings with the seriousness the Constitution demands. Unable to defend the president’s conduct on the merits, GOP members of the House resorted to deception, distortion and deflection: pretending that Trump didn’t ask President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rival; claiming that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 election; and throwing up all manner of silly assertions of procedural unfairness.
Now, as the process moves to the Senate, Republican senators threaten the ultimate cheapening and trivialization of Congress’s constitutional obligations: holding a “trial” that would be nothing but a sham.