The New Republic reports that President Donald Trump is having an easier jog to dictatorship thanks to American complacency, say scholars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
McKenzie Carrier and Thomas Carothers, among other democracy experts, are surprised at “how quickly and decisively Trump has dismantled long-standing limits on presidential power.”
“Relative to other backsliding cases, the Trump team has acted with uncommon early momentum in its efforts to consolidate power,” they write.
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Carrier and Carothers compared Trump’s administration to regimes in Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey. The scholars not Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, ended democracy largely through executive overreach instead of a military coup.
And like Orbán and Tayyip Erdoğan, they say Trump is taking advantage of allies in other government branches to wrest control, mostly in the name of one-party domination.
Trump, according to Carothers and Carrier, is employing three general tactics: Personally dominating the executive branch of government and firing everyone not aligned with him; using his presidency to dominate other parts of government and ignoring and overriding court rulings, congressional appropriations, and states and municipalities; and attacking the independence of U.S. civil society by forcing law firms and universities to abide by Trump’s edicts or face the loss of federal funding and security clearances.
But Trump and his administration are moving faster than other autocratic regimes, they note.
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“Steps comparable to the series of measures that Trump took in his early days to consolidate control over the executive workforce took form over a year-long period in Hungary,” the scholars argue. Trump has had a matter of months.
Foreign despots generally passed their antidemocratic agendas through their legislatures when they could, the scholars add. But a neutered Republican Congress and Supreme Court appear to allow Trump to dictate through “executive orders, states of emergency, funding threats and cut-offs, and rhetorical tactics to achieve its executive aggrandizement ends, with little energy spent on legislative pathways.”
Read the New Republic report at this link.