'Purge and pack': Ex-DOJ officials, scholars sound the alarm on Trump’s 'openly authoritarian campaign'

22 November 2023

Michael Cohen, 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's former personal attorney and fixer, has vowed to seek political asylum in another country if Trump returns to the White House. During a recent appearance on ITV in the U.K., Cohen said, "I fear for my life" and warned that Trump's vow to take revenge on his political enemies needs to be taken seriously.

Cohen told ITV, "It's not just me. It's judges, it's lawyers, it's citizens. It's prosecutors. It's Congress members. He will exact revenge on anyone and everyone that he's capable of."

Cohen isn't the only one who is sounding the alarm about the former president. In an article published on November 22, The Guardian's Peter Stone reports that major scholars and legal experts fear Trump will "govern as an unprecedentedly authoritarian American leader" if he wins the 2024 election.

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"Scholars and ex-justice officials see increasing evidence that if they achieved power again, Trump and his MAGA allies plan to tighten his control at key agencies and install trusted loyalists in top posts at the DOJ and the FBI, permitting Trump more leeway to exact revenge on foes, and shrinking agencies Trump sees as harboring 'Deep State' critics," Stone explains. "Ominously, Trump has threatened to tap a special prosecutor to 'go after' Biden and his family. Trump's angry mindset was revealed on Veterans Day when he denigrated foes as 'vermin' who needed to be 'rooted out,' echoing fascist rhetoric from Italy and Germany in the 1930s."

One of those critics is Steven Levitsky, author of the 2019 book "How Democracies Die" and a political scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Levitsky told The Guardian, "I'm hard pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies. This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I've ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use."

According to Levitsky, "U.S. democratic institutions are hard to kill. But Trump and people around him are better prepared this time. Trump learned he needs to purge and pack an administration with his loyalists."

Similarly, conservative attorney Donald Ayer, who served as deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, told The Guardian, "It is appalling that a presidential candidate could suggest using the Department of Justice to go after his political adversaries, to go after Biden and his family, and to effectively make the Department of Justice an arm of the White House to be used for its political purposes."

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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