'Echoes what I’ve seen': Dictatorship expert says Trump threatens 'the American project'
New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof has a career of watching nations crumble into authoritarianism and oppression. America, he says, is also showing the signs.
“America has periodically faced great national tests,” Kristof wrote on Wednesday. “The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.”
“I’ve seen all this before,” he warns, noting the “chummy scene in the White House this week as Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador "bonded over human rights abuses" from the Oval Office.
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But Kristof said the brand of authoritarianism he says Trump is embracing goes much further than legal residents getting snatched and dumped in a foreign prison. Trump’s record of disregarding court orders is a "challenge to the nation’s "constitutional system," with appellate judges warning the administration’s stubbornness portrays a “path of perfect lawlessness” heralding the government eventual ability to “send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
He went on to say that Trump, like many authoritarians, seeks to trample all institutions that oppose him by withholding federal funding and using executive orders to target law firms hired to represent his perceived enemies. Nine law firms have already surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s pet causes, and Columbia University acquiesced to the administration's demands before federal cuts could hurt.
Kristof considered Harvard University’s recent refusal to Trump’s demands “a dollop of hope,” however, and he urged more institutions and Americans to see the Trump administration as not only authoritarian but as a reckless "vandalism of the American project." He argued this could be an easy selling point, considering Trump's overt attacks on schools like Harvard University also impacts the university's research on Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments,” Kristof wrote, calling this moment “a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.”
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Read Kristof's full essay in the New York Times here (subscription required).
