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“The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call ‘competitive authoritarianism,’ doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. … Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.”
“If you were writing a hackneyed novel or film about an authoritarian America, it would go exactly like this: a figure close to the regime is assassinated, a massive shrill and sanctimonious hue and cry rises over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder, leaders in the regime and movement promise vengeance, private citizens are mobbed and lose their jobs for expressing anti-regime sentiments at the encouragement of regime officials and regime-aligned demagogues, and, then, the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime. … This is exactly what’s happening now.”
“It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous this moment is. Using the machinery of criminal justice to pursue manufactured charges against political predecessors is the stuff of strongmen and collapsing democracies… … It corrodes trust in democratic transitions, chills dissent, and redefines political opposition as criminal subversion.”
“Trump intends to send those he hates to foreign prisons beyond the reach of U.S. law. He does not care — he will not even seek to discover — if those he sends into these foreign hells are guilty of what he claims. Because this is not about their guilt — it is about his power. … And if he is capable of that, if he wants that, then what else is he capable of? What else does he want? And if the people who serve him are willing to give him that, to defend his right to do that, what else will they give him? What else will they defend?”
“Once you grasp Trump as an elected monarch, his full rebuke to the very idea of America comes into clearer view. He is precisely — almost uncannily — what this country was founded to oppose: an arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king.”
“I think we see a pretty consistent pattern of him wishing he was a dictator, wishing he could be Putin in America. That’s what’s dark to me about it. That’s what he really wants. He wants to be a dictator.”
— Chris Christie, speaking to the Financial Times about Donald Trump.
