Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Trump fires back after Chief Justice Roberts rebukes him" video.

  1. Trump clearly has the criminal mind of a dictator.  And his supporters are flirting with authoritarianism. "Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one." John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Today Dean believes Trump could be one of the most corrupt presidents ever—and get away with it. “The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested." Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it. “I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle."  Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
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