Heaven Forfend! Political Horror Stories.

22-3-13 DUHnocchio: Bully-in-Cheat as UNpresident again? | 60 Min > .

As to Kari Lake, there is nothing polite to say.  

"Ever since the [disastrous] 2016 election, observers like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt speculated that t-RUMP could undermine American democracy and move the country in an overtly authoritarian direction. That possibility grew more plausible over the years of the t-RUMP Badministration, as he sought to undermine a growing list of American institutions that stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media (which he branded “enemies of the American people”) and of course the integrity of elections themselves. t-RUMP made his authoritarian instincts clear by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the 2020 election [both of which he very definitely did].

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t-RUMP really does deserve more careful comparison with other leaders. There are indeed certain parallels between him and contemporary populists like Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, insofar as they all rely on a similar rural social base for their support. On the other hand, there are unexplained differences: Orban, Duterte and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, for example, used the COVID pandemic to vastly expand executive authority, while t-RUMP did the opposite, abdicating responsibility and shifting authority to the governors. Most strongmen are ruthlessly efficient and Machiavellian; t-RUMP demonstrated incredible incompetence in failing to build his border wall, repeal Obamacare or expand his voter base. And, of course, he failed to win re-election to a second term. Revelations in The New York Times of t-RUMP’s tax returns suggest he ran for president not out of a mad desire for power, but simply to avoid bankruptcy in his failed hotel business. And yet, despite myriad revelations, he exerted a magnetic pull on his core followers. Why? Perhaps it might be more useful to understand the ways that t-RUMP is sui generis, and how he could set a pattern for strongmen of the future, rather than reprising familiar precedents from the past."

Francis Fukuyama : [review] Authoritarians From Mussolini to t-RUMP .