An Antidemocratic President
It Can Happen Here
Donald Trump presents a conundrum, James Carville observes; He is a pathological liar, yet we are to take seriously his threats of retribution and authoritarian schemes if he's elected President.
He is an enemy of truth. The Washington Post's reliable fact-checker found 30,537 examples of false or misleading statements during his Presidency. He even lied about having sex with an adult movie actress who he paid $130,000 to keep quiet about it before the 2016 presidential election.
Take his anti-democratic blueprint very seriously; he promised conservatives that he'd be "your retribution."
His inexperience, and ignorance, prevented a lot of bad stuff for much of his Presidential term, More instructive is his final chapter: he tried to overturn a legitimate election, inciting violence, as top military brass worried about him staging a coup, sidetracked his conservative White House lawyers for outside hacks who told him what he wanted to hear, replaced or tried to replace top officials at the Defense and Justice Department with people whose loyalty was more to him than the country.
When I asked a diplomat friend about another Trump term, he sent me a copy of Sinclair Lewis' classic, "It can't Happen here." It is a novel set in the 1930s on how America falls prey to a fascist dictatorship.