Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: America is resisting Trump’s authoritarian and ethnic grievance onslaught. The rural south, Midwest, and mountain and desert west is not. And those who resist it are being read out of the Republican Party. Max Boot is a little too optimistic here: Max Boot: America is resisting Trump’s onslaught. Just don’t get cocky: "if Trump ruled in Italy in the 1920s, Argentina in the 1950s or Venezuela in the 2000s, he would undoubtedly be a dictator by now...
...But he doesn’t. Trump is the president of one of the oldest and most stable constitutional republics on the planet. We have checks and balances, and they are mostly working. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.... The civil service.... The press.... The judiciary is invalidating some of his proposed regulations. Even the Republican-controlled Congress, while shamefully refusing to resist his assault on the rule of law, has crammed down Trump’s throat a tough Russia sanctions bill that he hated to sign. So far our democracy, for the most part, has resisted the Trumpian onslaught. But don’t get cocky. Trump has been in office only a year, and already Freedom House has downgraded the United States in its Freedom in the World Survey “due to growing evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, violations of basic ethical standards by the new administration, and a reduction in government transparency.” How much worse might the damage become if Trump stays in power for another three or even, heaven help us, seven years?
That is why it is so disgraceful that so many Republicans are actively abetting Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice by undermining the credibility of the FBI and the Justice Department. In the republic’s hour of peril, most Republicans are either cheering the assault on democratic norms or pretending it doesn’t exist. I was a lifelong Republican until the day after Trump’s election, but I now agree with the centrist writers Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch when they call for voters to support Democrats “mindlessly and mechanically,” because “the Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy”...
