If another leader of another nation stood in another simmering capital and instructed police and law enforcement to “dominate the streets” against protesters, then walked through a park where government officers had forcibly cleared demonstrators from his path, then arrived outside a church to hold a Bible aloft like a championship trophy for the cameras — well, what would America think of that? “If we were seeing this in another country,” said Kori Schake, a former Pentagon official and Republican policy adviser, “we would be deeply concerned and talking about the foreign policy consequences of states behaving this way.”It is time, some opponents and academics agree, to have the conversation. From the earliest days of this norm-smashing administration, fretful critics, scholars and foreign policy experts have kept watch for signals of President Trump’s anti-democratic streak. This has not always required an exhaustive search. But the White House response to the gushing national traumas of this moment appears to have registered on another plane, producing the kinds of scenes and sound bites that some doomsayers had long prophesied and adding to the mounting social and public health crises a festering concern about the state of American democracy itself.

Source: New York Times June 02, 2020 21:09 UTC