Another Damning Phone Call
"President Trump's relentless effort to overturn the result of the election that he lost has become the most serious stress test of American democracy in generations, led not by outside revolutionaries intent on bringing down the system but by the very leader charged with defending it.
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"The president has gone well beyond simply venting his grievances or creating a face-saving narrative to explain away a loss, as advisers privately suggested he was doing in the days after the Nov. 3 vote, but instead has pressed the boundaries of tradition, propriety and the law to find any way he can cling to office beyond his term that expires in two weeks. That he is almost certain to fail does not mitigate the damage he is doing to democracy by undermining public faith in the electoral system.
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"His hourlong telephone call over the weekend with Georgia's chief election official, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to 'find' enough votes to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory in that state [and implicitly threatening criminal charges if he refused] only brought into stark relief what Mr. Trump has been doing for weeks.
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"But Mr. Trump's efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary.
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"'Trump's attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how authoritarianism works in the 21st century," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present. 'Today's leaders come in through elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office—until they get enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there indefinitely, as Putin and Orban have done.'" — Peter Baker; The New York Times—An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office
Matt Chase
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