Donald Trump says he is not a dictator. Isn’t he? | Donald Trump

Speaking in the oval office this week, Donald Trump had something he wanted to clarify.

“I am not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator,” said the president.

However, his comments occurred for weeks after having deployed armed soldiers and human -style military vehicles to patrol the streets of Washington, affirming, despite all the available evidence, that the use of the National Guard was necessary to control crime.

The remarks followed Trump to remember or threatened to retain billions of dollars from universities, and after the raid increasingly politicized by the FBI on John Bolton’s house, an eminent critic of Trump.

Trump has also targeted law firms who have deposited prosecution to which he opposed, while the Federal Communications Commission, led by one named by Trump, a survey on all the main dissemination network, except Fox, which owns the Fox Pro-Trump news channel. Trump personally continued information channels on critical coverage and dismissed the best government’s work statistician because she has published job data he did not like.

He threatened the Democrats with prosecution and demanded that former President Barack Obama are the subject of an investigation for betrayal. Trump did it all because his family has won millions of dollars at his presidency.

None of these things are typical for a democratic leader. So … is Trump a dictator?

“Yes, of course,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology at Princeton University who has spent years looking for autocracies, notably Hungary and Russia. Scheppele said that she had hesitated to use the term “dictatorship” until recently, but said: “If I hesitated before, it is this mobilization of the National Guard and the indication that he plans to go beyond the resistance by force which now means that we are there.”

Trump, embarked on by a republican party who seems willing to let their leader do whatever he wants, now threatens to send troops to democratic cities, notably Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York, causing an outcry and accusations of violence.

Scheppele said: “He really plans a military and repressive force to get out of the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and simply deposit everything.”

Most modern dictators try to hide their aspirations. Scheppele said that leaders such as Russia Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went to “great efforts” to avoid resembling “20th century dictators” in hopes that they can avoid the label.

“If you think of dictators like, you know, tanks in the streets and a large number of soldiers greeting the leader and the big posters of the leader who goes up in national buildings, everything that reminds all of Hitler and Russia in Stalin and everything and Mussolini in Italy,” she said.

Hence Orbán, Erdoğan and others try to avoid these scenes. But that doesn’t seem to bother Trump.

This week, a giant banner was draped in the building of the Ministry of Labor, showing that Trump rising on Washington DC above the slogan “American workers First”. The day of his birthday, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the training of the American army, he held a military parade in the capital and would have been furious that the troops would not seem “threatening”.

In Trump’s first term, while he rushed against political standards, the book How Democracies Die – which examined the dismantling of democracies around the world – has become a bestseller. Steven Levitsky, the book co-author and political scientist at Harvard University, said Trump had the mentality of a classic tin pot dictator “, but said the president has failed to become so far.

“Technically, in terms of political science, no, he is not a dictator. The United States, I think, collapse in a form of authoritarianism. But he has not consolidated in a pure and simple dictatorship,” said Levitsky.

Trump said he was not a dictator, but said last week: “Many people say:” Maybe we would like a dictator. “” It is not clear to whom he was referring, but he continued the theme on Tuesday.

“The line is that I am a dictator. But I stop the crime. So many people say:” You know, if that’s the case, I prefer to have a dictator “,” said Trump at a meeting of the cabinet.

The Guardian asked the White House what data that Trump quoted when he said that the Americans wanted a dictator, but did not receive an answer.

Levitsky reiterated that he does not believe that Trump is a dictator in the real sense, but added: “Dictators everywhere, first of all, claim that they are not dictators. And secondly, it is, somewhat contradictory, to say that people want a dictator. These are classic dictator lines. “

The United States has already expressed interest in authoritarianism. At the height of its fame, a third of the Americans expressed themselves in the radio broadcasts by Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose anti -Semitic programs praised Benito Mussolini. The laws of Jim Crow were authorized to apply racial segregation in the 1960s, while Senator Joseph McCarthy was authorized to persecute the alleged communists during the so-called red breakdown.

“You can still, in many periods in American history, find 25, 30% of the American electorate that was authoritarian, and I think it’s really true today,” said Levitsky.

Today, this is a “big piece” of the republican party, he said, and Trump is looking at this basis.

“There is a real performance side to the authoritarianism of this government, which suggests that there is a constituency for this, which is very frightening. And I have really seen nothing such a type of performative authoritarianism, honestly, since the 1930s in Europe,” he said.

Most authoritarian countries of the 21st century are “hybrid regimes,” said Levitsky. He underlined Venezuela, Hungary, Tunisia and Turkey, where Erdoğan spent more than two decades in power, cementing his position by repressing the country’s media and bringing thousands of criminal cases against people who insult the president.

“They are authoritarian, in that they are not entirely democratic: there are generalized abuses of power which incline the rules of the game against the opposition. So no one would look at Turkey and say: “It’s a democracy”. But that’s not what I would call a dictatorship.

There is, said Levitsky, a “no zero chance” that Trump can use emergency powers – as he has justified immigration measures and prices – to overthrow the Constitution, potentially undermining the elections.

But, he said: “The most likely result is a lighter authoritarianism where the opposition exists, the opposition is above the board of directors, the opposition competitions for power, participates in the elections.

“The government does not win all its battles, but the abuse of power – as we have seen in the last six months – the abuse of power is so widespread, so systematic and violations of the law, rights violations are so widespread and systematic that the rules of the game begin to include opposition.

“And you don’t call it a complete democracy.”