➽➜MSC⇢ Tyranny expert explains how Donald Trump has ‘ceded the election’ but is creating a crisis to ‘cling to power’ This week, as the economy revealed that the U.S. GDP cratered, President Donald Trump teased putting a hold on the November election. While it is unclear if the president was attempting to distract from the economy in freefall or his falling poll numbers.
Historian and expert on authoritarian regimes, Professor Timothy Snyder, authored of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, describing the key ways to spot authoritarianism.
“Do we have any reason to believe that Mr. Trump would accept the outcome of the election?” asked the Yale professor. “The tweet of July 30th was a very clear statement, but he has literally, dozens of times before said he wouldn’t. There is nothing in his career that indicates he actually likes democracy. In this particular tweet, we have a dangerous mixture, where he’s talking about a problem he created himself, insofar as we do have problems with voting in the U.S. They have to do with things like African-Americans not being enfranchised, they have to do with the things of foreign intervention. And even the problems he mentioned, which is postal voting, which is good and of itself, that might be slowed down because of his own postmaster general. So, he’s talking about problems he caused himself, then claiming they’re an emergency, and using that as a reason to claim power himself. That’s a manufactured emergency and that is, in fact, a prime historical fascist tactic.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tyranny-expert-explains-how-donald-trump-has-ceded-the-election-but-is-creating-a-crisis-to-cling-to-power/