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“Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.”

But what if picking him over the insiders means picking autocracy over the rule of law? The next few months will tell us if enough Americans prefer a criminal president to a Democratic one. I’m genuinely afraid of what the answer may be.

At its inception, “the republic provided a legal and political structure that channeled the individual energies of Romans in ways that benefited the entire Roman commonwealth.”

But over the following centuries, that foundation slowly weakened, and then rapidly collapsed.

Since the founding fathers explicitly modeled the United States on the Roman Republic, a study that investigates the circumstances of its demise promises to hold considerable relevance for our own times

the bigger point is that it’s not really about McCabe or Amazon. Having a sitting President launching scathing personal attacks on a federal law enforcement officer and demanding his firing or imprisonment for personal and political motives is wildly outside the norms that govern the American system. Similarly, a President who routinely threatens prosecutorial or regulatory vengeance against private companies because they are not sufficiently politically subservient to him personally is entirely outside of our system of governance.

At present, Donald Trump is an autocrat without an autocracy. The system mostly resists his demands because it’s not designed to operate that way and we have centuries worth of norms that are remarkably resilient. But systems change. And it’s clear that ours is already starting to change under his malign influence.

Preserving a rule of law political system from sliding into one that is corrupt and autocratic is much more important than the specifics of whether any one company is monopolistic or nefarious or the individual rights and wrongs of what some high level executive at the FBI may or may not have done

Global confidence in US leadership has fallen to a new low, and the country now ranks below China in worldwide approval ratings, according to a new Gallup poll.

The survey of opinion in 134 countries showed a record collapse in approval for the US role in the world, from 48% under Obama to 30% after one year of Donald Trump – the lowest level Gallup has recorded since beginning its global leadership poll over a decade ago.

Germany is now seen as a global leader by many more people (41% of the sample), with China in second place on 31%. Russia has 27% approval for its global role according to the poll.

Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it

Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great

Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.

In May 1910 seven kings (of Belgium, Greece, Norway, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and Portugal), one emperor (of Germany) and some 30 princes and archdukes gathered in London for the funeral of Edward VII

Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, also at the funeral, was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914; the new heir Karl abdicated in 1918

George’s favourite cousin Nicholas, Tsar of Russia, abdicated in 1917 and was murdered a year later. George’s other cousin Wilhelm II, German Kaiser, was forced from the throne into exile. By 1918 George wasn’t the only king left in Europe, but he was the only emperor

Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character.

More serious was Henry’s determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.

The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry’s election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V.

If this set allegations bears out it will be a stunning, massive story. We may not care about Bezos’s marital embarrassment. But we should care a lot if a foreign head of state attempted to use theft and extortion to control the coverage of one of the most influential press organizations in the United States.

if it bears out, this will be yet another example of a larger reality, perhaps the signature reality of the Trump Era and the era of global plutocracy and autocracy of which it is only a part. That is, the role of information theft and extortion as a key tool taking over the international system.

secrecy, money, familial relationships and extortion appear to be common tools or currencies in many of these relationships. We see a growing number of examples where they are exerting an influence over events entirely out of the public eye and outside public channels.

Before we leave the centenary year of the outbreak of war in 1914 there’s someone we should talk about. Everyone now knows about the famous Christmas truce and football matches. But this was a war that was meant to have been “over by Christmas” 1914, not dragging on for four blood-soaked years. Plenty share blame for that, but one major culprit who seems to have been conspicuous by his absence in 2014 deserves a name check: Otto von Bismarck.

What Germans got instead was a militarised monarchical autocracy sustained by rampant nationalism and supported by intellectuals of all kinds – sociologist Max Weber later repented his enthusiasm – who should have known better. Parliament was marginalised, the parties manipulated against each other, and Bismarck threatened to resign whenever he was seriously challenged. It was outrageous and it ended in the ruins of Berlin of 1945.

After its humiliations at the hands of Napoleon, 19th century Prussia’s was – even more than under Frederick the Great – a conscious process of self-aggrandisement. Plenty resisted the trend and Bismarck’s “iron and blood” exposition of his realpolitik ambitions in 1862 nearly got him fired before he started. He was not charismatic, soft-spoken, even hesitant, but utterly dominant over his king and even the powerful military, which privately mocked his weakness for uniforms. Try this interview with his biographer Jonathan Steinberg for a flavour of him. “This man means what he says,” Benjamin Disraeli concluded. Scary.

Worse, all that has happened In just three weeks. That’s a rate of about 3.3 percent per week. At that rate, a quarter of the economy is unemployed in another three and a half weeks or so. What happens when a society reaches about 25% unemployment? Usually, it tips into chaos and upheaval. 40%? It implodes into autocracy.

Even wars and earthquakes don’t crater a whole labour force in weeks. We have no experience of such an event, really, in modern history

What do they really mean? As people lose their incomes, so they have to dip into their savings to survive. But the vast majority of Americans have no effective savings. So then people are forced to sell assets. The net result of a tidal wave of unemployment is that people are going to lose their incomes, then savings, then homes.

Karl Rove had a novel idea for how to organize President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

He and the chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, decided on a “base strategy.” They reallocated the bulk of the campaign’s media budget to focus on social conservatives instead of on moderates — a decision predicated on the fact that the swing, or persuadable, share of the electorate had shrunk from one in five voters to less than one in 10.

The result was a shift that year from a traditional centrist strategy to an emphasis on anger and fear, a shift that turned out to have profound long-term consequences.

a few patterns do emerge.

Some of the most successful countries in fighting covid-19 are democracies with well-educated populaces, high levels of trust and transparency, and governments that are run by technocrats. They have tested early and often, and they have used contact tracing to isolate carriers.

Examples include New Zealand, Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan.

The G.O.P., by contrast, is one branch of a monolithic structure, movement conservatism, with a rigid ideology — tax cuts for the rich above all else. Other branches of the structure include a captive media that parrots the party line every step of the way. Compare the coverage of recent political developments on Fox News with almost everywhere else; we’re talking North Korea levels of alternative reality. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

nearly all Republicans in today’s Congress are apparatchiks, political creatures with no higher principle beyond party loyalty.

The fact that the G.O.P. is a party of apparatchiks was one crucial factor in last year’s election. Why did Marine Le Pen, often portrayed as the French equivalent of Trump, lose by a huge margin? Because France’s conservatives were only willing to go so far; they simply would not support a candidate whose motives and qualifications they distrusted. Republicans, however, went all in behind Trump, knowing full well that he was totally unqualified, strongly suspecting that he was corrupt and even speculating that he might be in Russian pay, simply because there was an “R” after his name on the ballot.

Kim’s Rejoinder to Trump’s Rocket Man: ‘Mentally Deranged U.S. Dotard’

Responding directly for the first time to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations to destroy nuclear-armed North Korea, its leader called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” on Friday and vowed the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

“A frightened dog barks louder,” Mr. Kim said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he vowed to annihilate North Korea if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies against it.

we learned last week that Republicans are deepening their complicity in derailing Mueller’s investigation and burying the facts. The more Mueller imperils Trump, the more McCarthyite the GOP becomes.

The apotheosis of Republican congressional collusion with Trump’s efforts to hang on at all costs came at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. One Republican after another attacked Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as if the latter should be placed on a new compendium of subversive organizations.

Only recently, it was widely assumed that if Trump fired Mueller, many Republicans would rise up to defend our institutions. Now, many in the party are laying the groundwork for justifying a coverup. This is a recipe for lawlessness.

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.

aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”

As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”

In May 1950, Hubert Humphrey, the firebrand liberal from Minnesota, took to the floor of the Senate to call for passage of a fair employment practices commission to root out systematic racial discrimination in hiring. “So long as men and women and children of color are discriminated against in the United States,” Senator Humphrey insisted, “the colored people of the world have the right to suspect our professed friendship for them.”

Figures like Humphrey, who came to be known as “Cold War liberals,” argued that the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism could be won only if the United States proved that democracies could deliver social justice more effectively than communism could

No fully established democracy has surrendered its norms more rapidly than the United States, which over the last decade has fallen from 22nd to 33rd in Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World index

the political scientist Henry Farrell suggested that I look at his field’s literature on cults of personality

“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities

Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”

What he and some of his most credulous Western supporters described as a coup was in fact something very different: proof that Bolivians—like the citizens of many other countries around the world—resent arbitrary rule. The longer they have suffered from oppression, the more they have come to value the democratic institutions that are now threatened by populists around the globe.

this is a momentous turning point: one of the first times in recent memory that an authoritarian populist has been forced to vacate his office, because his own compatriots would not stand for his abuses.

Morales’s departure from office marks both a sea change in Latin American politics and a stinging rebuke to the naïveté of parts of the Western left. Even though there had always been strong evidence of their anti-democratic leanings, new socialist leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia were widely celebrated throughout the first decade of the 21st century as the future face of Latin America.

The BBC was one of many outlets that carried the Senate proceedings live. France24 television broadcast much of the proceedings on their English and French services, with simultaneous translation into French, including the final vote and subsequent responses by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Mitch McConnell

In some even quite liberal quarters abroad Trump's acquittal now simply reinforces a fundamental belief that America has strayed off course.

Indeed, just as President Joe Biden was announcing he would sanction Myanmar's military leaders for seizing power by force of arms, the House impeachment managers were describing in brutal detail how then-President Trump sought to strongarm himself into a second term he'd failed to win at the ballot box.