But if Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris this November, America will encounter a Trump unbound, a man whose darkest impulses will not be checked by “adults in the room” — creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the American experiment. “This election is about whether or not we remain a democratic society or we move to authoritarianism,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells Rolling Stone, insisting that Trump “does not believe in the basic tenets and foundations of American democracy.”
The safeguards that kept Trump in check during his first term have collapsed — starting with the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party. “We know from the first administration that Trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He underscores that Trump’s darkest ambitions were present from the beginning — from the Muslim ban to the coup attempt of Jan. 6. “The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” Stanley says. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.” Read the article…
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