Trump’s America Meets All ‘Four Threats’ to Democracy
A John Hopkins professor explains the “Pillars of Democracy” that Trump is eroding and Rick and Molly get honest about Mitch McConnell’s SCOTUS hypocrisy.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
President Donald Trump isn’t a threat to American democracy on a metaphorical level. He’s a threat to the country’s entire political structure, literally, according to two academics who have studied American democracy throughout history and wrote a whole book on the topic.
Dr. Robert C. Lieberman, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal to share which of the “four pillars” that help sustain democracy Trump has completely bulldozed over (hint: all of them.)
According to Lieberman, that’s a big problem: “The American democratic system is supposed to keep one person or one small group from gaining all the levers of power at the same time. And that's where things have kind of fallen down,” he says.
See, these threats have always crept up in our history (even Alexander Hamilton was involved in partisan games) but Leiberman says it’s the “piling of threats on top of each other” that triggers the alarms.
“Trump seems to have an unerring instinct to make just about every situation worse. He is a product of this confluence of threats. He is a product of the time,” he says.
The team also hears from Rev. Raphael Warnock, who is running for Senate in Georgia’s special election race against Sen. Kelly Loeffler and would become the first Black senator for Georgia if he won, “at a time in which we’re dealing with a renewed conversation and reckoning around our age old problem of race and racism in this country.”
Plus! Rick tells Molly the cold, hard truth about the future of the Supreme Court, and the two discuss why the GOP is headed for an Ice Age, just how sketchy Deutsche Bank is, and of course, Trump’s “all kinds of illegal” tax revelations.
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