If Trump wins, US would look like Putin and Orbán’s ‘illiberal democracy’, Raskin says
If Donald Trump wins a second presidency, the US would resemble the authoritarian regimes of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a prominent Democratic congressman predicted on Sunday.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, Jamie Raskin invoked the names of some of the globe’s most powerful strongmen political leaders to characterize the threat posed by Trump’s status as the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination despite the mound of legal problems with which he is grappling.
“The role of the government in his view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his … enemies,” Raskin said of the former president and reality television show host. “So what would a second term look like?
“It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It would look a lot like Viktor Orbán in Hungary – illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights or liberties or respect for the due process system, the rule of law.”
Raskin added: “Their position is that they don’t accept elections that don’t go their way. They refuse to disavow political violence – they embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power. And then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician, and that is Donald Trump in their book.”
Raskin said another turn in the Oval Office for Trump would thrust the US “into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize as continuous with the past”, one that instead would feel more familiar in Xi Jingping’s China or in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil before the latter man was voted out of office last year and then barred by his country’s courts from running for re-election due to abuses of power.
The Maryland congressman’s dramatic admonition to Psaki came days after Trump went on Univision and suggested he would use federal investigators and prosecutors to pursue his enemies if he scores a victory in next year’s presidential election.
On Saturday, Trump promised in a speech to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin” in the US. Many commentators noted how the term “vermin” echoed antisemitic rhetoric that the Nazis frequently employed to dehumanize Jews as they murdered 6 million of them during the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on Saturday that Trump – who routinely speaks fawningly of Putin and other autocratic world leaders – is “planning an extreme expansion” of the immigration crackdown that the Republican oversaw during the presidential term he won in 2016.
The plan reportedly envisions sweeping raids to round up undocumented people in the US before detaining them en masse in sprawling camps while they await deportation. Among other measures, it also calls for a revival of his first-term ban against travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.
Raskin served on the US House committee which investigated the deadly Capitol attack staged by Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021, weeks after he lost the presidency to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.
After a series of televised hearings last year, the committee recommended that the justice department file criminal charges against Trump. And since March, a combination of federal and state prosecutors have obtained more than 90 criminal charges in four separate, pending indictments against Trump accusing him of election subversion, retention of government secrets and illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor.
He has also faced civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a rape allegation which a judge deemed “substantially true”.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing and sought to portray himself as a victim of political persecution. Nonetheless, he has held commanding polling leads in the contest for the 2024 Republican White House nomination. And there is a consensus among experts that a rematch between him and Biden would be very close.
The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, on Sunday said her organization was ready to support and embrace Trump as its candidate if he clinches the party’s nomination.
“The voters are looking at this, and they think there is a two-tiered system of justice,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union. “They don’t believe a lot of the things that are coming out in this. And they’re making these decisions. And you’re seeing that reflected in the polls.”