Scott Cummings: “To understand what action to take requires clarity about the democratic assault now being advanced with brutal efficiency against the United States. Trump and his legal team have carefully studied how democracies die. And they have learned the key lesson: democratic backsliding occurs when elected leaders claim a mandate to erode the pillars of democracy—free and fair elections, fundamental rights, and checks and balances—to enlarge executive power.
”“The ‘autocratic legal playbook’ is the strategic roadmap to this consolidation. The targets are well-established: capture the courts; erase internal pockets of independence within the public bureaucracy; silent sources of free thought and expression in universities, civil society, and the media; replace independent public prosecutors and government lawyers with loyalists; and disable legal resistance by coopting law firms and the professional bar.”