This is what people outside the USA are seeing, worried that people inside the USA cannot see it.
"If it continues like this,
the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy
project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg. "If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months."
His project includes 31 million data points for 202 countries, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 different attributes of democracy. Lindberg happens to be in the U.S. this week presenting this year's report — which only includes data through the end of 2024.
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But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning
1,500 criminals who supported him;
firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical
police and military brass; ignoring
laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal
programs, and even a
whole organization, created by U.S. Congress.
He's just called his predecessor's pardons
void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan
speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He
threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He
invoked a
227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it's still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the
ultimate constitutional safeguard.
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Lindberg said Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster."
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there more ...
