In late August, US President Donald Trump felt the need to declare not once but twice that he was not a dictator. However, he seemed to equivocate on the matter by claiming that many Americans would like to have one: “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.”
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Remember when Richard Nixon once said, “I am not a crook”? When someone feels the need to vehemently deny they are not someone people think they are, there is probably some truth to the characterisation. A survey released in April by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that 52 per cent of Americans think Trump fits the description of a “dangerous dictator”.
A May article in Scientific American headlined, “Science Tells Us the US Is Heading towards a Dictatorship”, claims an increasing number of political scientists think the United States “is becoming an autocracy”.
In an April issue of The New Yorker, another writer argued, “Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we’re headed – or where we already are.”
Early on during Trump’s second term, three leading US scholars on fascism – Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley – moved to Canada in self-imposed exile.
But people always say, that can’t happen in the US, with its constitution and “checks and balances”. That was what Phillip Forman, the judge who presided over the US citizenship hearing of Kurt Gödel in 1947, said to the famous logician.
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