German Jewish Scholar: ‘This Week Proves Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy’

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By Daniel J. Solomon August 1, 2017

Yascha Mounk, a German Jewish Harvard scholar, is warning that the recent White House chaos is not a mere sideshow, but an additional sign that American democracy is in trouble.

“America is on its way to a full-blown constitutional crisis,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday, warning about recent developments such as President Trump’s threat to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, his public tangling with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and public talk of the president pardoning himself.

He added: “Mr. Trump is increasingly emulating the playbook of popularly elected strongmen who have done deep, lasting damage to their countries’ democratic institutions.” Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard who was born in Germany, has studied a phenomenon known as democratic consolidation, in which a country’s democratic institutions slowly come apart. He’s studied examples of this phenomenon in Venezuela and Poland, and now fears the United States is already on that path.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter, @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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