Scholars warn of ‘military force,’ ‘political corruption,’ other ‘serious risks’ under Trump
Harvard University professors bemoaned the impact of Donald Trump’s presidential victory on international affairs during a forum Wednesday.
Government Professor Daniel Ziblatt said unlike the 2016 election, “Trump has now come to power without much aid from the Republican Party, the Supreme Court is now heavily Republican-leaning, and [he] has criminal immunity from any actions he carries out during his presidency as ruled in Trump v. United States,” the Harvard Crimson reported.
“You add all this together, and it does give one a very frightening picture,” Ziblatt (pictured) said.
“His presidency has a much freer hand to do what authoritarians have done throughout time. That is, harassing and prosecuting opponents,” the professor said.
Ziblatt also said Trump will now be able to enact a “mass, deep, and disruptive deportation of immigrants, the hollowing out of the federal bureaucracy, replacing scientists and experts with loyalists, the use of the military and the insurrection act against protesters, rampant political corruption.”
The professor called democracy “genius” because of “its self-correcting nature.”
He said the problem with it, however, “is if the person being elected into office is the kind of threat that it seems, and I just described, then this does disrupt this happy self-correcting logic of democracy.”
Similarly, politics Professor Pippa Norris called Trump a threat, warning that he could use “military force against his political opponents” or fire “thousands of career public servants.”
“When he makes claims like this in the rhetoric, is it essentially something that should be taken literally?” Norris said. “Is it simply a performance?”
Further, she warned against executive overreach under Trump. “In the second term, it could again be the serious risks that we see with these other strongman leaders,” she said.
She also commented on why Americans voted the way that they did.
“We find that those who voted for Harris think that there are tremendous threats to democracy,” Norris said.
“But for Trump supporters, I think they were also motivated by a genuine commitment to their vision of democracy and their vision of electoral integrity,” she said.
Meanwhile, government Professor Joshua Kertzer lamented that American foreign policy impacts 7 billion people while “6.7 billion of them don’t get a vote.”
This isn’t the first time Harvard professors have criticized Trump. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Ziblatt and fellow government Professor Steven Levitsky stated that “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy.”
“We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian,” the professors stated.
MORE: Wesleyan president blasts Trump as threat to ‘undocumented’ students
IMAGE: The Brainwaves Video Anthology/Youtube
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