Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Sunday compared a hypothetical second Trump White House term to that of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian leaders in response to Trump’s veiled threats that he would go after his political opponents if reelected.
“Well, the role of the government in his view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his political enemies. So what would a second term look like? It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin in Russia. It would look a lot like [Prime Minister Viktor Orban] in Hungary — illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights, or liberties, or respect for the due process, the system, the rule of law,” Raskin said on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
Raskin, a member of the now dissolved House select committee that investigated the Jan 6., 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it, also described such countries as not accepting results that don’t benefit certain leaders.
“They don’t accept elections that don’t go their way,” Raskin said. “They refuse to disavow political violence. They embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power, and then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician. And that is Donald Trump in their book.”
“So we are clearly headed into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize, as continuous with the past — right-wing, authoritarian government in league with Putin, [Chinese President Xi Jinping], Orban, [former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro], you name it,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out as he faces an unprecedented 91 criminal felony counts stemming from four separate indictments, two on the state level and two on the federal.
He has suggested in Truth Social posts and during rallies that if reelected, he could go after his political opponents such as President Biden in return.