In this op-ed for The Nation, Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, comments on President Donald Trump’s first 50 days of his Oval Office return and the future of democracy.
Four years ago, I published “Subtle Tools,” a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done — through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency and a failure to call for accountability of any sort — left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And — lo and behold! — now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as — if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours — the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
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Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the War on Terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we’re now witnessing, it’s worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country — and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Read “Trump Is Exploiting the Paranoid Fantasies that Drove the War on Terror” in The Nation.
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.