Edward Markey

Wednesday on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said President Donald Trump is “an authoritarian president who’s trying to turn our democratic republic into a strongman state.”

Markey said, “I was just astounded when Trump came into office for term two, and he didn’t talk about having a mandate and passing laws with Congress to implement it. He talked about this executive order, that executive order and everything he started doing. Not only was it operating through edicts, if you will, like a like a king, but he also started to appropriate, the powers that belong to Congress, the power of the purse, the power of taxation, and eventually a question of war. And I went, wow. You know, we for the first time, we have an authoritarian president who’s trying to turn our democratic republic into a strongman state. And in looking at the literature of how this has happened around the world, you know, places like Nicaragua, like Hungary, like Russia, like Turkey, there’s ten strategies that are authoritarian uses.

He added, “And I said, well, are these happening here? So I went to the floor for that, my very long through-the-night speech a year ago, to ring the alarm bells and say, this isn’t just a debate about policy. This is actually a real attack on the architecture of our republic. And those strategies are everything from firing the inspector general on the front end, the referees, putting loyalists, who are basically incompetent, in positions of power, and then proceeding to things like preparing troops to be on the streets, and weaponizing the Department of Justice with an enemies list and, of course, most dangerously, rigging the upcoming election. So, so ten items. And so those ten items reveal real vulnerabilities that we didn’t know we had. We thought that with our norms, our laws and our court system backing it up, it could never happen here, why this happened in other countries. And yet it’s happening.”