Taken together, these and more seem to give a pretty clear picture of Trump's authoritarianism:
Also highly troubling is the fact that Trump has maintained and apparently plans to continue to maintain a private personal security force independent of the Secret Service—the same security force that policed his rallies, and has been accused of excessive force as well as racial profiling... It is already being sued for allegedly violently interfering with political protest. Yet Trump’s chief private bodyguard has been named Director of Oval Office Operations, and there are no indications that the private security force will be disbanded.
This force is unaccountable to the usual political and legal checks and balances—Congress cannot cut its budget or audit its records, it may not count as a government actor for purposes of Constitutional challenges to his operations, like racial discrimination or retaliation for political speech. I would argue that the security force actually has become a government agency for Constitutional purposes, but there’s no good way to predict how a court would respond to this argument...
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Reinforcing worries about the undermining of the professionalism of the security services are Trump’s most recent moves to reshuffle the National Security Council. On January 28, Trump removed the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff from the NSC “principals committee” and replaced them with Stephen Bannon. This raises the worrying risk that intelligence information will be channeled to political operatives, and that political operatives with greater loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution will be exercising unchecked authority over the use of America’s military and intelligence apparatus.
Equally alarming are Trump’s efforts to undermine the free press. It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to say that millions of his supporters completely distrust the media, and are unlikely to believe reporting on any of his misconduct. And this appears to be a conscious strategy of Trump’s, who has been attacking the media in speeches and on Twitter, who put the press in a pen at his rallies to be abused by the attending mobs, and who has installed the CEO of the leading far-right “news” site in the West Wing, ready to feed the house interpretation of his actions directly to his supporters, no independent input required. This, of course, is Bannon again, who has also described the media as the “opposition party.”
No catalog of Trump’s danger to the free press can omit his evident disregard for the First Amendment. Trump has threatened to “loosen up the libel laws,” to allow suits against the press, and his campaign manager made thinly veiled libel threats against no less than the outgoing Senate Minority Leader...