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U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog.

"If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

"If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months."
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U.S. President Donald Trump's speech at the Department of Justice on Friday was 'one of the most extraordinary ever by a sitting president,' according to a professor who studies democratic erosion.
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The report refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress.

He's just called his predecessor's pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it's still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard.

It's not just the scope of what Trump's done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It's also the speed.

Lindberg said Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster.

"It's the pace," Lindberg said. "He's trying to do in a few months what it took them eight to 10 years to achieve.… It's very dire."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317