'Bully and terrorize and bribe': 'Deeply alarmed' conservative issues red-alert warning

Former President Donald Trump appears in Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler's visor cap in the photo illustration above a plea for sanity from a conservative scholar and a Canadian attorney who fear the convicted felon has already begun a fatal attack on democracy.

Norman Jay Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick delivered Tuesday a red-alert warning that Trump's criminal hush money conviction was not cause to celebrate of the Justice system's strength.

"The system held only insofar as efforts to bully and terrorize and bribe witnesses who have helped Donald Trump commit crimes with impunity for decades didn’t quite manage to silence all of those witnesses," the pair wrote. "We worry that every time we say 'the system held' it implies that 'holding' equals 'winning' as opposed to barely scraping by.

"There is reason to be alarmed — deeply alarmed."

Lithwick and Ornstein's lengthy opinion piece makes a strong case for alarm over Trump's "brutally honest" promises of behavior and policy should he return to the White House in 2025.

"His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not," they write.

"Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal," the pair write. "Donald Trump is rather different."

Lithwick and Ornstein compare Trump to Russia and Egypt's authoritarian presidents Vladimir Putin and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and theorize he could be forming "a personal vigilante army" with plans to pardon rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals," Ornstein and Lithwick write.

"Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office."

Lithwick and Ornstein then turn their angry gaze on the public figures they argue have abetted Trump's damning attacks on America's system of checks and balances.

"Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members — one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson — simply because Donald Trump demanded it," they write.

"They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless."

Nor are the scholars pleased with media coverage they say has been tainted by a "terrifying normalcy bias" that has rendered news coverage of Trump's trial and presidential campaign comparable to "yogurt, mayonnaise, and vanilla," they write.

"Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs," they conclude.

"What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger."