“I’ve pretty much given up on this country,” a friend texted me last week. The past several months—and it has, unbelievably, been only that long—have played out like the climax of a Roland Emmerich movie, as one American institution after another has crumbled in the face of a previously unimaginable assault. The nation’s top universities and its most powerful law firms, its largest companies and most venerable media giants, have succumbed to the president’s arm-twisting with little more than a whimper—or, in some cases, prostrated themselves without even needing to be asked. Government agencies have been snuffed out overnight, masked law-enforcement officers roam the streets, and the welfare state has been slashed to free up money for vast new detention centers. The question can feel les
How close is America to authoritarianism? These Russian journalists have an answer.

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