Two BU Experts Discuss Fears Based on President-Elect’s Statements
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would be a dictator—only on his first day in office. Some of his other utterances and actions about seeking revenge on opponents and rewarding his most loyal supporters have also unnerved critics, who see his behavior as unsettling, maybe even antidemocratic. But how much of what Trump says is bluster meant only to rile up his base and how much of it is grounded in actions he will actually attempt to take?
The president-elect’s musing about turning the military on “radical left lunatics” led a Harvard expert on democracy to pronounce it “classic authoritarian discourse.” Trump also doubled down, postelection, on his support for the military mass-deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants. That prompted a University of Pennsylvania political scientist to muse about a potential backlash against “Gestapo”-like raids.
BU Today asked Jonathan Zatlin, an associate professor of history at the College of Arts & Sciences, and Timothy Longman, CISS affiliate and a professor of international relations and of political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies, whether concerns about Trump’s second term in the White House are justified. Longman is a scholar of African human rights, democratization, and the interplay of politics with race and ethnicity, women, and religion…
To read more, visit BU Today, where this article originally appeared on November 27, 2024.