"This is where we're at," summed up Seth Meyers in Monday night's A Closer Look. "A president who dispatches secret police to round up dissidents and refuses to accept the outcome of democratic elections."
To be fair to Donald Trump, he technically hasn't refused to accept the outcome of the presidential election in November. Yet. He just told Fox News' Chris Wallace in a surreal interview over the weekend that he "would have to see" whether he would refuse to accept the result or not. (See? Nuance.)
"So much of our democratic system relies on norms, and Trump freely just shatters all of them," said Meyers. "For example, as Joe Biden opened up a 15 point lead in new polls, Trump said on Sunday he would not necessarily accept the outcome of the election as legitimate — because mail-in balloting, a thing Americans, including Trump himself, have been doing for a century and a half, might somehow 'rig' the election."
Meyers provided another example of those smashed-to-powder norms in the unidentified uniformed federal police in Portland beating protesters and hustling people into unmarked cars, fully realising Trump's public admiration for authoritarian leaders. This prompted Meyers to recall the 2016 debates, where Trump defended and then doubled down on his praise of the "strong" Chinese government response to Tiananmen Square in 1989 to prove it.
"The Tiananmen Square protests were peaceful demonstrations led by students calling for democratic reforms," Meyers noted. "But Trump sees any peaceful challenge to the status quo as a riot instigated by terrorists. Which is how despots talk."
"This guy is so detached from reality, everything in his yogurt brain is a Steven Seagal movie," he went on, before dropping into Trump Voice. "'Portland is Under Siege, so I had to go Above The Law, make an Executive Decision to send an Attack Force, Out For Justice.'
"What we're seeing in cities across the country are peaceful protests against police brutality and systemic racism, demanding change to an unjust and oppressive system. But Trump is only capable of emulating the authoritarian despots he admires, which is exactly what he's doing in Portland."
