recently announced that it was cutting thousands of jobs and closing several manufacturing plants in the United States, Trump immediately announced, “We are now looking at cutting subsidies.” Trump immediately responded on Twitter that Frazier’s resignation from the council would give him more time “to lower ripoff drug prices.” When Harley Davidson responded to European tariffs on its motorcycles-which were increased in retaliation for Trump administration tariffs on steel and aluminum-the President responded, “We won’t forget, and neither will your customers.” When General Motors Co. Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck & Co., resigned from the President’s American Manufacturing Council in protest against Trump’s refusal to offer an unqualified repudiation of white supremacists after the violence erupting during a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 (“very fine people on both sides”). Yet Trump has frequently punished corporations and their executives when they have dared to cross him.
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The rule of law does not countenance a nation’s chief executive selecting, at his whim, winners and losers in the economic marketplace. The Republican Party, which has largely become a “cult” of Trump worshipers-in the words of recently retired Republican senator Bob Corker-has been mostly complicit. Yet, along a wide variety of dimensions, Trump shreds the rule of law. To be sure, the United States is not likely any time soon to see officially sanctioned killings of drug users without due process or mass incarcerations of journalists daring to criticize the government. President Trump poses a greater threat to the rule of law than anything Americans have witnessed in generations.
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Surely, most Americans believe, such things could never happen in the United States.
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A quick glance around the world these days can be frightening for defenders of the rule of law: thousands of officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte lengthy prison sentences on fraudulent charges for two journalists reporting on ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar the officially orchestrated torture and dismemberment of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul the imprisonment of hundreds of opposition politicians and journalists by President Recep Erdogan in Turkey government packing of the courts in Poland the criminalization of immigrant aid groups and the forced closing of Central European University in Hungary.