Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack

For any would-be authoritarian strongman, a lesson of history is that you can’t do it by yourself. To accumulate power and vanquish your opponents, you need powerful elements of the state—such as the police, the armed forces, senior politicians, and the judiciary—to go along with your designs, or at least to stand aside as you do as you will. In some cases, such as Weimar Germany and Vittorio Emmanuel III’s Italy, many people in positions of influence were willing to support an authoritarian upstart because their commitment to democracy was weak or nonexistent to begin with. In other cases, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, elected leaders exploited threats of terrorism and domestic chaos to justify the curtailment of political rights and the harassment of political opponents.

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