The recent denunciations underscore a growing consensus among foreign policy elites in both parties: that Trump’s disrespect for constitutional norms and antipathy toward limits on executive power pose, as the Washington Post put it, “a unique threat to American democracy.”
Some voters, however, aren’t convinced.
Eighty-eight percent of Republicans and 40 percent of the general public support Trump. Judging by the last few months of polling, a significantly larger portion backs his national security agenda. Half the country supports a temporary ban on Muslim immigration; 44 percent favor a registry for Muslims already here; 53 percent want to intensify surveillance of US mosques; and 63 percent endorse the torture of terror suspects. In the latest Pew survey on the subject, voters say Trump would do a better job than Clinton defending the country from future terrorist attacks. [...]
If a constituency exists for Trump’s extreme anti-terror agenda it’s because Republicans and Democrats alike have spent the last fifteen years cultivating paranoia, secrecy, and deference to executive authority — while vastly overstating the threat of attacks on American soil. [...]
Obama’s DOJ largely continued these polices (with the exception of torture), abandoning a campaign commitment to bring transparency to the war on terror. Instead, he has ramped up investigations and prosecutions of national security leakers and resisted efforts to make public the worst crimes of the Bush administration.
On the battlefield too, there’s been much continuity between Bush and Obama. Bush administration lawyers reimagined the meaning of warfare, increasing the executive’s unilateral authority to wage it and creating a legal framework for a borderless, multifaceted war with no necessary end.
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