"Trump attempts to spin anti-democracy, authoritarian criticism against Biden/The former president declared his 2024 campaign as a 'righteous crusade' against 'tyrants and villains.'"

That's the headline at The Washington Post.

Form your own impression. Here's the entire tirade (yesterday, in Cedar Rapids):

I listened to the speech yesterday, a bit inattentively, because it struck me as a typical Trump speech, not any new concept. 

But the Post's idea is that he's responding to recent criticism:

"Anybody Fighting Joe Biden Is Helping Trump’s Next Coup/All Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian."

There's an incendiary headline! But it shows too much, I think. It's demanding that everyone quiet themselves and act as though the current regime is good. Isn't that what they do in North Korea? And yet if you criticize Biden, you're the fascist. Functionally. 

Where is that headline? New York Magazine. On a column by Jonathan Chait. 

Is "coup" the word we're using now for anytime the wrong candidate wins an election?

I'll read the article. Highlights:

Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative and formerly influential Republican adviser, seized the attention of the intelligentsia by warning in a Washington Post essay that the constitutional crisis had already arrived. Trump is likely to win the party’s presidential nomination; ergo, the Republican Party is presumptively a vehicle for Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. 

Therefore — and here was the sharp end of the argument — anything advancing the Republican Party is a vehicle for Trump’s attack on the Constitution. Kagan’s provocation irritated his former allies because it closed off any pretense that Republicans engage in normal politics without endangering the republic...

What's "normal"? This is an argument of labels. Trump is "authoritarian." Democrats engage in "normal politics." 

Zero Republicans have even entertained joining with Democrats to support a bill to protect voting or elections from the subversion campaign Trump’s allies are energetically carrying out in various red states. Their apparent calculation is that even if they still harbor private concerns over the party’s direction, “normal” Republican partisanship remains completely kosher....

"Normal" gets quote marks there because Republicans act as if they can be considered normal but they cannot. Chait dictates.

The reason you can’t cordon off Trump from the rest of the party is that we now live in something functionally resembling a parliamentary system.

Chait likes that word "functionally." When things aren't what you want to say they are, just add "functionally."

Biden leads the governing party. Trump is the leader of the opposition. To oppose the one is to support the other....

No, that's not how America works. You were just scaring us about "Trump’s attack on the Constitution," but now you're assuming the Constitution out of existence, kicking it to the curb, and we're not supposed to notice, and if we do, we'd better be quiet... or we're functionally authoritarian.

It is true that some of the weapons at [Trump's] disposal last January will be in Biden’s hands in January 2025. But many of the state officials who resisted him last time have been replaced with more pliant figures; Trumpist Republicans seem likely to gain control of the election apparatus in Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia. In any case, Trump might well win the election fairly — and then what?

Well, then it's not "Trump's next coup." It's Trump's second election, like the one in 2016, and it will be your obligation — if you actually do care about the Constitution — to accept the results of the election and aim at winning the next election. That's democracy, and if you don't like that, who's "functionally authoritarian"?

... Does the probability of a catastrophic outcome like the end of American democracy actually need to exceed 50 percent before we take firm action to stop it? While conservatives like [Ross] Douthat are correct that Trump is not a Hitler, that is setting the bar for action rather low. Trump doesn’t need to be a potential Hitler, or even a Mussolini, to justify suspending our normal rules of political conduct.

Again, who's the functional authoritarian? You're openly justifying suspending our normal rules of political conduct!

ADDED: Think a bit more about this idea that "some of the weapons at [Trump's] disposal last January will be in Biden’s hands in January 2025." I'm seeing this at The Atlantic: "Kamala Harris Might Have to Stop the Steal/Constitutional scholars are already worrying about another January 6 crisis, and they warn that the next election might be harder to save" by Russell Berman: "How would [Kamala Harris] handle a certification from a Republican governor or secretary of state that appeared to subvert the popular vote in that state? What if, in other words, it were up to her to stop the steal?"

"The Obama administration’s ranks are filled with people, fresh from the academy and the think tanks, who talk about the need to manage American decline..."

"... and even boast about how much more sophisticated they are than the Bush people on this score. They do say all this off the record, however. Perhaps they know that many Americans would not applaud them for their sophistication. Let’s hope the man in the Oval Office knows it, too."

Robert Kagan.

"This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

"It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time. The man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century' has reestablished a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world. Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world's third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move."

Writes Robert Kagan.

Observations about the Amazon page on the Hart & Wechsler casebook:

1. It's still possible to "Be the first person to review this book!"

2. Customers who bought Hart & Wechsler also bought: Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan; Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken.

I actually have both of those books on the shelf at home, but read (and paid for) only one. There are 2400 customer reviews of Franken's book. Lots of 5 star reviews and 1 star reviews.

That's a fruitful exchange of opinion.