Anybody who doubts that American democracy could fall if President Trump wins reelection should take it from someone who knows, John Dean says. He believes a budding dictator occupies the White House.

Jan 28, 2021 Germany's vaccine commission said the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine should not be given to people older than 65 years, amid a bitter dispute between the European Union and the drugmaker over. Germany's vaccine commission said the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine should not be given to people older than 65 years, amid a bitter dispute between the European Union and the drugmaker over. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Over is when a bowler in baseball terms if you know called a Pitcher bowls 6 balls to a batsman/Batter. There is a rope if the ball bounces over the rope it's called a six, if it bounces on ground and his rope it's a four. There is non strike bats.

“I worked for the last authoritarian president, and he was dangerous enough,” said Dean, the Watergate cover-up co-conspirator who served as chief White House counsel to Richard Nixon and testified against him during Senate hearings. 'Trump makes Nixon look like a choirboy.”

'If we get four more years of him,' Dean said, 'then our democracy will be gone.”

The notion of a U.S. president bringing about the nation’s downfall could be easily dismissed as breathless hyperbole, business as usual in America’s super-heated political climate.

But Dean and other critics of the Trump administration — former government officials, historians who’ve tracked the rise of dictatorships in other countries — see an increasingly bleak future for America if voters don't come to terms with Trump's recent behavior.

The president has encouraged voters in both North Carolina and Pennsylvania to cast ballots twice, floated the idea of delaying the election — something he has no legal authority to do — and when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked whether he'd accept the results if he loses, Trump answered, 'I have to see.' He's spread baseless theories about voter fraud and threatened to withhold aid to the U.S. Postal Service during an election year when tens of millions of voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail due to a deadly pandemic.

Even with so many signs that Trump is operating out of bounds, Republican leaders and rank-and-file members often seem unwilling to stand up to him.

“It can be easy to view some of this as science fiction, doomsday stuff, but there is really something extraordinary and extraordinarily worrying going on,” said Michael Waldman, president of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “The checks and balances, the legal constraints, the unwritten norms — they’re all under enormous pressure.”

The Trump campaign says the real danger to the nation's core principles is Democrats and their nominee, the longtime moderate and former vice president.

In a statement that offered no evidence for its claims, spokeswoman Thea McDonald said, 'The only threats to America's Democratic principles are Joe Biden with his socialist manifesto and the Democrat party with their endless attempts to throw our election system into chaos and trample our ‘one person, one vote' foundation with their ballot harvesting schemes.”

Trump’s attempts to sow distrust in the most basic functions of a democratic society — in particular voting — should give all Americans pause, Waldman said.

“That’s what a dictator does,” he said. “It’s utterly foreign to the entire 244-year history of the country. There’s been ugliness. There’s been racism. But to have a leader try to undermine the vote, as a part of his core strategy, is something that’s never happened.”

“That is a sign of a shaky democracy.”

Trump hasn't just undermined the election process. He's portrayed protesters against police brutality as 'thugs' and 'domestic terrorists' while defending armed supporters who demonstrated inside the Michigan statehouse over pandemic lockdown measures and those who went to Portland, Ore., and Kenosha, Wis., during civil unrest.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, a retired four-star general, said he was especially stunned at Trump's threats to use the military to quell unrest, which have so far been rebuffed.

Speaking by phone recently, Hayden said he could hardly stomach the sight of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley, the nation's top military officer, standing with the president during Trump's Bible-holding photo op near the White House in June, moments after federal officers forcibly cleared the streets of peaceful anti-racism demonstrators.

Hayden witnessed authoritarianism firsthand when he worked inside the Soviet Union. Now, he said, it’s the possibility that Trump will be reelected that gives him chills.

“I’m going to be gone sooner or later,” said the 75-year-old Hayden, who recently suffered a stroke. “But I thought America would be OK … I’m a little bit scared now.”

The same week that Trump accepted his party’s nomination for reelection, Hayden voiced his concern to a panel of experts on democracy. If the president wins a second term, he told them, 'I don't know what will happen to the American republic.'

Grave warnings such as Dean's and Hayden's are notable because they don't just emanate from Trump's detractors on the left but in many cases from within conservative ranks — and from people who served in Republican administrations.

Hayden was one of 73 former national security officials from the Trump, Reagan and both Bush administrations who endorsed Biden in a letter in the Wall Street Journal.

What Is The Overwatch League

What also galls Hayden, who served as national security director under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush before Bush appointed him to lead the CIA, are Trump's penchant for lying and his attacks on the free press. Hayden said the president has committed an abuse of power used by despots all over the world by trying to distort the nature of reality itself.

Hayden recounted a dinner conversation he had with a military leader during the Cold War when he was a diplomatic attache in Bulgaria. The man explained his definition of 'truth.'

“He said, ‘Truth is what serves the party,’” Hayden recalled. “I think about that time, and now my own government is doing something similar. Truth is what serves Trump.”

Dean has also been struggling to make sense of how the world’s most successful democracy, one that’s championed the idea of free and fair elections, constitutional checks and balances, civil discourse and the idea that no one is above the law, could be threatened even more than during the Nixon administration.

“Those who say this election is a defining election, they’re not spoofing,' Dean said. 'It’s a shame that more people don’t see it.”

In a book he co-wrote, “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers,” Dean tries to explain the appeal to some Americans of a president who has expressed good will and even praise for strongmen like North Korea's Kim Jong Un, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Trump went so far as to boast about his cozy relationship with Kim in recorded interviews with Bob Woodward for the veteran journalist's upcoming book 'Rage.'

'It's funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,' Trump said of authoritarian leaders to Woodward.

If Trump is reelected, Dean said, he would be like a toddler 'in the terrible twos with the keys to the tank and nobody restraining him.

“Democracy is fragile. There are traditions and norms and guardrails that have always been respected, and he just ignores them.”

What Is The Overall Reaction Of Photosynthesis

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution, is taken aback by Trump's seeming affinity for autocrats and his attacks on the press, and said his attempts to undermine mail-in voting are 'just criminal.'

But Kamarck believes that even though Trump is 'the most authoritarian man we've ever had in this office,' he may end up being more bark than bite — a feckless and desperate leader who tweets conspiracies that have no merit and makes threats that he doesn't back up.

“The flip side of all of that is he has not, as far as I can tell, made any substantive legal changes to our system of checks and balances — in spite of his rhetoric,' said Kamarck, who served in the Clinton administration as leader of its 'reinventing government initiative.' 'The press seems to be doing its job. The House of Representatives did go ahead and impeach him. The courts have consistently thwarted him, including his Supreme Court. The separation of powers is intact. So basically, he’s a lot of bluster.”

“He’s a TV performer — not a doer,” Kamarck said. “In that way, the country’s lucky.”

Still, Trump's failure to respect democratic norms has become so routine, such a feature of his leadership style, that it's easy to lose sight of the damage he can do to people's faith in their power to check the government even if the rule of law survives his presidency, Yale historian Timothy Snyder said.

“If you go back to what the Founders were saying, it was that regular elections are like fresh air,' said Snyder, who's an expert on the rise of tyrannical rulers. 'They’re a way of keeping leaders honest and accountable.… Messing with that is messing with something that’s fundamental to democracy.”

Snyder said Americans should heed efforts in some states to close polling places and impose burdensome voter ID rules. No one should take the idea of a free and fair election for granted, he said.

He agrees with Dean that it is voters who will decide whether America holds tight to its democratic values.

If Trump persists in subverting the democratic process by interfering with the election — or resists stepping aside if he loses to Biden — Americans have to be willing to take to the streets in protest if need be, he said.

They must be ready show the president that while he may act as if he’s above the law, he’s not above reproach by the American people, Snyder said.

What Is The Overjustification Effect

“The only guardrail left,” said Dean, “is the voters.”

The pandemic has rendered many activities unsafe, but thankfully it can’t stop us from fantasizing about them. A common balm that people reach for is the sentence construction “When this is over, I’m going to ____.” It seems to help, if only in a fleeting way, for them to imagine all of the vacations they’ll go on, all of the concerts they’ll attend, and all of the hugs they’ll give, as soon as they’re able to.

Unfortunately, the sublime post-pandemic period that so many are longing for will likely not arrive all at once, like a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve. If and when the pandemic is over someday—in the sense that it’s safe to resume normal life, or something like it—pinpointing its conclusion may never be possible. Internalizing that, and mentally bracing for a slow fade into the new normal, might lead to less angst.

Whatever the end of the pandemic might look like, the United States is nowhere close to it at the moment; week after week, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to test positive for COVID-19, and several thousand die from it. But when the threat of the pandemic does eventually subside, the process will likely be gradual and incremental. “I don’t think there’s going to be, all of a sudden, one day when we can all go make out with people at the grocery store,” Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. “Our concept of how the pandemic will end is just as oversimplified as the way we’ve approached everything else about it.”

Recommended Reading

• The Fog of the Pandemic Is Returning

  Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer

• How the Pandemic Has Changed Us Already

  Joe Pinsker

Recommended Reading

• The Fog of the Pandemic Is Returning

  Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer

• How the Pandemic Has Changed Us Already

  Joe Pinsker

As a matter of epidemiology, there’s no clear-cut criterion that determines a pandemic to be over. “You can’t sign a treaty with a virus, so we have to settle for a kind of cease-fire,” says Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. One intuitive end point is full-on eradication—meaning that the coronavirus no longer circulates in humans or animals—but that outcome is quite unlikely, in part because of how easily the virus could continue to reach still-susceptible groups of people anywhere on Earth even well into the future.

At any rate, a metric like that does not translate to straightforward guidance on when it’s safe for people to do certain things again. It will not, for instance, tell Maya Cade, a 26-year-old screenwriter and social-media manager in Brooklyn, when she should get her post-pandemic tattoo. Cade told me she spent some of her pandemic alone time reflecting on how she presents herself to others and on “the respectability politics I was knowingly and unknowingly internalizing as a means of survival as a Black woman.” Although this held her back from getting a tattoo before, now she’s resolved to get one as soon as it’s safe, though she doesn’t know when that will be—maybe 2022, she guesses.

Others I spoke with had similarly firm plans with similarly foggy timelines. Kelby Pierson, a 42-year-old who works in fraud prevention at a bank in Houston, told me he misses being able to bask in the variety of his city. “In Houston, you can go to a crawfish boil, and on the same weekend, you can go to somebody’s quinceañera,” he said. He’ll be at gatherings like these again as soon as he’s able to, but suspects that’ll be at least a year from now.

He and Cade said they wouldn’t be comfortable going through with their plans until a safe vaccine had been developed and distributed. They and many others think of an effective vaccine as a key that unlocks the post-pandemic future. It would indeed provide some relief, but as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, “it certainly will not immediately return life to normal”; the availability of a vaccine would represent merely “the beginning of a long, slow ramp down.”

As a result, although many people have a distinct memory of the beginning of the pandemic, they may not experience a single parallel moment marking the end of it. The break between the Before Times and the present was conspicuous, but the transition from the present to the After Times will likely be more piecemeal and less tidy.

The way that people process the end of the pandemic could have to do with how abruptly their life changes after it. One theory for how people mentally perceive transitions from one event to another is that they notice when their expectations of what will happen next start to get upended—“like the disorientation you feel when a movie abruptly shifts to a new setting,” says Lance Rips, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Under this framework, if someone undergoes a big life change during the final stages of the pandemic (say, moving or getting a new job after a bout of unemployment), they might be more likely to register a turning point. But if instead they merely start going out more, day by day, that might not yield the same discombobulation that can mark moments of transition.

Even if people crave a swift restoration of normalcy, many have come to terms with the fact that they won’t get it. “Wearing a mask is just like making sure you pocket your keys at this point,” says Athul Acharya, a 34-year-old lawyer in Portland, Oregon. The pandemic “has now lasted long enough that I, at least, don’t find myself waiting for the end. Looking forward to it? Yes. But anticipating it as a thing that will happen in the tangible future? Not so much.”

But a gradual fade-out—one without clear indicators about the safety of resuming normal activities—might be particularly distressing for some people. “Those with generalized anxiety disorder, in which a person experiences uncontrollable worry over a range of topics, could really be suffering,” Sandra Llera, a clinical-psychology professor at Towson University, wrote to me in an email. “If we don’t have a clear-cut ending, those with a tendency to worry”—whether they have a diagnosable disorder or not—“might experience a lot of stress about when we can begin to safely return to business as usual.”

This sort of uncertainty probably will, in a way, manifest society-wide during the pandemic’s final stages, as a politically polarized nation bickers about whether it’s really over or not. “It’ll be just as much of a mess as everything else that’s happened so far,” Marcus, the Harvard epidemiologist, said.

This dispute won’t exactly be new: The country has been having a debate about whether the pandemic is over practically since it started. In late March, President Donald Trump said he’d “love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” and in mid-June, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed asserting that “panic” about a second wave of infections was “overblown.” (Since the piece was published, some 75,000 Americans are estimated to have died from COVID-19.)

What Is The Over Under In Betting

When the pandemic is actually petering out, public-health experts may have even more trouble conveying the precautions people should take when going about their day. “The particular challenge of a lack of a concrete end is that there is … a much more complicated calculus of what people should be doing in their behavior,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me. In “a complicated, gray landscape,” she said, “there is more room for debate, error, and nuance in who should do what and when to protect themselves, their families, and their community.”

Perhaps people will get final confirmation that the pandemic is over not from the potentially conflicting messages of politicians and public-health experts, but from milestones that they have subjectively settled on themselves. For instance, Cade told me that getting a tattoo will mean that the pandemic is over for her. Acharya says his own subjective ending to the pandemic will come when he and his wife feel it’s safe to finally have a bunch of friends over for a housewarming party, complete with food and drink.

What Is The Overall Charge Of An Atom

This suggests a different definition of the end of the pandemic, one based not on case counts or governors’ directives but on people’s individual experiences. Under this definition, the pandemic ends in one person’s head at a time. And as Marcus noted, “the pandemic has already ended for some people: There are people who feel that this was never a thing. There are people who decided it’s no longer a thing.” More of these premature mental endings—and more accurate endings later on—will arrive, but not all at once. Cade will get her tattoo at a different time than when Acharya sends out the invitations to his housewarming party and when Pierson follows a crawfish boil with a quinceañera.

What Is The Overseer

When these personal endings come, they will be cathartic and triumphant, but their individualized nature might deny us a collective sense of closure. There will be no clear moment when we can all move on.