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What Democracy Scholars Thought of Trump’s Bible Photo Op

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The president’s true believers saw a message to appreciate. Many others saw something more alarming.
If another leader of another nation stood in another simmering capital and instructed police and law enforcement to “dominate the streets” against protesters, then walked through a park where government officers had forcibly cleared demonstrators from his path, then arrived outside a church to hold a Bible aloft like a championship trophy for the cameras — well, what would America think of that?
“If we were seeing this in another country,” said Kori Schake, a former Pentagon official and Republican policy adviser, “we would be deeply concerned and talking about the foreign policy consequences of states behaving this way.”
It is time, some opponents and academics agree, to have the conversation.
From the earliest days of this norm-smashing administration, fretful critics, scholars and foreign policy experts have kept watch for signals of President Trump’s anti-democratic streak. This has not always required an exhaustive search.
But the White House response to the gushing national traumas of this moment appears to have registered on another plane, producing the kinds of scenes and sound bites that some doomsayers had long prophesied and adding to the mounting social and public health crises a festering concern about the state of American democracy itself.
Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, told governors to “dominate the battle space” against protesters. A Black Hawk helicopter flew low enough above the city’s Chinatown district to snap tree limbs and tear signs from the sides of buildings, a show-of-force maneuver often seen in combat zones to scare off insurgents.
And presiding over it all was the man who had threatened to send the American military to states where governors could not restore calm, labeling demonstrators who have used violence to draw attention to police brutality against black people as “organizers” of terror.
If the episode has generally been processed, thus far, along typical ideological lines, the reactions have also been laced with more urgent passions to match the times.
Many of Mr. Trump’s admirers have encouraged his vows to curb chaos, cheering the religious imagery he reached for, quite literally, in service of a photo opportunity.
“Every believer I talked to certainly appreciates what the president did and the message he was sending,” said Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a stalwart evangelical Trump supporter. “I think it will be one of those historic moments in his presidency, especially when set against the backdrop of nights of violence throughout our country.

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