Michelle Goldberg

But the Freedom House report gives us at least two reasons for continuing alarm.

The first is that it usually takes more than two years for a democracy to collapse. “Elsewhere in the world, in places like Hungary, Venezuela or Turkey, Freedom House has watched as democratic institutions gradually succumbed to sustained pressure from an antidemocratic leadership, often after a halting start,” the report said. Abramowitz told me that an increase in corruption and a decrease in transparency — both hallmarks of this administration — are “often early warning indicators of problems in a democracy,” undermining public faith in the legitimacy of the system.

Second, if Americans increasingly ignore Trump’s words, foreign leaders don’t. Authoritarianism is on the rise all over the globe — according to the Freedom House report, this is the 13th consecutive year that global freedom has declined. Trump’s presidency is a consequence of this trend, but it’s also become an accelerant of it.

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All over the globe, autocrats have learned that they will pay no serious diplomatic price for repressing or even killing reporters. In 2017, Cambodian strongman Hun Sen said of journalists, “Donald Trump understands that they are an anarchic group.” Later that year his government forced one of the country’s most prominent independent newspapers to close. The Trump administration remained loyal to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince despite the C.I.A.’s assessment that he ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/freedom-house-trump-democracy.html