‘Cult of authoritarian personality’: Jamie Raskin excoriates Republican party

The Republican party under Donald Trump has become “a cult of authoritarian personality in league with autocrats and kleptocrats and dictators”, the prominent Democrat Jamie Raskin said, as the former US president saw off Nikki Haley, his last rival for the presidential nomination, and finally won the support of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate.

Raskin was a House manager in Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. After Senate Republicans ensured Trump escaped conviction, Raskin sat on the House committee that investigated January 6.

“The next election wasn’t much on my mind when we were reeling from the violence and the catastrophe of January 6,” Raskin told MSNBC, referring to the deadly riot Trump stoked in an attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.

“But I think my assumption was that of the constitution itself, which is that someone who participates in an insurrection against the union should never be allowed to hold office again.

“It is disgraceful that a great political party, much less Abraham Lincoln’s [Republican] party, a party of liberty and union, should be reduced to a cult of authoritarian personality in league with autocrats and kleptocrats and dictators all over the world.”

Of 91 criminal charges now faced by Trump, four federal and 13 state charges concern attempted election subversion. The others arise from retention of classified information (40, federal) and for hush-money payments to an adult film star (34, state).

Trump has also been handed multimillion-dollar fines in civil cases over his businesses and a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and subjected to attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an