It is a most immediate objective of news analysts to evaluate Donald Trump's so-called policies, but what seems of greater concern is related more to character than policy. Becoming more apparent daily is the slouching of Trump toward despotism.
Efforts to fulfill his seeming wish to become a dictator are not obscure: his admiration of dictators around the world, some of whom he envies for their lifetime appointments; ridding himself of those who disagree with him; insistence that only he has supreme authority; his sense that the military belongs to him ("my generals"); the desire to roll tanks through the streets of Washington in a military parade; his endorsement of torture, including the death penalty for those who "misbehave" in certain ways.
It is beyond time for corrective action lest advancing events cannot be curtailed or reversed.
Don R. Lipsitt
Cambridge
