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Political Memo

What Democracy Scholars Thought of Trump’s Bible Photo Op

The president’s true believers saw a message to appreciate. Many others saw something more alarming.

The authorities used riot-control tactics to disrupt peaceful protests outside the White House to clear a path for President Trump’s walk to St. John’s Church in Washington on Monday night.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

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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The police advanced on protesters outside the White House on Monday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

All the while, some Democrats are deploying a term that they have turned to occasionally in these three and a half years, but perhaps never with such frequency and conviction.

“The words of a dictator,” Senator Kamala Harris of California said.

“He behaves like a dictator,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted.

“For us to just shut our eyes and somehow believe he won’t go that far — he just ordered the federal government to fire at innocent protesters,” Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona said in an interview. “We need to accept the fact that this president, if given the opportunity, will try to be a dictator.”

Mr. Gallego, a veteran of the Iraq War, predicted that military leaders would find themselves at a decision point soon: “They’re going to have to say no to the president and not follow illegal orders.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed to echo this anxiety on Tuesday in an article for The Atlantic. While he was confident that uniformed officers would obey lawful orders, he wrote, he had less faith “in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief.”

Experts on democratic systems have been careful to distinguish certain conspicuous traits and data points — Mr. Trump’s boundary-pushing instincts, his inveterate bluster, his fondness for some phrases associated with strongmen — from the most legitimate challenges to the country’s institutions and ideals.

They note that recent events are broadly consistent with the spirit of Mr. Trump’s tenure to date, much of which they have found troubling: Here is a president who had already fired an F.B.I. director leading an investigation into his campaign; who urged a foreign power to investigate a political rival; who purged inspectors general tasked with oversight of his administration; who led a public crusade for his own Justice Department to drop charges against his first national security adviser, who had already pleaded guilty.

Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively about threats to liberal democracy, said that Mr. Trump was best understood as “an authoritarian populist.” In Mr. Trump’s conception of authority, Mr. Mounk said, “what that means is that he and he alone truly represents the people. And anybody who disagrees with them, anybody who criticizes him, by virtue of that fact is an enemy of the people.”

Projecting military might as personal political power was of a piece, Mr. Mounk suggested.

“I don’t believe Donald Trump, when he took his oath of office, thought, ‘I want to be a dictator.’ I don’t think that today that he wants to be a dictator,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s outlandish to worry that should he be re-elected, the democratic system in the United States would be in serious danger.”

Mr. Trump’s invocation of religion in the context of law enforcement muscle struck several scholars as especially notable.

Katherine Stewart, an author who has focused often on the Christian right, said that the church visit on Monday called to mind political leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

“Trump doesn’t quote anything from the Bible. He really just uses it as a pure symbol of partisan identity,” she said, adding: “Authoritarianism frequently comes veiled in religion.”

Ms. Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, sounded a touch more hopeful. Warnings about authoritarian backslide were not quite alarmist, she said, “but I don’t share that concern just yet.”

“I remain optimistic,” she said, “that the Congress, including Republicans in Congress, will see that we have given the chief executive of this country too wide a latitude.”

There is little indication of that to date — and little political incentive, it seems, for party leaders to condemn a figure who remains widely popular with their base (and whose rampaging conduct has been well-known since before his election).

Most Republican lawmakers have declined to air any misgivings about Mr. Trump this week, though a handful have publicly taken issue with his comportment.

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska on Tuesday declared himself “against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.” Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, often a willing Trump critic, has lamented the president’s “incendiary words.” And Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the capital’s most prominent black Republican, spoke disapprovingly of the decision to violently clear protesters from the area for a presidential photograph.

So far, Mr. Trump appears plainly unbowed. He spent much of Tuesday morning tweeting about the disorder in New York, instructing local leaders to “CALL UP THE NATIONAL GUARD,” and insisting that a “SILENT MAJORITY” remained on his side.

And he framed the actions in Washington on Monday evening as a success worth emulating.

“D.C. had no problems last night,” the president wrote. “Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination.”

Matt Flegenheimer is a reporter covering national politics. He started at The Times in 2011 on the Metro desk covering transit, City Hall and campaigns. More about Matt Flegenheimer

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Bible Photo Op Further Divides Debate On State of Democracy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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