Donald Trump’s “only I can fix it” rhetoric is giving off authoritarian vibes, some conservatives are admitting, including John Yoo, the George W. Bush administration lawyer who authored the so-called “torture memos.”
Yoo told the Washington Post that Trump “reminds me a lot of early Mussolini,” calling the comparison “very disturbingly similar.”
His comment comes as even Trump’s supporters have explicitly equated him to authoritarianism.
“We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law,” Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) told a local radio show this week.
Yoo went on, in the Washington Post story, to criticize Trump’s vow to use a special prosecutor to re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email as “a compounded stupidity.”
“If you are a Republican or a conservative, you think that special prosecutors are unconstitutional,” Yoo said, adding that the idea would have the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia “rolling in his grave.”