When at Times the Mob Is Swayed

A visionary legal scholar's clear-eyed but reassuring defense of the Constitution's power to withstand an authoritarian president Noted constitutional lawyer Burt Neuborne opens his new book with a chilling narrative of how closely Donald Trump's communications strategy resembles the toxic mix of deliberate falsehoods, white racism, and the search for scapegoats used by Hitler in the 1930s to topple German democracy. Neuborne is relatively confident, though, that it won't happen here. The American president is bound by four unprecedented sets of constitutional protections, all endorsed by both major parties, that stand between us and an authoritarian regime fronted by Donald Trump's tweets: separation of powers, federalism, and two Bills of Rights protecting individual freedom and equality. Several important constitutional rights—a women's right to choose, the right of gay marriage, and the Establishment Clause, promising freedom from other people's...