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South Korea is in an uproar. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands have been surging through the streets of Seoul, the capital city. Some of the marchers are celebrating a ruling Friday by the Constitutional Court, which has upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Others who support the president have been angrily denouncing the court, leading to clashes with police that have resulted in the deaths of two protesters.

All of this turmoil is taking place against the backdrop of ominous gestures from North Korea, which fired off a salvo of four medium-range missiles in a test Monday. The distance traveled by the missiles would have enabled them to hit a U.S. military base in Japan a point explicitly mentioned by the North Koreans in a communique accompanying the launch.

What are we supposed to make of all of this? Is the Korean Peninsula descending into chaos?

Its important to keep two things separate here. First of all, the latest developments in South Korea follow revelations of corruption at the highest levels of political power. The allegations encompass not only the conservative President Park who is accused of using her close friend, Choi Soon-sil, to funnel bribes to businessmen but also the de facto head of Samsung, the vast business conglomerate that accounts for more than 10 percent of the countrys GDP. The companys vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, was maneuvering to expand his power at the top of the Samsung hierarchy. His trial on corruption charges has just gotten underway.

Eight court justices voted unanimously to remove the president from office. Parks actions in office, said acting chief justice Lee Jung-mi, betrayed the trust of the people and were of the kind that cannot be tolerated for the sake of protecting the Constitution. Note: It was all about the people and the Constitution. The courts act of institutional defiance is especially remarkable when you consider that democracy in South Korea is a mere 30 years old

This is the first time in Korean history that a democratically elected head of state has been removed from office by nonviolent, legal means. But thats not all. The fact that Parks fate became intertwined with that of Lee, a scion of the immensely powerful clan that controls Samsung, has given her case even greater resonance. This is a major landmark in the young political history of the South Korean state, says Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Its significant because it really speaks to the deep problem of collusion between the government and big business. The scandal has fueled the outpouring of public anger by reminding the public that the people in the country who have money and power feel theyre above the law, says Lee. In this sense, this is a big blow against the old political culture. Its a victory for the rule of law.

Now the country faces fresh elections within the next 60 days. The current front-runner is the opposition leader Moon Jae-in, head of the Democratic Party. Among other policy proposals, he favors a return to the so-called sunshine policy, a program of rapprochement with North Korea that was favored by left-wing governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Parks conservative administration, routinely vilified by North Korea, preferred sanctions to negotiations.

At the moment, North Korea doesnt appear to be particularly interested in compromise. The rhetoric coming from the regime of Kim Jong Un has been especially harsh lately, and this weeks missile launch (not to mention the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the current rulers half-brother) doesnt exactly sound like an overture to reconciliation. Yet Sung-Yoon Lee, the Tufts scholar, notes that North Korea has little incentive to moderate its appalling behavior since thats the only way it can get regional powers to treat it like a player. (Plus, a revival of the sunshine policy would give the North a new lease on life by allowing it to squeeze financial and material benefits from the Southerners.)

For the time being, though, not even North Koreas military prowess or South Koreas current political instability can conceal the fundamental divide between the two. North Korea remains one of the worlds few examples of a fully totalitarian state, its leaders presiding over an impoverished and brutalized population. South Korea, which boasts one of the worlds most dynamic economies, continues to evolve and broaden its democratic institutions. Observers sometimes invoke the rivalry between the two states, but it isnt really much of a competition, and it hasnt been for years. Thats worth contemplating at a time when many around the world are bemoaning the authoritarian resurgence and the ills of democracy.

To be sure, South Korea still has many problems. But its people, buoyed up by an extraordinary wave of civic activism, are showing that they arent prepared to accept the established way of doing things. They have mounted a remarkable campaign for change, and today that campaign has borne fruit of the most dramatic sort. Their cousins to the north can only dream of similar acts of defiance which is why their country remains frozen in time, beholden to a leader whose only plan for the future is tied to the machinery of violence.

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South Korea shows the world how democracy is done - Washington Post

Unless we act fast, the world may have already reached peak democracy.

After World War II, there were only a few lonely democracies scattered across the West. This began to change dramatically in the 1980s, when most of Latin America joined that exclusive club. But most crucially, in the 1990s, the fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a rapid and broad expansion of democracy across the world. From Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, civil liberties rose as dictatorships fell.

That rosy trend has reversed. In each year since 2006, the world has become less democratic. We have now suffered more than a full decade of declines for global democracy.

At the same time, despots across the globe are becoming more authoritarian. Their abuses are becoming more brutal; their violations of democracy more egregious. From Turkey to Russia to Iran, ruthless regimes are steadfastly suffocating the dying gasps of pro-democracy reform movements in their societies. Indeed, in the last 11 years, 109 countries have seen a net decline in their level of democracy, according to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House.

The Westthat hodgepodge of developed countries that embody liberal values, from Canada to the European Union to Japanis partly to blame for the global recession of democracy. Misguided Western foreign policy, like backing friendly dictators, turning a blind eye to abuses of democracy, or actively toppling democratic regimes, hurt democracy in the long run. More recently, counterproductive foreign policy decisions have corresponded with the rise of illiberal populism.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the state of global democracy is going to get worse. US president Donald Trump certainly did not start the trend of democracys retreat, but his America First foreign policy guarantees its continuedand likely acceleratedglobal decline.

To understand why we find ourselves in this perilous tipping point, we need to look at our foreign policy choices over the past several decades.

The United States and its Western allies have, at best, a checkered relationship with promoting democracy around the globe. During the Cold War, American foreign policy was far more concerned with finding friendly pro-West, anti-Soviet regimes than it was with finding democratic ones. Indeed, in de-classified memos, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that the biggest threat to American interests was the insidious model of a legitimately elected democratic regime that supported the Kremlin instead of the US. As a result, from Iran to the Congo to Chile, the American government has actively intervened (often with the help of European allies) to overthrow democratically elected regimes at various points in history.

That calculation shifted when the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall crumbled, and despotic regimes collapsed. Western foreign policy began to earnestly support democracy in a much stronger way. It was still imperfect, of course. But there was genuine, sustained diplomatic pressure exerted in an attempt to liberalize authoritarian states. The results were clear: The 1990s were so auspicious for the spread of democracy that Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama even claimed that the world was approaching The End of History, with democracy as the natural and inevitable endpoint of global development.

But we now live in a darker period for democracy. Certainly, the true culprits for democracys decline are dictators and despots, along with counterfeit democratsthose authoritarian wolves like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Viktor Orban in Hungary who cloak themselves in the faade of democratic sheepskins to gain political legitimacy.

They deserve the overwhelming blame. They have organized and executed a heist against democracy, from Turkey to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Afghanistan. But when you look closely, its clear that the West has often been driving their getaway car.

First, theres what I call the Saudi Arabia effect. The Westwith America at the helmhas, for decades, cozied up to awful, abusive authoritarian regimes out of geopolitical expediency. The United States knows that it is being two-faced, praising democracy publicly while inking arms deals with emirs and despots under the table. But the West proceeds nonetheless because it perceives some despotic regimes as key strategic allies. The same hard-nosed realpolitik calculation is made with many countries across the world, even though that type of global diplomacy inhibits democracy and empowers authoritarian regimes.

Second, increasingly since the 1990s, Western governments set laughably low standards for what constitutes democracy. This serves as a counterproductive incentive for cynical leaders to do only the bare minimumto simply appear democratic. This allows Western governments to accept deeply flawed counterfeit democracies so that they can work with them in seemingly good conscience. I call this the curse of low expectations.

In Madagascar, a few years ago, I met with the head of a political party who told me:

Unlike the other parties, we are a party of values.

Okay, I responded, which values?

A look of panic crossed his face.

I left the values in the car. Someone go get the values for the American.

This was a carefully choreographed charade gone wrong. He was trying desperately to play the part of an ostensibly committed democrat. He was expecting me to play the part of the Westerner waiting eagerly to see just enough glimmers of democracy. The problem, though, is that the more than 100 regimes around the world trapped between pure dictatorship and genuine democracy have no meaningful political competition, and no meaningful input from the people.

Nonetheless, the West often calls elections free and fair when they are not (which I saw firsthand in Madagascar) and often labels countries as democracies when they are not. In Azerbaijans 2013 election, US Congressional representatives even praised an election where the results were accidentally released on an iPhone app before voting took place.

Counterfeit democrats get foreign aid and political legitimacy that should only be conferred to genuine democrats. Yet that low bar for what counts as democracy, paradoxically, ensures that leaders in the developing world have absolutely no incentive to ever build a real democratic government.

The last issue is the botched Western military interventions that purported to be in support of democracyparticularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Libya. These misguided efforts have given despots a gift of plausibility when they crack down on pro-democracy activists, foreign NGOs, and human rights organizations. Because America and its closest allies claimed to be invading those countries in the name of democracy, despots use those examples as a pretext to purge pro-democracy reformers.

Despots often falsely claim that any pro-democracy agenda is a Trojan horse, a ploy to craftily achieve the Wests true goal: regime change by force. Paradoxically, then, misguided and failed interventions in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have given anti-democratic forces key rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian rule. And in the West, the risks of pushing hard for democracy has also reinforced the emerging consensus in Brussels, Washington, London, and Paris that the dictatorial devil we know is better than the democratic devil we dont.

Those three aspects of Western foreign policy coincided catastrophically with the rise of illiberal populism across the globe and a crisis of confidence in the concept of democracy in the West. This was the perfect storm necessary to halt democracys advance and transform it into a retreat back toward authoritarianism.

President Trump is already accelerating this retreat. Several authoritarian regimesincluding Chinaare already using his 2016 election as anti-democratic propaganda, arguing that Trump is clear evidence of the bad decision-making ushered in by democratic government.

More substantively, Trumps early foreign policy decisions (and especially his America First rhetoric) has sent a clear signal that the United States will be shifting its focus away from global human rights to focus exclusively on its narrow conception of self-interest. Indeed, his budget proposal would gut the State Department budget, axe pro-democracy foreign aid, and make it far more difficult for the United States to promote democracy generally. Thats not the right approach, even though there is room to improve the strategies that the United States uses to boost democracy across the globe.

Beyond the budget, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson bucked longstanding tradition and did not unveil the State Departments annual human rights report personally, thereby signaling the United Statess diminishing focus on human rights.

Such signals matter. The United States and its Western allies used to be an important referee on the global stage, blowing the whistle on the most egregious abuses of democracy and human rights. Certainly, America has been a biased refereeturning a blind eye to countries like Saudi Arabia and only lightly penalizing others that deserved harsher treatment. But its important that the referee exists. After just a month, Trumps rhetoric suggests that hes not even going to watch the game.

Follow Brian on Twitter at @brianklaas. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Read next: Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy

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Democracy is dying around the worldand the West has only itself to blame - Quartz

Donald Trumps presidency is just one element of our disintegrating democracy.

A voter pulls back the curtain as she leaves a voting booth on November 8, 2016. (Kristopher Radder / The Brattleboro Reformer via AP)

Today, less than two months into a new administration, we are now facing the biggest crisis of legitimacy of our democracy in a generation or more. But the crisis has been building for years.

Normally, our democracy is considered the most legitimate form of government because the power rests with the people. But when this power dynamic is altered and citizens lose their influence, the legitimacy of the system is threatened. And thats what we now face: a system in which money speaks louder than voters, voting is increasingly difficult, and the votes that are cast may not matter because of an archaic system known as the electoral college. As a result, we, as citizens, are governed by representatives who do not reflect or respect the values and priorities of the majority, and our democratic legitimacy is in grave danger as a consequence.

To understand the roots of our current crisis, we must first look to the orchestrated attack on the pillars of our democracy that began seven years ago, starting with the lawless Citizens United decision. In the years that followed, the attack continued with the recent wave of racially targeted voter-suppression laws, last years hijacking of the Supreme Court by the GOP, and capped off by a president who lost the popular margin by nearly 3 million votes. Yet we cannot treat these issues as one-off concerns. Instead, we must respond as a citizenry, as a movement, to the broader threat, taking action from the local level on up, and refusing anything less than the restoration of the power of the peopleand our democratic legitimacy.

First, our democracy is built on the pillar that elections are determined by the votersnot by money. The Supreme Courts 2010 ruling in Citizens United has turned political campaigns into proxy wars between billionaires and giant, multinational corporations who dont seek to buy just election results but the legislative and policy decisions of the government itself. The result has been a Gilded Age on steroids, with more than $6.8 billion spent on the 2016 election alone. In my recent race for the US Senate, I saw personally how much influence these dark money groups now enjoy, and how normalized their influence over down ballot elections has become. In fact, the press now treats the strategy and plans of these groups as near-definitive indicators of whether a candidate can win. In the eyes of pundits, support from a billionaire now means a candidate on the rise. Only seven years after Citizens United, activity from the groups it created is assigned as much predictive power as any credible poll. This era of massive institutional corruption must end, and the only way to do so it by returning elections to the voters with a system of elections that puts power back in the hands of individual voters.

Second, the fundamental right to vote must not, once again, be restricted for cynical, political purposes. Voter-ID requirements may be the latest tactic, but weve seen this evil before, in the form of the literacy tests and poll taxes of Jim Crow, which unconstitutionally suppressed the voting rights of African Americans. In todays version, Republicans, despite no evidence, have invented charges of voter fraud in a deliberate attempt to justify voter-suppression laws that disproportionately, and intentionally, suppress minority and low-income voting. We must fight back, both by using litigation to overturn these laws, and by working directly with the communities these laws disenfranchise. We cannot allow a new generation of black voters to face exclusion from our most sacred right.

Third, protecting the vote means protecting the power of the popular vote. Two of the last three presidents have been elected by the electoral college in defiance of the national popular vote. The electoral college is a historical relic designed to balance power between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. Our democracy has come a long way since then, and yet we have stuck with this electoral relic. It is time to leave it to the history books and ensure that the popular vote decides national elections. The best solution is a constitutional amendment that removes the electoral college. But states also have the power to at least nullify the electoral college by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; 11 states have already done so and more should join.

The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.

Finally, the legitimacy crisis facing our system of government has also extended to the Judicial Branch, when, last year, GOP senators decided to abandon their constitutional responsibilities by blocking Justice Merrick Garlands nomination. They offered no legal justification for their actions, fully admitting that their sole intention was to sacrifice the legitimacy of the Supreme Court on a bet that a Republican would win the White House and they could secure their own nominee. I have never seen a type of politics more cynical than this strategy, crafted by keader Mitch McConnell. The severity of this action and what it means for the country cannot be overstated, because the legitimacy of the court will be questioned for a generation. The difference between Garland and Gorsuch could be the difference between overturning or cementing voter suppression laws, with future elections in the balance.

Dark money and voter suppression would be severe problems even in isolation, but combined they are devastating threat to the standing of voters in our democracy. This is the crisis of our lifetimes, and must be met with a call to actionto restore our democratic legitimacy. As citizens, as voters, we have work to do. And it starts at the local level. Ensuring we have a democratic governor in Virginia to prevent hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Increasing the number of states that enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Overturning Citizens United. We may not have another national election for four years, but there are nationally-relevant laws being debated and issues being addressed right now. What happens in four years depends on what we do today. And nothing less than the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.

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The Very Legitimacy of Our Democracy Is Under Threat - The Nation.

By Brian Klaas By Brian Klaas March 10 at 8:10 AM

Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. on March 5 denied that President Trump's 2016 campaign was wiretapped while senators of both parties weighed in on the allegations. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) is a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics and author of The Despots Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy.

Today, March 10, is President Trumps 50th day in office. Since his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump has governed in a way that poses a unique threat to the integrity of American democracy.

Democracy is bigger than partisanship. Therefore, this is not a critique of Trumps policy proposals. Rather, its a sober assessment of American democracy at a pivotal moment and a call for Americans of all political stripes to press all politicians to agree, at minimum, on preserving the bedrock principles that make the United States a democracy.

The call is urgent. In just 50 days, Trumps presidency has already threatened American democracy in six fundamental ways:

1. Trump has attacked the integrity of voting, the foundation of all democratic systems. Without any evidence, Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. This claim is not true. Every serious study that has assessed voter fraud, including studies conducted by Republican presidents, has concluded that the scale of the problem is negligible.

Nonetheless, on his sixth day in office, Trump called for a major investigation into voter fraud now largely forgotten by many Americans. Unfortunately, his assertion has not been forgotten by a large swath of Trumps base. Tens of millions likely now believe Trumps claim which will certainly prove an important alternative fact when, in the future, attempts are inevitably made to make it harder for certain Americans to vote.

2. After attacking the integrity of his own election, Trump has also undermined the credibility of his own office. Democracy will not function if Americans cannot be sure that the presidents claims are at least grounded in evidence-based reality. And yet, in just 50 days, Trump has made at least 194 false or misleading claims an average of about four daily. (March 1 was the only day without one, so far.)

Recently, Trumps early morning tweet-storm alleging that former president Barack Obama personally ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower has not been backed up by a shred of evidence. Key Republican senators and representatives have expressed their bafflement at the accusation. Yet there have been no consequences for the president baselessly accusing his predecessor of criminal action. Rep.Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went so far as to chide reporters for asking questions about the wiretap claim, saying, I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally. How can democracy function when people cant take the president literally?

3.Trumps administration has repeatedly flouted ethics guidelines without consequence. When Trump failed to discipline Kellyanne Conway for brazenly giving a commercial for Ivanka Trumps jewelry and clothing line, the Office of Government Ethics had to send an extraordinary letterreminding Trump that ethics rules apply to the executive branch. Trump has also failed to meaningfully separate himself from his business interests. Most recently, Trump received 38 lucrative trademarksfrom China, not just a likely violation of the Constitutions emoluments clause but also a benefit that will call into question whether Trumps foreign policy will pursue what is best for the American people or what is best for his profits. That conflict of interest is precisely why democracies set ethics guidelines and why it threatens democracy to violate them.

4. Trump has attacked the independent judiciary. When U.S. DistrictJudge James Robart defied Trumps travel ban, Trump called him a so-called judge and insinuated that he would lay blame for a terrorist attack squarely at the feet of the judiciary. Presidents routinely object to individual court decisions, but it threatens democracy to go one step further and demonize any judge that dares cross the president. After all, the judiciary is charged with upholding the law and the Constitution not blindly affirming the presidents worldview.

5. Crucially, Trump has accelerated a long-term trend, prodding tens of millions of Americans to further lose faith in basic institutions of American government. Any experts in federal agencies are now the deep state. Trumps team has begun suggesting that the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office a trusted authority for Democrats and Republicans since 1974 is simply a group of hacks. There is virtually no authority trusted by both Democrats and Republicans anymore. Instead, the opposing sides are all too inclined to view government as captured by evil partisans rather than disagreeing patriots. Rep.Steve King (R-Iowa) made this view explicit, recently calling for a purge of leftists from government in an astonishingly totalitarian tweet. Public trust is part of the lifeblood of democracy, and it is draining faster than ever.

6. Finally, Trump has attacked a cornerstone of every democracy: the free press. He has called legitimate media organizations fake news no fewer than 22 times on Twitter in the first 50 days and many more times in speeches. Worse, Trump called the press the enemy of the American People, language that echoes Mao and Stalin rather than Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.

Trump only views the press as a legitimate player in American democracy insofar as it is willing to affirm his narrative. To Trump, negative polls are fake. Unfortunately, his attacks are working. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 81 percent of Republicans agree that the media is the enemy of the American people. Eighty-six percent of Republicans trust Trump to tell the truth rather than the media (up from 78 percent just two weeks earlier). Throughout history, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction has been a critical precursor to the breakdown of democracy and the creeping advance of authoritarianism.

Whether these six attacks are a deliberate long-term strategy to erode American democracy, or simply a political ploy to poison the electorates view against any anyone that is willing to defy the president, remains to be seen. Certainly, Trump is not fully to blame; he is capitalizing on long-term divisions and a long-term erosion of American institutions. But he has accelerated those trends.

The Constitution and checks and balances are not magical guardians. Documents dont save democracy people do. American democratic institutions are only as strong as those who fight for them in times of duress. This is one of those times, and this is just the beginning. It will be a long fight. To win it, Democrats and Republicans must set aside policy divides and unite in the defense of democracy.

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How President Trump has already hurt American democracy in just 50 days - Washington Post

Bernie Sanders has launched a withering attack on Donald Trump, accusing him of being a pathological liar who is driving America towards authoritarianism.

In an interview with the Guardian, the independent senator from Vermont, who waged a spirited campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, gave a bleak appraisal of the new White House and its intentions.

He warned that Trumps most contentious outbursts against the media, judiciary and other pillars of American public life amounted to a conscious assault on democracy.

Trump lies all of the time and I think that is not an accident, there is a reason for that. He lies in order to undermine the foundations of American democracy.

Sanders warning comes 50 days into the Trump presidency at a time when the country is still reeling from the shock elevation of a real estate businessman and reality TV star to the worlds most powerful office. In that brief period, the new incumbent of the White House has launched attacks on former president Barack Obamas signature healthcare policy; on visitors from majority-Muslim countries, refugees and undocumented immigrants; and on trade agreements and environmental protection programs.

Speaking to the Guardian in his Senate office in Washington DC, Sanders said that he was concerned about what he called Trumps reactionary economic program of tax breaks to billionaires and devastating cuts to programs that impact the middle class. But he reserved his most excoriating language for what he believes are the presidents authoritarian tendencies.

He charged Trump with devising a conscious strategy of lies denigrating key public institutions, from the mainstream media to judges and even the electoral process itself, so that he could present himself as the sole savior of the nation. The aim was to put out the message that the only person in America who stands for the American people, the only person in America who is telling the truth, the only person in America who gets it right is the president of the United States, Donald Trump.

Trumps fragile relationship with the truth has been one of the distinguishing features of his fledgling administration. He astonished observers by calling a judge who issued a legal ruling blocking his travel ban a so-called judge, accused Obama without producing any evidence of wiretapping Trump Tower, and claimed falsely that up to 5 million votes had been cast illegally in the November election.

Sanders, however, suggested the lies all serve a purpose. To underline his point, Sanders compared the 45th president with the 43rd. George Bush was a very conservative president, I opposed him every single day. But George Bush did not operate outside of mainstream American political values.

While the media spotlight remains firmly on Trump and the daily bombardment of his Twitter feed, quietly and largely unmarked, Sanders, the self-styled democratic socialist senator, is spearheading a nationwide resistance to the new administration. The Brooklyn-born politician is working in tandem with, though at arms length from, former senior advisers in his presidential campaign to rouse for a second time the vast army of young people who flocked to his cause in 2016.

He said that despite what he sees as the virulent threat of Trump, he finds comfort in the evidence that the resistance is already in full swing. You are seeing a very active progressive movement. Our Revolution a group which came out of my campaign other groups, the spontaneous Womens March, thats all an indication of the willingness of the American people to fight back for democracy.

Trumps end goal was to end up as the leader of a nation which has moved in a significant degree toward authoritarianism, he said. The only way to defeat that trend is for massive grassroots resistance, and clearly we are seeing that right now.

As examples of what he meant, Sanders pointed to the 150 rallies in 130 congressional districts that were held in one recent weekend alone. The events mobilized tens of thousands of people demanding meetings with their members of Congress to protest against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Sanders made a specific appeal to his Republican colleagues in Congress to join him in this resistance. He addressed himself directly to those Republicans who believe in democracy, who do not believe in authoritarianism. It is incumbent upon them, in this moment in history, to stand up and say that what Trump is doing is not what the United States is about, its not what our constitution is about. They have got to join us in resistance.

He added: I hope in the coming months to be working with some conservative Republicans, who I disagree with on every economic and environmental issue you can imagine, to say to this president that you are not going to undermine American democracy.

The Vermont senator also remarked on the ongoing inquiry into alleged connections between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies have accused the Kremlin of trying to distort the presidential election in Trumps favour by hacking into Democratic email accounts.

Russia played a very heavy role in attempting, successfully, I think, to impact our election. That is unacceptable, Sanders said.

We need to know what kind of influence the Russian oligarchy has over Trump. Many people are astounded. Here he is, seemingly in strong disagreement with Australia, with Mexico, with long-term allies; but he has nothing but positive things to say about Mr Putin who is an authoritarian leader.

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'Trump lies all the time': Bernie Sanders indicts president's assault on democracy - The Guardian