Experts are stepping up to assure anyone who had thought Trump would follow the law, that they are in for a surprise.

President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Germany has issued a travel warning to its citizens after several cases showed US border patrol denying entry based on biological markers (stripped naked for genitalia audit). And France has said one of its scientists was detained at the US border and denied entry after having said… scientific things.

Meanwhile, the US says Ukrainians will have asylum status revoked despite loss from war with Russia. Instead America says it will declare asylum status for white South Africans due to the loss of racist apartheid.

How could such illogic be developed? Criticism of education and the arts as too partisan-by not being partial enough-was foreshadowing. The dictatorship signs are here and clear.

A pillar of our democracy, our schools, is being targeted in a way that seeds and reinforces autocratic populism…, the common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet.