[Editor’s note: The domestic political situation in America is spiraling. This is, I think, an important Weekly, so in addition to sending it as an email to those of you who get the Weeklies delivered to your inbox, I’m publishing it as an article available to all subscribers.]

Ekrem Imamoglu’s still in jail.

On March 19, Istanbul’s popular mayor was arrested on a litany of trumped up charges ranging from bid-rigging to terrorism. The day before, he was stripped of his college diploma.

Imamoglu, who twice bested Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hand-picked mayoral candidates in Turkey’s largest city (which Erdogan himself governed during his rise to power in the 1990s) was poised to contest the presidency in Turkey. Erdogan’s bid to remove his most formidable challenger from the chess board came as Turkey’s main opposition party was set to officially nominate Imamoglu as its candidate.

Erdogan’s decision to move against Imamoglu was widely described (decried) as one of the strongman’s most brazen domestic maneuvers in a career full of them. In the days that followed, Turkey’s interior ministry arrested hundreds of Imamoglu’s supporters who took to the streets, where riot police deployed crowd control tactics including water cannons against protestors.

As one Turkish parliamentarian wrote for Politico this week, “Even for [Erdogan], jailing or disqualifying an official presidential candidate backed by such an overwhelming mandate would be hard to swallow.” This is, the same editorial noted, “a tactic more commonly seen in Russia, Belarus or Venezuela — not in a country that still claims to be a democracy.”

But, as I discussed at some length when news of Imamoglu’s arrest made international headlines this week, Turkey’s not a democracy anymore. Rather, Turkey’s defined by what political scientists would call “competitive authoritarianism” which, to use Steven Levitsky’s classic definition, is a state where “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority [but] incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.”

In such systems, the playing field isn’t level, which in simple terms means that although AKP in Turkey and, to use another prominent example, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, have a legitimate claim on a popular mandate by way of a mostly-credible democratic process, they wield the levers of government such that their opponents are unfairly disadvantaged even if procedural norms are generally observed when the ballots are cast and counted. It’s akin to a soccer match where one team’s players are required to wear ankle weights and the referees are employed by the other team. Nothing stops the disadvantaged team from scoring enough goals to win — if you don’t count the ankle weights and the biased umpires.

As the Turkish lawmaker cited above noted, Imamoglu has “faced over 90 investigations” since winning the mayorship in 2019, an election he had to win twice, by the way. AKP nullified his first victory on false claims of irregular voting, forcing a do-over. When he emerged victorious again, AKP conceded. Allegations made against Imamoglu over the past five years run the gamut from the serious (corruption) to what the Turkish politician described as the “absurd,” including “charges of overloading public buses” during the pandemic.

Imamoglu’s not alone in Erdogan’s jails. AKP also had dozens of his allies arrested this week in a bid to erase his presence from the domestic political landscape altogether.

This is the risk of a model the new American right’s keen to adopt for the United States: Competitive authoritarianism’s a very slippery slope. Such systems can dead end in de facto dictatorships. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s Russia was once considered a competitive autocracy, but as Aleksei Navalny would attest were he still among the living, that label plainly doesn’t fit today. In Putin’s Russia, Imamoglu would probably be dead by now, and he damn sure wouldn’t be mayor of anything.

Erdogan’s intimately familiar with Donald Trump’s affinity for strongmen and Ankara’s fully aware of the MAGA movement’s friendly propinquity with Orban’s “illiberal democracy.” It’s not a stretch, at all, to suggest that America’s democratic backsliding helps explain why Erdogan felt emboldened to go after Imamoglu in such a blatant way. His arrest and possible disqualification for the next presidential election is the sort of thing other US State Departments would’ve frowned upon and castigated, particularly coming from a NATO member. I doubt Erdogan has much to worry about in that regard today.

As any EM veteran would tell you, democratic backsliding and Erdogan’s penchant for autocratic rule is one of, and probably the, biggest impediments to the investability of Turkish assets. Turkey’s experienced on-again, off-again currency crises for years now due almost entirely to Erdogan’s habitual encroachments on monetary policy. Local bonds and equities likewise trade in the long shadow of a megalomaniac.

This week, Turkish equities plunged more than 16% amid the fallout from Imamoglu’s arrest. It was the worst week for local shares since the financial crisis, exceeding even the losses suffered during the onset of the pandemic.

I thought about all of that while I waited for a seat at the bar on Friday evening at my new favorite haunt, a modest establishment by any high culinary standards, but a place where the bar staff’s superb beyond their combined years.

Over the 45-minute or so wait, I caught up on the Times. Slouched in one of two broken-in leather chairs by the hostess stand, I read article after article recounting the Trump administration’s border actions. Against illegal immigrants, yes, and against alleged Venezuelan gang members, sure, and against Palestinian activists. But also against legal immigrants. And against permanent residents. And against tourists, scientists, surgeons and teachers. And against Germans, French, Canadians and Indians.

Excuses range from the semi-plausible to the apparently ridiculous to the mostly unexplained, which is to say the administration’s now in the business of detaining and initiating deportation proceedings against legal residents, some of them highly accomplished, for no reason, or no reason they’re willing to disclose or put before an immigration court. I read about half a dozen specific examples. I’ll discuss two of them.

Here’s a question: Do I want to hang out regularly with someone who attended Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral last month? No. Probably not. Here’s another question: If I need a kidney transplant and the person best qualified medically to advise me on the procedure is, like many people of Lebanese descent, sympathetic to Hezbollah, do I care that she was among the 50,000 people (at least) who crowded into Beirut’s Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium to pay their respects to Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine in February? Not really, no. In that scenario, I’m only concerned with living through the procedure, and if it turns out Dr. Mephistopheles is the foremost authority on the subject… well, then, my only question is whether the Devil takes Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Let me be clear: I don’t know the behind-the-scenes specifics of Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s case. It may well turn out that the US had very good reason to deport her. But what I do know is that i) she had a valid visa, ii) she taught at Brown, iii) the Trump administration, wittingly or not, shipped her out despite a court order blocking her deportation and iv) depending on the definition of “sympathetic,” finding “sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures” (as US officials described content discovered on the good doctor’s phone) is not the same thing as, say, discovering al-Qaeda propaganda on the phone of a Saudi with a tourist visa.

The point is: Maybe Dr. Alawieh’s a terrorist maybe she isn’t, but tossing out a Brown transplant nephrologist who held a fellowship at Ohio State and did her residency at Yale because she had — whatever — one of those 1980s mall glamour shot-style pictures of Nasrallah as her iPhone wallpaper, is to misunderstand Hezbollah and its relationship with the Lebanese diaspora.

Dr. Alawieh’s a Shiite Muslim from Lebanon. If the question’s whether she “supports Nasrallah in any way” (that’s a direct quote from her CBP interrogation), the answer’s probably, “I mean, kinda, yeah.” And that’s basically what she said. At one point, Dr. Alawieh told CBP, of Nasrallah, “He’s a very big figure in our community,” an understatement of comically epic proportions. Like a North Pole elf saying, “Santa’s a pretty big deal where I come from.” (I should note that a law firm which initially agreed to represent Alawieh sought to withdraw from her case citing “further diligence.”)

Then there’s the case of Syria-born Mahmoud Khalil, whose grandparents were displaced in the Nakba. A permanent US resident, Khalil became the public face of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, to which he returned even after graduation. Khalil famously refused to wear a mask while campaigning for the Palestinian cause, confidently telling friends that because he wasn’t doing anything wrong, he saw no reason to cover his face or otherwise obscure his identity. That was a mistake.

Khalil was singled out on social media by pro-Israel activists, one of whom (a professor at Columbia who was banned from campus) exhorted Marco Rubio on “X” to initiate deportation proceedings against Khalil, which the US ultimately did. He was arrested earlier this month by plainclothes officers in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife, a US citizen. He ended up in Louisiana. Trump jeered and smeared Khalil on TruthSocial, calling him a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student” and promising “many” more arrests to come.

Through the whole ordeal, Khalil was never charged with a crime. That seems like a key point to me. The White House says he’s an anti-Semite, only not the kind Trump likes. If, instead of rallying Palestinian activists at Columbia, Khalil had picked up a tiki torch at Home Depot and marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” he would’ve been just another “very fine” person on one side of a completely legitimate political debate. Instead, he’s a prisoner of the state with no rights, apparently, other than the right to counsel. His critics also say he promoted Hamas literature, a contention that stems from the dissemination of propaganda at rallies where he was present. There’s scant evidence (if there’s any at all) to suggest Khalil’s what the US implicitly claims: An avid promoter of terrorist causes.

There are probably all sorts of dubious legal end-arounds available to Trump for denying US citizens their rights under exigent circumstances, and I think that’s coming. Trump’s promised again and again to go after his political opponents by turning the Justice Department into his personal prosecutorial arm. Who’s to say he won’t, for example, arrest a Democratic mayor for resisting the administration’s efforts to illegally detain or deport alleged terrorists? Far-fetched? I actually don’t think so. What if he arrests Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ships her off to El Salvador as a Nicolás Maduro sympathizer? Ridiculous? Maybe. But who’d stop him? Chuck Schumer? The courts? If you don’t think Trump’s asked himself that question (maybe not about AOC specifically, but about Democrats and US citizens he doesn’t care for more generally), you’re wrong, and I can assure you the conclusion he’s come to is that no one would stop him. And by appearances, he’s right.

On Friday, in what, as the son of college professors, I can only call a disastrously disgraceful development, Columbia submitted to a long list of Trump’s demands in a bid to win back hundreds of millions in frozen federal funding. Among other things, the university’s created a new senior vice provost position tasked with oversight of the college’s Middle Eastern Studies Department, a decision which looked, to some faculty, suspiciously like receivership. And academic receivership was one of Trump’s demands. The vice provost will supervise the curriculum and review hiring decisions for some programs, including the Center for Palestine Studies.

Thanks to the Columbia’s trustees, Trump now knows he can extort America’s top colleges, which raises questions as to what the government might do next in terms of leveraging federal funding to influence public schools, or anyone else who depends on federal grants for that matter. As the Times noted, “Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties, and college administrators have said Columbia’s response to the White House’s demands may set a dangerous precedent.”

The concern in all of this is that the crackdown on legal US residents and the apparent denial of due process and disdain for habeas corpus, along with the successful extortion of Columbia, are evidence that America’s crossed the Rubicon. Authoritarian rule’s upon us. That autocracy’s already here. I don’t think that’s alarmist. I think it’s a fact.

America’s going to look a little bit more like Erdogan’s Turkey from a domestic political perspective every day, and the cumulative effect of that four years on will be quite dramatic, where that means this won’t be the same country anymore. If Trump’s healthy, Republicans will find a way to let him seek a third term or failing that, he’ll declare some manner of emergency that’ll prolong his presidency. I guarantee it, again assuming he’s physically up for another term.

On Friday night, one of the bartenders asked where I got my over-shirt. I was wearing my Carlota Barerra white denim jacket for just the second time since I bought it last year. It’s an understated piece, but it stands out accidentally. “It’s by a Spanish designer,” I said. “Why do you ask? Am I too old for white denim?” She looked surprised: “No, that’s not what I meant at all. You’re not old.”

I guess she was right. I’m not “old” on a strict definition of the word, but I’m getting older, so it means something when I say that never before in my lifetime have I been genuinely concerned about openly expressing my political viewpoints in a public forum. But I’m concerned now.

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