Dear Editor,

It is now blindingly obvious that Trump and Putin are very much alike; both men are at heart authoritarian dictators. Neither will willingly accept any criticism from their citizenry or the press or from the leaders of other countries for that matter.

Trump snuggles up to dictators and oligarchs because that’s exactly who he is. Before the election — when the amount of Russian interference wasn’t as well known and when he thought that he would lose — Trump was already laying the groundwork for refusing to recognize the results of the election and a power grab.

Putin has had 17 years to consolidate his power. I don’t think it will take Trump that long. The dirty tricks campaign has only started.

We now know that sources — probably within the administration — are circulating forged documents purportedly from the NSA — to mainstream news sources with the objective being that they would use them in writing an article, which would later be “blown up” or discredited by the administration.

I suspect that’s what happened at CNN last week when three investigative reporters were fired for running a story that didn’t check out.

Trump frequently states about the Russian hacking, “who knows who did it? Nobody knows. It’s impossible to know.” Of course, this is patently untrue. Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed that the Russians interfered in our 2016 elections.

But of course that’s their objective. Discombobulate people to the point to where they can’t tell fact from fiction and good news from fake news. At some point many millions of uncritical people will be ready to believe a strongman dictator and shut everything else out and then he will have won.

Be very, very careful America; we are on very thin ice. Democracy and the primacy of the constitution are hanging in the balance. If the administration manages to shut down the investigations of its collusion with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election, the results will be that more and more Putin-like measures against the press and the opposition will be taken and the road to perdition will become exceedingly clear. But by then it will be too late!

Jim Porter

Danville