On Thursday, Vox’s Carlos Meza released a Video on its YouTube channel comparing President Trump to Latin American dictator Hugo Chavez. This in addition to flatly calling the President a “Threat to democracy” in the same video.
Following the recent call from the Editor-in-chief of Vox to “Not trust the government so long as Trump is President”, Maza went full tin foil hat after releasing a video titled “The decline of American democracy won't be televised”. The video, which compares Republican Donald Trump to the socialist Chavez, attempts to prove that Trump is attempting to destroy American democratic institutions.
Meza goes on to rant about all the things that he believes the President has done, saying:
“Trump shows a deep distrust of America's democratic institutions. He lashes out at judges, calls journalists the enemy of the people, accuses watchdog agencies of conspiring against him, [and] he questions the legitimacy of an election that he won. His white house stonewalls reporters to avoid answering questions, is suspicious of the mechanisms that limit his authority, and he encourages his supporters to be. That is a catastrophic thing to be happening in a democracy. It’s how democratic backtracking starts.”
To justify this statements, Meza overlaid tweets and clips of Trump rallies, as if arguing that the oldest democracy in the world can be taken down by a tough campaign and 120 characters. When Meza said that Trump is “suspicious of the mechanisms that limit his authority,” he put up a short clip of President Trump speaking of the lower court decision to stay the travel ban, saying “This is an unprecedented judicial overreach”, something that many agree was, in fact, an unprecedented judicial overreach.
When trying to compare Trump to Chavez, Meza assails:
“What's scary about [the] Chavez story is that he didn't need a military coup to screw up Venezuela's democracy, he did it legally by slowly turning his supporters and political allies against the country's democratic institutions.”
The things Meza forgot to mention is that Hugo Chavez did attempt a military coup in 1992 and that his socialist policies have led to the near collapse of an oil-rich nation. What is even odder is that when Chavez did finally get democratically elected, with the help of the communists, he moved his country away from democracy by rewriting the entire constitution, not by sending out a tweet.
But to even compare President Trump, who Vox has repeatedly attacked for wanting to cut too many taxes and cutting government agencies, to a man that had nationalized entire sectors of his nation’s economy is ridiculous.
