Trump's call to Georgia election officials highlights White House bunker mentality

Trump's actions are giving Americans a taste of the maneuvers autocrats engage in when they feel desperate to keep power.

Adolf Hitler retreated to his Führerbunker as the Allies advanced into Germany in the spring of 1945, leaving Germans to their fates. Moammar Gadhafi holed up in his fortress on the outskirts of Tripoli, refusing to surrender when Libyans took up arms against him. And President Donald Trump has turned the White House into his own refuge as he desperately seeks to remain in power despite having lost the presidential election.

Trump has followed an authoritarian, rather than a democratic, playbook as president. It is fitting that he would end up like some of history's best-known autocrats: hunkered down in his safe space, surrounded by his latest crop of unhinged loyalists, trying pathetically to escape the reality of his defeat....

For those who have followed Trump's time in office closely, his recourse to such measures is unsurprising. During his presidency, Americans have witnessed not just the decline of accountability and ethics in government, but also the rise of a political cult that glorified Trump as a man able to get away with what lesser men cannot and replaced expertise with loyalty as a criterion for government service....

From start to finish, Trump's administration offered Americans an extraordinary civics lesson in how democratic erosion works and a road map of the weaknesses in our institutions that we can follow to bolster our system....