Déjà vu and Donald Trump autocracy: Hungary remembered

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe newspaper:

In 1976, as part of my first visit to Europe, I went to visit the country of Hungary, the birthplace and former home of a close friend’s parents, who had immigrated to the United States after World War II. 

It was unnerving to see many soldiers on the streets — Hungarians in gray uniforms and Russians, with machine guns, in black — and to be required to show our papers for something as simple as booking a hotel room. This, in the Cold War, is what we were fighting against. And it is inconceivable, tragic, and unacceptable that now this is what America is starting to become.

Aa an autocartic Trump presents the challenge of “Who’s going to stop me❓” I urge judges, governors, legislators, and ordinary citizens to do all they can to enforce the laws, to uphold values and ideals that make this country the type of beacon that, in some ways, it has been and that we aspires for it to be.

From Todd Macalister in  Newton, Massachusetts