Fareed Zakaria

Look, there's no question that that's true.

When I was writing about it, when I coined the phrase illiberal democracy in 96, 97, I was looking at places like Pakistan, the Philippines, Slovakia, Turkey, Erdogan, you could begin to see it happening.

And I always thought that this is not going to affect the developed world as much.

I did actually in my book have a chapter or two about America, but I thought it was sort of like a tendency, a danger that we were becoming too enamored of the idea of these charismatic leaders.

But what I didn't expect is that the institutional framework

of Western democracies would be as fragile as it is.

And in this case, actually, the United States is in worse shape than other places.

No, no, no, no.

More than in places like in Europe.

Giorgia Maloney comes to power in Italy, and she's a fire-breathing right-wing populist.

But she's contained by the institutions.

Her policies have actually not been as radical as people thought they would be, partly because there are lots of institutions, both within Italy and within the European Union, and she's basically not torn them up.

In the United States, we have the oldest constitution in the world, which is great in many ways, but in some ways it's kind of old fashioned.

So for example, our Justice Department does technically sit entirely under the president.

That is not true in Europe.

All their Justice Departments are independent agencies.

So what that means is that what we developed after Watergate was a set of norms

the president wouldn't ask the attorney general to prosecute certain cases.

But those are all just norms that we developed after Watergate.

And Trump just broke them all.