Mr. Trump has already demonstrated an affinity for legal pressuring. His recent tirade against Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for being critical, demanding that they recuse themselves on all “Trump related matters,” betrays an impulse for turning the justice system into a support system.

The subsequent step in autocratic legalism is to use and abuse the law to target critics. This, too, is commonplace today among many countries with democratically elected presidents. In Russia, Vladimir Putin uses anti-corruption campaigns to arrest critics who accuse him of corruption. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has removed elected mayors after accusing them of terrorism. And in early February, the ruling party of Poland, another country in the process of democratic backsliding, passed a law allowing politicians to fine and fire judges whose rulings they consider harmful. Analysts think this law will be abused by the executive branch to turn the legal system into a weapon against critics.

Mr. Trump has engaged in smear campaigns against his critics since Day 1, often questioning their precise legal standing. Barack Obama is the liar under oath (in reference to his birth status), Hillary Clinton is the crook (referring to her emails) and Joe Biden is the corrupt one (his dealings in Ukraine).

It seems that Mr. Trump has already used more than tweets to target enemies. Even before his interference in the Stone case, the administration was already pressuring the Justice Department to go harsh on an investigation of the former deputy F.B.I. director Andrew G. McCabe. Mr. Trump disliked Mr. McCabe for investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 elections.

The United States is obviously nowhere near the dangerous point of using the law to target dissent systematically. To get to this level, more is needed than just a bigmouth president and an enabling ruling party. In Hungary, for instance, President Viktor Orban achieved autocratic legalism after overhauling the Constitution, changing voting rules in Parliament, gaining control of the entire bureaucracy, undermining the autonomy of regional and local governments and scoring impressive electoral victories at the polls. In Venezuela, the state benefited from controlling the media, which helped to minimize debate on these attacks.

This aggressive type of autocratic legalism is not here yet. But the first steps have been taken. There is a reason for its appeal. The duality of autocratic legalism — impunity for loyalists, legal pressure on the opposition — is a useful tool for illiberal presidents because they desperately need the public to turn the attention the other way. By saying that the other side is worse, they can achieve this. If they can prove it with the law, even better.

And once underway, autocratic legalism is hard to stop. By definition, the court system becomes disarmed. Public outcry can help slow down autocratic legalism, but only to a point. While a massive letter-writing campaign in 1937 helped convince some senators to defeat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bill to pack the Supreme Court, it is unclear that Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress today would budge. The main recourse left is therefore elections. Public outcry against autocratic legalism can work, but only if translates into punishing votes against enablers.

Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst College, is the author, most recently, of “Fixing Democracy: Why Constitutional Change Often Fails to Enhance Democracy in Latin America.”

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