Birds of a feather goosestep together

President Trump, who seems never to have met a contemporary dictator or authoritarian he didn't like, has made it a point to call and congratulate Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the narrow (and possibly fraudulent) passage of a referendum which grants him vast new powers and  spells the end of any credible pretence that Turkey is a democracy rather than the kind of authoritarian state Mr. Trump seems to admire so much.

Why would an American president do that? It was an internal Turkish issue; POTUS wasn't required by protocol to officially even notice it. If nothing else, the signal it sends amounts to a renunciation of everything the United States has stood for in the world since the nation's founding.

And the American deniers of Mr. Trump's authoritarian contempt for basic American values keep hallucinating on...