(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.” In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)

Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.

But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?

“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”

“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”

Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”

“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”

“The result,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home, and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”

In the current cases, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.

Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Mr. Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s home server.

“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”

Mr. Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Mrs. Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Mr. Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.

“We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”

But he also hinted that many of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Mr. Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)