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A Weak President Can Still Be a Dangerous One
Trump’s failures in office shouldn’t obscure the threat he poses
Just as physicists spend decades seeking to resolve the seeming paradox that a photon is both a wave and a particle, observers of U.S. politics continue to struggle with the reality that Donald Trump is both an exceptionally weak president and an authoritarian threat. Since 2017, many commentators have treated this question as binary, suggesting that Trump’s failures as a president should invalidate any concerns over what his White House tenure might mean for the future of our democracy. But that’s an incorrect — and dangerous — assumption.
The latest example of this line of thinking comes in New York magazine from political theorist Corey Robin, who denounces “pundits and scholars [who] have been sounding the alarm over the authoritarian or fascist turn of American politics.” To the contrary, he says, Trump’s “weakness has been evident from the beginning.” Robin means to criticize those journalists whose emphasis has swung between the weakness and authoritarian hypotheses, but in the process, he collapses these ideas back into the same false dichotomy. “Where did all the tyranny go?” Robin asks, citing numerous examples of Trump’s defeats that he suggests means the president is a “flailing conservative” rather than “an ascendant…
