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 authoritarian.”
Robin directs particular fire at advocates of the so-called Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, a term I coined to describe the idea that a president’s failure to achieve his policy goals is simply due to a lack of will to pursue their goals forcefully enough. Barack Obama’s critics often leveled these types of charges against him, saying he should have taken some unspecified action to enact liberal policies like gun control that could not overcome Republican opposition in Congress. During his run for the White House, Trump played on these notions, claiming that previous presidents lacked the will to make trade deals that would benefit U.S. workers. If he were president, Trump implausibly claimed, he could negotiate deals that would reverse structural changes in the economy.
Trump has revealed a weakness that is unprecedented in recent history.
