The Trump-as-authoritarian debate, reconsidered

The Trump-as-authoritarian debate, reconsidered

By Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

March 17, 2021 at 5:58 a.m. GMT+9

Was he a weak president or a punishing one? The answer is yes.

Former president Donald Trump is driven past supporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., last month. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The Trump presidency has ended. The debate about what it means for American politics has not and likely never will. But a few stories from this week offer some further illumination about the future contours of the debate.

For the past four years, political scientist Corey Robin has aggressively staked out the “Trump is a weak president” turf. His latest in the New Yorker does the same, but with a few twists. First, he has to reckon with Trump’s role in fomenting violence Jan. 6 — which, to his credit, he does: “The attack on the Capitol was the latest, and most significant, data point supporting the claim that Trump has practiced strongman politics, variously described as authoritarian, fascist, or tyrannical.”

Robin does not stop there, however. Even as the Republican politicians displayed performative fealty to Trump, Robin correctly observes that Trump’s GOP caucus thwarted him over the course of his four years, which stymied his ability to implement policy: “Whenever Republicans wanted to oppose Trump on matters of policy or political importance to them, they did.”

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He further notes that Trump’s reliance on executive power is not all that different in form from what President Barack Obama did after 2010 and what President Biden is likely to do. The reason for this is not the enhanced power of the presidency, but rather the fundamental weakness of American democracy as currently constituted:

Behind its shadows is a reality we’ve been facing for some time: not the concentration of power in the hands of one person, but the dispersal of power across the polity; not the conversion of popular preferences into partisan will, but the inability of parties to legislate those preferences; not the threat of a tyrannical white majority to the Constitution, but the way in which a minority of mostly white voters depends upon the Constitution to stop the multiracial majority.

Robin’s argument is well-considered. Like most political scientists, he focuses on policy outcomes to assess Trump’s relative power. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, however, offers a different lens to view Trump’s presidency in a column that mostly focuses on Biden. Serwer agrees that Trump’s legislative agenda was a bust; he did not succeed as president by enabling policies that benefited his coalition. Rather, he implemented policies that punished his opponents:

The Trump administration moved quickly, if not always efficiently, toward its paramount goal of punishing Democratic-leaning constituencies. Early in his administration, Trump banned travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, barred federal grants to so-called sanctuary cities, and sought to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were in the U.S. on temporary protected status. Almost all of his accomplishments were punitive. …

Trump was not a successful president. But as a form of punishment, he was everything conservatives dreamed of, and they loved him for it.

Throughout his term in office, and even after his electoral defeat, Trump proclaimed to his admirers that he was all that stood between them and annihilation, cultivating a sense of existential dread among the conservative faithful.

One can go even further than Serwer does. Trump’s foreign policy was also grounded in the notion of punishing countries viewed by liberal internationalists as traditional U.S. allies. As his term evolved and he grew more comfortable and secure in the presidency, Trump tried to wield the power of the U.S. government to punish his enemies. This triggered his first impeachment, as well as his four-year effort to deconstruct the administrative state.

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This is an interesting way to think about the debate over whether Trump was a strong or weak president. If one uses the standard conventions of political science, then Robin has a strong argument. But if one thinks about the politics of performative punishment, Trump’s authoritarian streak seems far more visible.

My own theory has long been that Trump was a weak man who occupied a strong office and that the strength of the office mattered more. This is consistent with both assessments described above. Even a strong president can do only so much without congressional approval, and Trump rarely earned it. That said, what Trump was able to do as president was use executive power to punish his political enemies and transgress the norms erected by them.

As it happens, it is also consistent with Trump’s ebbing post-presidential aura. His profile is starting to wane, according to Axios’s Neal Rothschild. Stripped of presidential power and resources — as well as his Twitter feed — Trump seems at something of a loss as to how to wield power. Politico’s Gabby Orr and Meridith McGraw make this point in a story that you know Trump would rage-tweet about if he had that capability:

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Ex-president Donald Trump finds himself adrift while in political exile. And Republicans, and even some allies, say he is disorganized, torn between playing the role of antagonist and party leader.

“There is no apparatus, no structure and part of that is due to a lack of political understanding on Trump’s behalf,” said a person close to the former president, noting that Trump has struggled to learn the ropes of post-presidential politicking.

“It’s like political phantom limbs. He doesn’t have the same political infrastructure he did three months ago as president,” added GOP strategist Matt Gorman, who previously served as communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

As president, Trump was always a potent agent of chaos. As a former president, Trump is a celebrity trying to keep his name in the news because that has always been the only way he understands his self-worth.

This does not mean Trump will not be a potent force in GOP politics over the next four years. Like an overexcited toddler, however, Trump’s primary power is to destroy rather than create. After four years of focusing his destructive energies at the government he ran, his new target is the GOP. Fortunately for the Republican Party, as an ex-president, Trump is a bloated husk of his former self.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the first names of Axios’s Neal Rothschild and Politico’s Meridith McGraw.