2. Here's what I wrote in October 2016, a month before Trump was elected: "As president, Trump—a con man who traffics in dark fantasy—would quickly find himself constrained by the realities of actual government."https://newrepublic.com/article/137076/worst-case-trump …
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3. me, Oct. 2016: "The Constitution makes it difficult to pull off the kind of Putinesque strong-arming that Trump admires. Instead, he would be forced to try, & ultimately fail, to be what he is not: a capable & measured leader, his power subject to the checks and balances..."
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4. I also argued, at length, that Trump should be seen as part of the continuum of the American right, rather than compared to foreign dictators (as folks like Timothy Synder were)https://newrepublic.com/article/140952/horrible-histories-perils-comparing-trump-stalin-hitler-dictators …
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4. The area of disagreement I have with Corey Robin is not over Trump's power, but over his impact. I believe that even if Trump is ineffectual in policy terms, his position as president still allows him to spread conspiratorial, anti-democratic & racist ideas
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5. I happen to think that having a president who routinely mocks the rule of law (by calling for his opponents to be jailed) and civic equality (by using racism to rally his base) is corrosive to democracy. I still don't understand why Corey Robin doesn't think so.
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6. And, again: the fact that Trump is weak & ineffectual doesn't mean he isn't also authoritarian: the two feed off each other. Trump's weakness leads to incendiary rhetoric ("enemies of the people" stuff), some of which has a real world effect.
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7. Me (slack-jawed imbecile): Having a president spewing racism all the time is bad. You (genius tenured professor): Oh, so you believe in Green Lanternism, do you?
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I found this entire essay to be confounding, obtuse, and weirdly divorced from reality. Who exactly has been seeing Trump as a strong president, and how exactly is this the fault of the "Historovox", which is what, exactly?
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I could've sworn it was a vintage guitar amp.
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My takeaway wasn’t that so much as the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism can’t be easily squared with widely-held Obama-era conceptions of the limits of presidential power.
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