1. Is Trump a weak & ineffective president or is he an authoritarian menace? Spoiler alert: you can be both!
-
-
Trump has a certain type of "competence": he is very good at bluster and bullying to sell what he wants to sell and get what he wants to get. The question, though, is whether he can sell or get what he wants when he's got minimal leverage over the party he's dealing with.
-
If he doesn't have leverage, however, the temptation to revert to using force must be very tempting . . . and that makes him dangerously likely to slip into authoritarianism now that he has the power of the government behind him.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
But at least Phillip the Fair was good looking.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Dysfunction is a weapon the autocrat. See modern Russia. Multiple power centers. No functioning institutions to check/constrain. Patronage and sycophancy keys to success. Autocrats don’t want to “get things done”. They want a stable instability they control.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
I read a bio of Stalin a few years ago and I came away stunned at how incompetent he was at everything but being a dictator.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
There are more recent examples here as well, Maduro, Milosevich, Duterte, All pretty incompetent, all dragged nominal democracies to authoritarianism.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
In many ways, these differences play out pre-election positions on dangers of Trump victory. Frum & Chait took threat of Trumpism much more seriously, Robin treated it with disdain, continually asserting that Trump would never win & so one could vote however one wished.
-
The argument that Trump is weak and in mainstream of American presidency (Robin compares his administration to Jimmy Carter's) functions as an ex post facto justification for pre-election dismissal of the dangers his election posed.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.