Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College, implies that the answer is, ‘No,’ without apparently ever considering the question (in a post titled, “Why Has It Taken Us So Long to See Trump’s Weakness?“).
First of all, political scientists – following Richard Neustadt’s analytic framework in “Presidential Power” – have commented on Donald Trump’s weakness as a president for more than two years. Jonathan Bernstein, who has made this a recurring theme of his column, began doing so as early as January 2017 (several days before Trump took office). Matthew Dickinson is teaching Trump’s weaknesses to his undergraduate students at Middlebury.
Professor Robin pretends that commentators have only recently recognized this fact; that Trump’s weakness is, as he puts it, “a secret that’s been hiding in plain sight for two years. Why has it taken pundits so long to see it?” The answer, of course, is that it hasn’t. It has been widely commented upon.
Yet even if this were a recently discovered insight, there is no contradiction between the assertion i. that Trump is an historically weak president and ii. that he has aggressively pushed the country in an authoritarian direction (and with numerous complicit allies, among them: the Republican Congress, Fox News Channel, and Vladimir Putin). The result is damage to our democratic institutions – the guardrails that protect us from tyranny.
A quick Google search reveals numerous commentators who have contemplated without contradiction both Trump’s remarkable weakness and the threat he represents, including Heather Digby Parton, Jeet Heer, and Jonathan Chait.
Not only is there no contradiction, in some respects Trump’s ignorance and incompetence (which, as the Neustadt framework suggests, represent a diminished skill-set and loss of influence; that is: presidential weakness) actually heighten the threat to democracy. As Bernstein put it, “What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.”
Robin begins with a false claim (that Trump’s weakness has only been recognized recently), which even if true, would hardly refute the idea that Trump’s presidency represents an “authoritarian or fascist turn of American politics.” Robin concludes, “For two years, America was on the verge of authoritarianism; now it’s not.” This is (as Joe Biden might put it) malarkey. It’s an example of a straw man argument: unsupported, in spite of a flurry of links to books and articles, which the author shows little evidence of having read.
The post concludes with an appeal to the critical role of the scholar (who must “resist the tyranny of now,” rather than “offer her expertise to fit the needs of the pundit class”). Unfortunately, this piece falls short factually and logically. It is a muddle, not a template for anything we might reasonably hope to gain from academic research or scholarly wisdom.