The Dangers of Trump's Last Stand

For months, analysts predicted a scenario where Trump would refuse to accept an electoral defeat. Now that they have been proved right, questions remain about how far Trump can go. Some commentators say the American system has largely contained his worst impulses.

“Trump, like [President Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, does not like democracy,” Federico Finchelstein, a historian of fascism and populism at the New School in New York City, told Today’s WorldView. “He admires dictators and autocrats but, so far, though he has downgraded American democracy in so many ways, institutions, media and citizens have presented barriers to his desire to open a fascist danger in the United States.”

Through executive acts, Trump got his way on a number of key issues, including staffing the Supreme Court with conservative justices and pursuing a hard-line restrictionist immigration policy. But on other fronts, he looked impotent. “What was most remarkable was how flimsy Trump’s presidency was, how easily he was obstructed and stalled,” wrote Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, in an essay that pointed, instead, to Trump’s capacity to “imaginatively” dominate the country, if not institutionally.

“Many of Trump’s authoritarian feints were the desperate measures of a man expecting to be the most powerful in the world but reduced to one who could rarely rely for help in achieving his erratic designs — including from his own servants,” Moyn added.

Experts still point to the corrosive effects of Trump’s political style. “While Trump was not in power long enough to dismantle American democracy, he did succeed in installing a form of the ‘personalist rule’ that characterizes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and other autocrats he so admires,” wrote Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University. “Personalist governance concentrates power in one individual, whose own political and financial interests (and relationships with other despots) often prevail over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy.”