Donald Trump is dangerous when he’s losing

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump titled “How to stop an autocracy.” The essay began with the premise that Trump has a will to power and a contempt for the basic norms and institutions of American democracy, and then explored how to limit the damage. The answer, basically, was that Congress needs to do its damn job.

But after I wrote it, smart people argued the piece was built atop a mistake. Trump might have the will to power, but he doesn’t have the discipline for it. Grim scenarios suggesting his presidency would grow too strong missed the likelier scenario that it would be extremely weak.

Yuval Levin, editor of the journal National Affairs and a leading conservative intellectual, made the case to me over email:

I think the more plausible cause for worry is that he will be a dysfunctional president. He seems to have come in without a clear sense of the nature and character of the presidency in our system, and he's not playing that role but rather using the presidency as a platform for playing the role he has always played. And for now the White House team seems to be reinforcing that rather than counteracting it. The result of that seems more likely to be dysfunction than autocracy.

Levin’s argument is convincing. Trump’s White House is the picture of dysfunction. He isn’t focused or effective in his application of executive power. His staff is riven with infighting, inexperienced with the mechanics of government, and unable to corral their boss’s worst impulses. Trump’s slipshod executive orders are being easily batted back by courts, and his agenda hasn’t even made it to Congress yet. How is he going to go from here to strongman?

I felt better. And then I talked to Ron Klain.

Klain served as chief of staff to both Vice President Al Gore and Vice President Joe Biden. He led Hillary Clinton’s debate prep — which is to say, he was deeply involved in their effort to understand Trump’s psychology — and he was widely rumored to be the frontrunner for chief of staff in Clinton’s White House. He understands how government works, and I’ve always found him unusually sober in his view of it.

Klain had a theory that combined Trump’s authoritarian impulses and troubled White House management in a way I found hard to dismiss. In Klain’s view, it’s Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the government that catalyzes his illiberal tendencies — the more he is frustrated by the system, the more he will turn on the system.“If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state,” Klain said. “It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”

We’ve seen it already. When Trump is frustrated, he turns on the system.

As we spoke, examples of this tendency of Trump’s were already in abundance. There was the campaign, of course, where Trump responded to polls showing him behind by tweeting that if he lost, it would be evidence that the election was rigged.

The pattern has only intensified since Trump took the oath of office. After US District Judge James Robart ruled against Trump’s travel ban on people from seven majority-Muslim countries, Trump tweeted: