How Trump Brought 'Competitive Authoritarianism' to America

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

86% : But the first round has been kind of stunning, because Trump took everybody by surprise.
82% : But when Trump wins by one, it feels like he wins by 30 -- because he's Trump.
65% : They said as much in private, but in public, they decided that the best way to advance their careers was to enable Trump, to acquiesce to Trump, and the bulk of the party acted that way with huge consequences.
61% : That's just never been seen in a democracy to my knowledge.
60% : That has to do with the nature of his victory, I think -- Trump made inroads with unexpected populations, and Democrats don't know how to counter that exactly.
54% : Is there an equivalent you can think of where somebody has been in charge of their party for this long, the way Trump is dominating them for this long, and then the party eventually does turn on them?
54% : They had Bush and the Patriot Act and Cheney in mind.
49% : In this case, Trump has an astounding level of personal control of the party, more than any other leader in modern history in the United States.
47% : I spoke with Levitsky, who is also a Senior Fellow for Democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations, about how the first few weeks of Trump 2.0 have gone, how Elon Musk has scrambled his thinking, and whether he ever thought competitive authoritarianism could actually come to the U.S. Many of the warnings in your essay have already turned into reality:
46% : That doesn't necessarily block Trump from doing anything again.
41% : For a while after 9/11, a lot of liberals were concerned with the Patriot Act, that the Bush administration was going to be somewhat authoritarian.
34% : To go back to your boxing metaphor, perhaps Trump is George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle and he'll punch himself out? James Carville wrote that out a few days ago,
34% : Trump has never been that popular.
32% : There's always this debate within the party about the extent to which politicians should be calling out every one of these anti-democracy infractions that Trump commits, and to what extent that they should just focus on the bread and butter issues, egg prices, and inflation, and all of that stuff that voters care most about.
29% : If Trump does become quite unpopular, which is entirely possible, if he does fall into the 30s, the combination of his unpopularity and lame-duck status means that he's not going to be able to impose his son as a candidate or the guy he wants as a candidate.
27% : In 2018, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky co-authored How Democracies Die, a hit book that explored the way strongmen leaders, including Donald Trump, can erode once-stable political systems.
27% : But I think there's a good chance that the party will find itself if Trump becomes sufficiently unpopular and it becomes politically useful to abandon him.
16% : I think Trump is probably hurting himself by making so many enemies so quickly.

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