Trump declares war on America

Beware the president's Portland plot

President Trump, Bill Barr, Mike Pence, and Mark Meadows.

Is Trump a tyrant? Or does he just play one on Twitter?

The debate over these questions goes back to the earliest days of the Trump administration. Though I've gone back and forth during the past three and a half years, I've usually sided with the skeptics. Trump talks (and tweets) like an autocrat. He clearly would love to control the country like a dictator. He may well be preparing a sizable segment of the population for an authoritarian future. But Trump himself is, if anything, an unusually weak president, with very few accomplishments, most of them enacted with executive orders that quite often get ignored by executive branch departments and agencies or shot down by the courts, and all of which will be vulnerable to reversal by Trump's successor.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.