Eric Levitz: “In real life, the president is not an exceptionally power-hungry or willful leader but a historically unambitious and emotionally fragile one. America is living under the thumb of an authoritarian weak man.”

“At the onset of the coronavirus crisis, some feared that Trump would exploit the pandemic to further erode constitutional guardrails and aggrandize his personal power. After all, national emergencies tend to be fertile climates for authoritarian overreach. And a crisis of infectious disease seemed especially conducive to right-wing nationalist calls for sealing borders and surveilling suspect populations.”

“In reality, Trump has not spent the COVID-19 crisis aggrandizing his power but shrinking from it. Which makes sense. The mogul has pursued no small number of power grabs during his first term in office. But none of these have required Trump to invest significant time or mental energy into solving complex problems. And the bulk of his abuses of power have been either reactive measures aimed at insulating himself from legal accountability, or relatively trivial contortions of executive authority, such as declaring Canadian steel a national security threat so as to impose tariffs without congressional approval. Trump’s most proactive and extreme abuses of office, such as his attempt to coerce the Ukrainian government into damaging his domestic opposition, were aimed at maintaining his grip on power rather than exercising that power to effect some transformative act of governance.”