America Will Survive. Probably.  Nicholas Kristof

In his testimony before Congress last week, Michael Cohen in effect warned of a coup:

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Cohen said.

That fit neatly into the concern in some liberal circles that President Trump may not simply undermine democracy but actually overturn it. References to the Nazi takeover of Germany have proliferated, and cautionary tales about fascism are now ubiquitous, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning.”

The polarization also leads Trump supporters to worry about a coup — by the “deep state” against Trump — and some make glib references about resorting to violence.

“We are in a civil war in this country,” Joseph diGenova, a prominent conservative commentator on Fox News and other programs, told Laura Ingraham in her podcast. He added, “As I say to my friends, I do two things — I vote and I buy guns.”

Let’s all take a deep breath.

I think Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, has a point when he says: “This is a moment of great peril for our democracy.” But just past the midpoint of the Trump presidency (I hope!), it’s worth examining how the country has weathered the challenge — and my take-away is that American institutions and norms have shown impressive strength and resilience.

One of the most troubling elements of Trump’s presidency has been his systematic assault on our institutions: the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the news media, the courts. Yet for the most part, they have stood up to his bullying.

To take one example, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reports that Trump in 2017 told aides to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, apparently to punish CNN (a unit of Time Warner) for its news coverage while helping Fox News. This was utterly inappropriate, so aides ignored him.

“I’ve mentioned it 50 times,” Trump raged, according to Mayer’s account. “And nothing’s happened.”

The Justice Department did in fact bring suit to block the merger, but courts foiled Trump and allowed it to go ahead.

Likewise, Trump’s efforts to block meaningful investigations into his conduct have backfired, leading to the Robert Mueller inquiry and to congressional inquiries of obstruction of justice. His dangling of federal pardons before former associates encouraged state investigations. He has personally genuflected before Vladimir Putin, but his administration policy on Russia has ended up rather tougher. And his rogue behavior helped Democrats seize the House of Representatives.

Trump has regularly demonized journalists as “enemies of the people,” but reporters have not been intimidated. As I’ve often written, I thought we in the news media did not do well during the 2016 campaign, but the competition today between The Washington Post and The New York Times is the best kind of newspaper war, keeping America straight.

Gallup finds that public approval of newspapers, while still low, is up a little since 2016 even as Trump has excoriated them.

The best book warning of authoritarianism is, for my money, “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors of government at Harvard. It’s a brilliant book, wise and nuanced, so I reached out to the authors and asked how they think the U.S. has done so far in the Trump presidency.

“The U.S. is not 1930s Germany or contemporary Hungary, Venezuela, or Turkey,” Levitsky told me. “The U.S. has much stronger democratic institutions than these countries, and it has a much stronger opposition. So whereas in Hungary and Venezuela autocrats steamrolled weak oppositions, Trump faced pushback on multiple fronts, including, very importantly, the electoral front in November 2018. So, yes, U.S. democracy is hard to kill.”

Still, Levitsky and Ziblatt caution that an underlying polarization and erosion of norms made Trump’s election possible, and they persist. Moreover, while the Democratic victory in the House is good news for accountability, it also results in a divided government that can’t get anything done.

“U.S. democracy is sliding into dysfunction,” Levitsky said, noting that this can increase the appeal of other demagogues. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell have also refused to stand up to Trump and have allowed certain authoritarian values to infect a wing of the party. Almost a quarter of Republicans said in a poll last year that “President Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.”

So there’s plenty to worry about, but let’s acknowledge that the American system so far has shown itself resilient. In my more hopeful moments, I think that we are seeing a backlash to Trumpian authoritarianism that may ultimately strengthen the rule of law, as happened after Watergate.

For those still wringing their hands and unconvinced, here’s my bottom-line reassurance: Trump won’t manage a coup, and he seems to me more likely to end up a felon than a president for life.