The fundamental legitimacy of Donald Trump

To claim the mantle of resistance is also to suggest that your opponents are something akin to fascists or, more modestly, that they are authoritarians. But, unlike the 1930s, today’s right-wing populists do not generally condemn the idea of democracy. More likely, they salute it (or at least a majoritarian version of it). Rather than dispatching brownshirts in the streets, they call for referenda and plebiscites. As many observers have noted for years, “direct democracy” isn’t necessarily good, but direct democracy isn’t quite the first thing you think of when you think of Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler.

Being in a constant state of alarm, particularly when there’s little actual threat of being imprisoned for your beliefs, can be unusually thrilling. Carl Schmitt, the hugely influential jurist-philosopher who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, called this the romance of “the occasion.” Romantics, writes the political theorist David Runciman, “want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things.”

But, more than two years after Trump assumed power, there is the risk that they may no longer have an enemy worthy of the title. Democrats control the House of Representatives. More than norms, institutions—the courts, the media, and the machinery of government—have constrained the Trump presidency. In policy terms, outside of immigration, the Republican Party has more coopted the Trump administration than the other way around.