FRUM: Here’s what the Russians have achieved. 1) They blocked from office a capable and effective foreign-policy president who understood them, their aims and how to build effective coalitions against them. 2) They gained a president who for reasons of vanity or worse has left the country vulnerable and exposed to further attack. 3) They gained a president who is smashing apart America’s alliance structures. What intelligent South Korean can look for protection to the United States when its president regularly tweets that it is to China, not the United States, that South Korea should look for protection — and who is contemplating sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Korean lives to protect mainland U.S.A.? 4) The Russians gained a United States that operates in ways they are comfortable with — open to corruption and oligarchy — and they have scored points for the argument that democracy is a joke and a fraud. 5) They have helped install a racial provocateur who identifies every stress point in American political culture and inflames it to the point that the United States polarizes and paralyzes … I could go on.

DOUTHAT: That the Russians have gained a president who may be seriously endangering America’s broad position in the world I don’t dispute. My argument is just that, so far, your intelligent South Korean could look at the actual moves made by the American state and persuade themselves — as many world leaders have seemingly persuaded themselves — that they should act as though McMaster and James Mattis and a few others are really running foreign policy, and the official president’s tweets are so much sound and fury. Likewise an intelligent Pole or Hungarian or Ukrainian, trying to make choices in the shadow of Putin’s ambitions: You just don’t see the kind of dramatic steps, with NATO or anything else, that would suggest that Trump is substantially changing American policy. Which is why despite our agreement about Trump’s character and competence, my general level of alarm has lowered somewhat since his inauguration, and is currently lower than your own.

FRUM: The United States is a big bureaucratic state. Change more often comes to the United States by changing the content of the American state than by changing its forms. For example, the Constitution contemplates a cabinet system of government, with the principal officers confirmed by the Senate. Yet the chief of staff and the national security adviser, two positions never contemplated by the Constitution, matter more than any cabinet officer. On constitutional democracy’s periodic upswings, we develop expectations about how the president should behave that exceed the law — e.g., no Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s doing shady deals from the White House — and we go into reverse on the downswing. Trump has not changed any law or policy about presidential financial integrity. He’s just ignored customs (publish his tax returns), rendered other laws meaningless (financial disclosures that conceal things the public most needs to know, e.g., the upstream debts of the Trump Organization) and simply defied other laws by official lying (the endless misstatements by Trump’s son-in-law and the nation’s de facto chief foreign affairs officer).

DOUTHAT: I agree; this is a definite downswing, a return of certain kinds of presidential sordidness and their exacerbation on certain fronts. But part of what’s been striking about the Trump era to me is how much its events have confirmed trends that are bigger than Trump, that he benefited from during his ascent and that loom larger to me as symptoms of continuing crisis than most of the specific policy moves he’s attempted. In particular, the paralysis of Congress, it’s abdication of power to the presidency and its inability to function as a legislative body — plus the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party, its collapse into an entertainment-wing-driven grift — these have been defining features of life under President Trump, as they were under President Obama before him. Were Trump an effective authoritarian, he could use these features of our politics to claim new powers and execute unilaterally on grand ambitions — as both of the last two presidents, on matters of war and peace and domestic policy, attempted and sometimes succeeded in doing. But his ineffectiveness so far means that the pre-existing crisis in how the presidency and the legislative branch relate to each other, and how the G.O.P. all functions, is still percolating, but not necessarily becoming dramatically more dire.

FRUM: Your use of the word “unilaterally” casts a useful clarifying light on what may be the foundation of our disagreement. Let me be very clear what I do not mean by “Trumpocracy,” at least not yet: Caesarism. The authoritarian-nationalist system Trump is building is not being built against Congress, but with Congress — and even more, with Republican Parties at the state level. The big reveal to Republicans in the second Obama term, continuing now into the first Trump term, is that you and Reihan Salam and Ramesh Ponnuru and Henry Olsen and other “reformicons” were right on the politics of Paul Ryan-style conservatism: Such politics simply could not prevail in a free and fair democratic contest. You and they (and me, too) assumed, or at least hoped, that Paul Ryan’s party would respond to this better-late-than-never recognition of the obvious by moderating their policies. More health care, less immigration, more infrastructure, more family-friendly tax policy, etc.