When the political scientists I know talk about Trump, an increasing number use “Trump regime” rather than “Trump administration.” The implication might be subtle to you but it carries meaning to social scientists. Basically, many of my colleagues are saying that under Trump, America’s liberal democratic regime is changing into something else, a fact that should be acknowledged.

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Is it a real fact or fake news, however? Books like Tim Snyder’s On Tyranny imply that the answer is yes, but as I noted in my brief review of that book, “Trump’s brand of populist nationalism may be illiberal, but it is also not very popular. Since his inauguration, a critical free press, independent judiciary, patriotic Civil Service and robust social movements have placed significant constraints on Trump’s actions.” Trump has violated countless norms, but Congress and the judiciary are still being treated like co-equal branches of government. Civil liberties still exist. The current administration has made a lot of moves that I find personally objectionable in its first hundred days. That doesn’t mean that the character of the republic has permanently shifted.

On the other hand, one can point to elected populists who eventually did alter the nature of their regime in deeply illiberal ways. We have just seen Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan pull off this move in Turkey. In this century, elected leaders ranging from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hungary’s Viktor Orban have taken actions that changed the character of political authority enough to talk about shifts in regime type.

The past week has revealed some nascent signs that the Trump administration is a wee bit different from previous administrations. Consider:

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Oh, and this morning, there was this from the president of the United States:

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these seem like steps toward a populist, illiberal system of rule. This would indeed represent more than just a change in government from Obama to Trump, but a change in regime type as well, from liberal to illiberal.

Don’t just take my word for it; see this piece by historian Heather Cox Richardson about what makes this administration different from the modern constitutional republic that Americans have lived in for quite some time:

Trump’s administration looks a great deal like those of the 1850s and the 1890s, with business and government so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled. It makes sense that he would think it should have been easy for the nation’s elite leaders to “work out” the tensions that caused the Civil War: Easy solutions arranged by strong, elite leaders have been Trump’s go-to solution all along, on health care, taxes, immigration, the Islamic State, even the Arab-Israeli conflict. So why not the Civil War? The answer is: Because America is not an oligarchy in which the wealthy hammer out their own rules among themselves; it is a democracy.

I hope Richardson is correct, but I fear that it requires some actual debate to consider whether she is indeed correct.