The unsettled question of whether President Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy increasingly hinges on whether his words matter or not. Those who argue that Trump is an authoritarian can easily point to a nearly endless supply of evidence in the president’s tweets and off-the-cuff comments, notably in his repeated calls for the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies.

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

Aside from such blatant attacks on the rule of law, Trump’s own words convict him of being unfit in other ways, from his comments as a candidate that Mexican immigrants are rapists to his recent closed-door putdown of “shithole countries” while discussing Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries.

But using quotations to portray Trump as an extremist threat doesn’t convince everyone. There’s a formidable school of thought, encompassing analysts on the right and left, that Trump’s words don’t matter since they rarely manifest themselves in concrete, implemented policy. Trump might sound like an aspiring Mussolini, skeptical analysts argue, but in practice he’s no different than recent Republican presidents.

Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist for New York Times, argued last week that “angry presidential tweets that lack any sustained follow-through” are “not the same thing as a sustained presidential assault on democratic institutions.” Trump, the demagogue, has been tamed by the political system, he contends: “If the president yells about his persecutors and little or nothing happens—the Mueller probe continues, Rod Rosenstein keeps his job, etc.—what’s undermined is presidential authority, not the rule of law.”

Corey Robin, the leftist political scientist, has been making a similar argument for months. “Trump has always thought his words were more real than reality,” Robin wrote last May, having surveyed Trump’s paucity of policy achievements. “He’s always believed his own bullshit. It’s time his liberal critics stopped believing it.” More recently, he argued that “Trump is all bully, no pulpit,” and “that sometimes the main effect of Trump’s words is either nil or negative.”