Conventional wisdom among President Donald Trump's critics has it that his executive order banning U.S.-bound travel from seven Muslim-majority countries was the epitome of incompetence and arrogance.

They note that it was put into action without being reviewed by the State or Defense departments or the appropriate government lawyers. The order's intent, goes the opposition's thinking, isn't national security. It's racism and the president's desire to prove to his core supporters that he meant what he said on the campaign trail.

"Put simply, I don't believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose," wrote Benjamin Wittes, a conservative who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law. "This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this." He added:

"It's a grave charge, I know, and I'm not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don't marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don't target the wrong people in nutty ways when you're rationally pursuing real security objectives."

But other critics have another, even darker view of Trump's executive order. That the president is swiftly and expertly creating an authoritarian state modeled on Vladimir Putin's in Russia.

"The regime's main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress or the Courts," wrote Yonatan Zunger, a former Stanford theoretical physicist and a principal engineer at Google. "Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this."

His evidence: that Trump's executive order did not include Muslim-majority, terrorist-fostering countries where the Trump Organization has business interests; that Trump's inner circle -- namely senior political strategist Steve Bannon -- overruled the Homeland Security Department's interpretation that the order did not apply to green-card holders; that Bannon, in an unprecedented move, has been put on the National Security Council while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence have been downgraded; and that there's been a surge in resignations of career foreign-service managers in the State Department, many of them forced by the Trump administration.

Zunger also argues that the travel ban -- highlighted in its first days by customs and Homeland Security officers refusing to obey federal judges' decisions to halt parts of the executive action, apparently on the president's order -- is a probing of our institutions' weaknesses and willingness to fight.

"That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government," he wrote on Medium. "This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored."

President Trump, for his part, is mocking his critics and their theories about his actions. "Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage, protesters and the tears of Senator Schumer," he tweeted, referring to protests at airports across the country and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer calling the executive order "mean-spirited and unAmerican." The president added:

"There is nothing nice about searching for terrorists before they can enter our country. This was a big part of my campaign. Study the world!"

Many people who have studied the world are growing increasingly worried. Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, professors at the University of Chicago Law School, argue in a newly released academic paper that our vaunted separation of powers does not actually offer us much protection from an authoritarian president.

"Our analysis suggests that when local partisan forces or an exogenous constellation of socioeconomic and transnational forces are threatening that political disposition [that maintains our legal and political institutions], the Constitution as currently construed provides only feeble shelter," they wrote. "Democratic stability hence depends on the preferences of particular leaders, and under the right political conditions, constitutional retrogression is a clear and present risk to American constitutional liberal democracy."

Huq and Ginsburg define constitutional retrogression as the incremental but steady undermining of the "three basic predicates of democracy -- competitive elections, liberal rights to speech and association, and the adjudicative and administrative rule of law necessary for democratic choice to thrive."

They cite as recent examples, among many others: Trump's criticism of a federal judge during the campaign; his refusal to release his tax returns that would show his conflicts of interest; his war against the press and the meaning of facts; his refusal during the campaign to say he would accept a loss at the polls; the "surge in popular abuse, vandalism and violence targeting racial minorities, ethnic minorities, gay, and transgender individuals;" and congressional efforts to weaken oversight of the executive and legislative branches.

So where does all of this leave the country? Trump backers say this is Chicken Little hysteria, that Trump is simply doing what presidents should do: making the country safe and putting his personal stamp on the government.

For progressives and other Trump critics, however, it means resistance must be more than complaining but become focused on results. The activist group MoveOn.org has launched #ResistTrumpTuesdays to goad Democratic lawmakers into fighting the new president. And though we're barely a week into the new administration, Cato Institute adjunct scholar David Post insists it's time to get serious about impeachment.

"Can we now stop the debate about whether Trump's business interests might influence his policymaking," he wrote, alluding to the travel ban, "and move on to the more important question, which is how do we protect ourselves from this despot and start the work of getting him removed from office?"

-- Douglas Perry