Amid the Resistance-y funeral rites of John McCain, the president’s latest Twitter rants against his attorney general and the wild White House stories being circulated by Bob Woodward’s latest book, it’s a good time to revisit a familiar and crucial subject. To what extent is Donald Trump an extraordinarily dangerous president whose authoritarian style is constantly enabled by his advisers and his party? Or, alternatively, to what extent is he an extraordinarily weak president, constrained by his appointees and his notional allies at almost every turn?

I’ve made the case for the second narrative before, arguing that Trump isn’t really in charge of his own presidency, and that the Republican Congress — or at least the Republican Senate — has constrained his behavior more than many Resisters acknowledge.

A year into his administration, I ran down the list of destabilizing or immoral moves that Trump promised during his campaign and pointed out almost none had actually happened — no return to waterboarding, no exit from NATO or Nafta, a hackishly implemented travel ban that only gestured at the promised Muslim-immigration shutdown, no change to the libels laws to shutter hostile newspapers, no staffing of the cabinet or the judiciary with unqualified cronies, no practical concessions to Vladimir Putin in Russia’s near abroad, and more. In general the Trump of early 2018 looked like a Twitter authoritarian but a practical weakling, hounded by a special counsel and unable to even replace his own attorney general because Senate Republicans said he couldn’t.

But the last six months have tested that argument. Trump has asserted more control over his presidency’s staffing decisions, ejected obvious establishment plants like H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in favor of faces he likes from cable TV. He’s pursued a version of the trade wars that he touted on the hustings; he’s disrupted summit meetings with allies and fallen prostrate before Putin; he’s conducted diplomacy with North Korea in a reality-television style; he’s attacked the Mueller investigation constantly and hired surrogates to take the attacks all the way to 11; he’s pursued a family-separation policy at the border that’s exactly the kind of cruelty that his campaign promised and that many Republicans promised to restrain.