Last May, President Donald Trump reportedly summoned Andrew McCabe, then the acting director of the FBI, and asked: Who did you vote for in the 2016 election? McCabe deflected the question by saying that he didn’t vote, but that didn’t stop Trump from fuming about McCabe’s wife, a Democrat who made a failed bid for the Virginia Senate. The Washington Post, which broke the story about the meeting on Tuesday, reported that McCabe told colleagues the encounter was “disturbing.” Trump’s treatment of McCabe is reminiscent of the president’s earlier attempt to suborn “loyalty” from then-FBI Director James Comey in early 2017. Meanwhile, Axios reported on Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire McCabe, a move Wray resisted by threatening to resign.



Paralleling these backroom machinations are a concerted media campaign by Trump’s allies to discredit the FBI and the ongoing special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller. Last month, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called for a wholesale purge of federal law enforcement. “There is a cleansing needed in our FBI and Department of Justice,” Pirro said. “It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in cuffs.” McCabe was among the FBI officials she singled out for arrest.

The president and his allies are trying to cow law enforcement officials, making them subservient to him rather than the rule of law. This reality has prompted disparate reactions among his opponents, who can divided between pessimists (or realists, some might say) and optimists. The former worry that Trump is an authoritarian wrecking ball that threatens to crush U.S. democracy. The latter argue that the system is working: Trump might dream of ruling as a strong man, but he’s been remarkably ineffective (Wray ignored the president, after all, and McCabe is still the bureau’s deputy director).

This division transcends the normal political spectrum. Major voices sounding the alarm include conservative Atlantic editor David Frum and liberal New York

magazine writer Jonathan Chait, versus complacent observers like conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and leftist political scientist Corey Robin. But perhaps they’re both right, in a way: Trump’s very weakness is fueling his extremist rhetoric, which is reshaping the Republican Party and corroding democracy.

Writing in the Guardian, Robin argues that “the discourse of Trump’s authoritarianism ignores or minimizes the ways in which democratic citizens and institutions—the media, the courts, the opposition party, social movements—are opposing Trump, with seemingly little fear of intimidation.” Pressing the point further, Douthat notes that Trump’s own party and administration have often derailed his preferred policies. “A vast gulf between the things Trump says he wants—which are, indeed, often authoritarian—and the things that actually happen is the essential characteristic of his presidency’s first year,” Douthat wrote recently.