On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump called into Fox & Friends and went on such a rant that even the show’s conservative hosts seemed startled. “You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI, it’s a disgrace,” he said. “And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t—our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia.” As if to protect Trump from further embarrassment, Brian Kilmeade cut the interview short by saying, “We’d talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do.”

This is what Trump’s critics have warned about all along: that he’s an authoritarian who would use the office of the presidency to destroy norms (like his attempts, as in the Fox interview, to undermine the independence of the Department of Justice). And in destroying those norms, some fear, Trump could destroy American democracy itself—or at least contribute to its decline. “Donald Trump is not the heart attack of democracy, he is the gum disease of democracy,” The Atlantic’s David Frum said during a Brookings Institution forum in February. “You can die from gum disease, but it festers for a long time before it finishes you off.”

But some Trump critics lately have argued that he’s not the disease at all. “The problems we face run deeper than the Trump presidency,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard political scientists and authors of the recent book How Democracies Die, wrote in The New York Times in January. “While Mr. Trump’s autocratic impulses have fueled our political system’s mounting crisis, he is as much a symptom as he is a cause of this crisis.” The crisis, as they see it, is that “the norms that once protected our institutions are coming unmoored.” Or, as Vox’ Dylan Matthews put it in a column earlier this week: “the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in.”

But American democracy as a whole remains healthy, as seen in the robust resistance to Trump within the government, the courts, and the public at large. The disease is localized within the Republican Party. Which is why, if indeed American democracy is in a death loop, any solution must not focus solely on ousting Trump, but on punishing and reforming the GOP.

The big takeaway from the first year of Trump’s presidency is that the country’s institutions largely have checked him. “President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year,” Levitsky and Ziblatt argue in their book. “He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized.... Little actual backsliding occurred in 2017.”

