On Oct. 5, the Pew Research Center reported that partisan conflict on fundamental political values

reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency. In Donald Trump’s first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger. And the magnitude of these differences dwarfs other divisions in society, along such lines as gender, race and ethnicity, religious observance or education.

In the introduction to their forthcoming book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists at Harvard, write:

Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here.

Their attempt at reassurance is not comforting:

American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as ‘laboratories of democracy,’ are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

In an email, Levitsky argued that “it is important that we understand that the U.S. has largely been doing these things to itself,” before adding, “obviously we should investigate Russian meddling to the fullest, but to blame Putin for the mess we are in today would be ridiculous. We Americans created this mess.”

Along similar lines, Ryan Enos, who is also a political scientist at Harvard, suggested that the question of Russian involvement in the election is a secondary issue:

It might be that all the distrust and rancor we see today would have happened without Russia’s meddling. There is reason, of course, to believe this is true: after all, the dysfunction in the US political system that put Trump in office existed long before Putin’s 2016 interference.

In addition, Enos noted,

Trump’s ability to diminish the United States’ international standing is also made possible by flaws in our political system, for example a weak Congress that has ceded too much power to the executive.

Trump has not only taken a hammer to the code of behavior underpinning democracy at home, he has simultaneously diminished the international stature of the United States — and arguably accelerated the rise of this country’s major competitor, China.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. and a co-author of “Why Nations Fail,” argued in an email that he believes

the battle between the Chinese-Russian axis and Western democratic institutions to be the defining struggle of the next century. And now the US is in an ambivalent position, led by a flawed character much more sympathetic to the Chinese-Russian axis.

Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign affairs has, in turn, served to strengthen both Russia and China, in the view of several experts.

Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, emailed:

As America is seen as an increasingly volatile and unreliable partner, the reduced credibility that follows creates new international opportunities for people like Putin — who can promise relative stability.

The net result?

“We now have reduced leverage in many international settings.”

A Pew survey of adults in 37 foreign nations released in June provides the clearest evidence of Trump’s effect on America’s international stature. It found that

a median of just 22 percent has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64 percent expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.

As the accompanying chart shows, confidence in Obama was higher than confidence in Trump in 35 countries. Tellingly, Trump did better than Obama in only two, Russia and Israel.