No, Trump is not a dictator or a fascist, as some wrongly claimed. But he certainly has authoritarian tendencies and a baffling admiration for despots. He has a penchant for attacking democratic institutions and appears willing to sacrifice them in a heartbeat on the altar of his ego. And he has spouted several dangerous lies that a sizable portion of his political base unfortunately believes to be true. As a result, he has already managed to do major damage to democracy at home and abroad in five important ways.

Trump also actively solicited and took advantage of Russian meddling in U.S. elections. He invited Russia to hack and publish Hillary Clinton’s emails. He mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times in the final month of the campaign (Trump’s CIA director subsequently labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service”). The hacking of the Democratic National Committee was a brazen cyberattack on U.S. democracy and yet Trump has consistently been an apologist who plays down the hack rather than working to ensure it never happens again. (By the way, there is still an active FBI investigation into whether he or his campaign colluded with Russia in that attack).