“The best way to stop an authoritarian is to prevent them from getting into office in the first place,” Harvard professor and political scientist Steven Levitsky said last month. “Once they’re in office, it’s too late.” He was referring, naturally, to Donald Trump, who by Levitsky’s count checks all four boxes for an authoritarian ruler delineated in his new book, How Democracies Die, which he co-wrote with Daniel Ziblatt. So far, the president’s autocratic outbursts have mostly been bluster: calling Democrats “treasonous” for refusing to applaud him; creating a presidential commission to study his baseless allegation that Hillary Clinton received “millions” of illegal votes; encouraging the F.B.I. to investigate his political enemies; and of course, that $30 million military parade. With his buffoonish tweets and Don Rickles humor, Trump is more Berlusconi than Mussolini.

Still, the authoritarian impulse is alive and well in the White House. As Jonathan Swan reported Sunday night, the president is in awe of Singapore’s policy of punishing drug traffickers with the death penalty, and has been telling people for months that it’s the reason the country’s drug-consumption levels are so low. “He says that a lot,” a source said. “He says, ‘When I ask the prime minister of Singapore do they have a drug problem [the prime minister replies,] ‘No. Death penalty.’” Five sources who have spoken with Trump about the issue say he has a habit of declaring drug dealers to be no better than serial killers. “Trump has said he would love to have a law to execute all drug dealers here in America,” Swan writes. Any sentence that exhibits sympathy for the accused, according to the president, is bound to fail.

Trump, a teetotaler who has described addiction as a failure, is reportedly aware that executing drug dealers is likely a political impossibility. There are, however, other aspects of Singapore’s draconian approach that he’s eager to emulate. The first is toughening up the anti-drugs curriculum in schools: Trump has told friends and affiliates that the government must teach children they will die if they take drugs, and that drug dealers should be made to fear for their lives. Both Melania Trump and Kellyanne Conway, who helms the White House’s anti-drugs effort, are reportedly keen on this educational initiative.

Conway took the time to clarify Trump’s stance on drug control, telling Swan that when Trump praises the merits of the death penalty, the president is referring solely to dealers who are killing thousands of people. His point, she explained, is that while some states execute criminals for killing one person, a dealer who brings a minute amount of the synthetic opioid fentanyl is treated far less harshly. It’s the impunity to which Trump objects—not only does he want to execute big-time dealers, he’s also advocating harsher punishment for all drug dealing, and may back legislation requiring a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for traffickers who deal as little as two grams of fentanyl. (“The president makes a distinction between those that are languishing in prison for low-level drug offenses and the kingpins hauling thousands of lethal doses of fentanyl into communities, that are responsible for many casualties in a single weekend,” Conway said.)

Trump’s personal stance on drug-trafficking tallies with broader steps taken by his administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an anti-drug hawk, has begun to roll back Obama-era moves to soften penalties for nonviolent drug offenses. He has aggressively pushed to enforce federal law in states that have legalized marijuana, for instance, and has instructed law enforcement officers to stop de-prioritizing lower-level dealers. This month it emerged that state and local law enforcement agencies are battling a Trump administration proposal to move a $275 million drug-prevention program to the Justice Department, fearing that it would push the country’s drug-fighting strategy toward federal legal crackdowns and away from community-based efforts.

It’s a big step from prosecuting minor marijuana offenses to executing fentanyl dealers, of course. But, as Levitsky writes, “democratic backsliding” happens slowly—and then all at once. Trump has not hidden his adoration of fellow strongmen, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Rodrigo Duterte, who has encouraged the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug offenders. (On a call with Duterte last year, Trump praised the president of the Philippines for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”) Trump’s Republican allies, meanwhile, have demonstrated an alarming willingness to tolerate his lesser dictatorial tendencies. In a poll, slightly more than half of Republican voters said they would support postponing the next presidential election if Trump said it was necessary.