A wise psychoanalyst once told me: “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” If only journalists applied the same rule to Donald Trump.

On Friday night, Trump complained that he was being stymied by “archaic rules” in the House of Representatives and the Senate and warned “maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on”.

Aaron Blake, a journalist at the Washington Post, was quick to diagnose the statement:

Now Trump is talking about consolidating his power … Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind of attitude. He wants more power – and he wants it quickly. It’s not difficult to connect this to his past admiration for authoritarian leaders, and these comments are likely to give Democrats (and even some in the GOP establishment) plenty of heartburn. This is a demonstrated pattern for him, for all the reasons listed at the top of this post.

This kind of narrative of Trump the authoritarian is popular among journalists such as Vox’s Ezra Klein and academics such as Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It’s the background mood music of a lot of liberal commentary in the US. But it depends on paying almost exclusive attention to what Trump says rather than what he does.

If Trump were actually serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power. Instead, this is what he’s been doing – or not doing – since he’s been in office:

The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees.

Trump, in other words, has failed to fill 85% of the positions in the executive branch that he needs to fill in order to run the government to his specifications. It’s a strange kind of authoritarian who fails, as the first order of business, to seize control of the state apparatus: not because there’s been pushback from the Senate but because, in most instances, he hasn’t even tried.

Ah, Trump’s liberal and left critics will respond, but that failure to fill key positions is all part of the White House’s master plan. Back in February, Steve Bannon, Trump’s top strategist whose star lately has fallen, claimed that the administration’s goal was “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. As Bannon made clear, that was just a fancy way of describing the longstanding Republican goal of gutting rules and regulations the business class hates. What better way to do that than simply not staffing the agencies that are tasked with enforcing those rules and regulations?

There are two problems with this theory. First, Trump has failed to fill positions in departments and agencies he actually wishes to empower and expand. He’s only filled one out of 53 positions in the Pentagon, two out of 14 in the Department of Homeland Security, one out of seven positions in the intelligence agencies, one of out 28 positions in the treasury department, and almost none of the key positions in the justice department having to do with terrorism, drug crime prosecution and the like.

Second, many of those positions are not empty. Until Trump appoints someone to fill them, they will remain mostly occupied by holdovers from the Obama administration – who will continue to enforce the thousands of rules and regulations Obama passed and Trump hates.

Though Trump has had limited success overturning some of Obama’s rules through an obscure piece of legislation, the real work of deregulation and undoing Obama-era rules will require a much heavier lift that Trump is not yet in a position to execute.

Despite the fact that Trump, whose party is in control of all the elected branches of the federal government, has lost virtually every legislative battle he’s waged, and backed down from virtually every bluff he’s made, the faith in Trump’s power – not in his probity or purposes but in his ability to dominate the political scene – dies hard. And nowhere harder, it seems, than on the left.

In March, I was on a panel of liberal scholars and writers where it was the universal consensus that Trump had an almost intuitive grasp of and control over public opinion – as evidenced by his tweets, which were held to be the invisible puppet strings of the American mind. This was not long after Trump’s travel ban had been overturned by the courts and Trump had responded by tweeting his contempt for and hostility toward the judges involved.

It seemed like the classic demagogue’s move – whipping up the masses against elite judges – so there was some nervousness on the panel about what Trump might do to bring these recalcitrant judges to heel. (Trump has since repeated that charge against the judiciary, and his critics have repeated their concerns: now, Snyder says, “it’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will declare a state of emergency and try to seize full control of the government.)

As I pointed out to my co-panelists, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was rebuffed by the judiciary, he tried to overhaul the supreme court with his infamous court-packing scheme. Now that was an assertion of executive power. In the face of judges frustrating his agenda, all Trump managed was to emit a plaintive tweet promising to appeal their ruling: “I’ll see you in court.” Even that Trump couldn’t be bothered, in the end, to do. Instead he withdrew his appeal, revised his travel ban and found his ban back in court. Where it remains.

But even more important, Trump’s Svengali-like control of American public opinion is belied by the fact that most of America has disapproved of him for most of the time he’s been in office. In March, moreover, Trump saw precipitous drops in support from his base: Republicans, white people and men.

With every day he’s in office, fewer and fewer people believe that he’ll keep his promises, that he’s strong and decisive, and that he can bring about the changes the country needs. And as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, despite Trump’s consistent opposition to immigration and free trade, public support for those positions has gotten consistently stronger – record highs in the case of free trade, and in the case of immigration, the highest it’s been in over a decade – since Trump came into office.

There’s little doubt that Trump’s administration has pursued policies designed to make life crueler and harder for immigrants, people of color and women. There’s also little doubt that some in his administration, particularly his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, will be successful in doing so.

But with the exception of immigration, most of these aims are longstanding Republican goals. They reflect no peculiar authoritarianism on Trump’s part; they’re just the revanchist stock-in-trade of the American right, which any Republican president would pursue.

When it comes to advancing the singular potency of the presidency – whether that means controlling public opinion, consolidating the power of the executive branch or dominating Congress – Trump has been an abject failure. Whatever fantasies he (or the media or his critics) may have about the presidency abound, the last 100 days have shown that Trump has no realistic agenda for, or steady interest in, consolidating power.

“Strong leader” is a slogan for Trump, a rhetoric, a performance, but that’s about it. Trump has always thought his words were more real than reality. He’s always believed his own bullshit. It’s time his liberal critics stopped believing it too.