So much has been made of Trump’s affinity and respect for Putin. What do you think Putin thinks of Trump? I think that he feels disappointed. Putin really assumed that once Trump — who had such clear admiration for him — was elected, it would be convenient for Trump to change the relationship with Russia profoundly and instantly. On a larger scale, I think that it’s very difficult for Putin to deal with an unpredictable interlocutor, because he has always been the madman on the international stage. Weirdly, I think it would have been easier for Putin to deal with Hillary Clinton, who would have been tough but very consistent.

In your essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” your third rule was that institutions will not save you. What do you make of United States institutions in the last year? A lot of what we think of as democratic institutions are informal ones, like the White House press briefing. There is no law that guarantees press access to the White House. Communication was lessening during the Obama years. There was every reason to suspect that Trump was going to create an adversarial relationship and that people were going to be faced with the impossible dilemma between sort-of-complicity and access.

At the same time, there’s a strong pushback to that: It feels like a big news story drops every weekend. The question is how sustained and effective this pushback can be over the course of four or eight years. Institutions function in relationship to one another, so when you have an institution that is being destroyed, the system begins to tear. A great example of that is the travel ban — the reason the judiciary was able to act so quickly was that civil society, which is also an institution, had sprung into action. The whole democracy depends on its existence. We’re seeing civil society fatigue with the different iterations of the travel ban, which is basically the exact same travel ban all over again, and that’s what I’m really worried about. Gradually, the fatigue is starting to stick.