David Brooks had a column in the NYT last week in which he argued that chaos in the Trump Administration should be more of a concern than authoritarian behavior. In this, he was following the lead of his colleague Ross Douthat, who proposed a graph with an axis running from chaotic to authoritarian.
Both of them have missed the point. There is no doubt that the Trump Administration will be chaotic; Trump likes chaos, because it makes him unpredictable and increases his freedom of action. Given his short attention span and lack of interest in ideology, I am also convinced that he has no plan to institutionalize repression. What I do expect, however, is that chaos and failure will lead to unpopularity, which in turn will cause Trump to lash out at his critics periodically in ways that only a man on golf cart could admire. And so, it is perfectly possible that Trump can be both authoritarian and chaotic; he just can’t do it in a systematic way.