The pattern is by now all too familiar: with every power grab Trump tries – from a fraudulent speech about voter fraud to appeals to his supreme court to let him rig the midterms – a debate kicks off about whether these moves are signs of strength or of desperation. Maybe we keep getting caught in this debate because the question is badly posed. So much of what is distinctive about Trump’s governance during his second term can serve the consolidation of an autocratic regime and at the same time create particular vulnerabilities for the regime. We have to become better at identifying these weaknesses, as opposed to being shell-shocked by Trump’s brazenness every single time.

Aspiring autocrats operate differently in the 21st century; in previous eras, they had little hesitation about unleashing violence and committing massive human rights violations. Today, they try to fool both domestic and international audiences into thinking that democracy and the rule of law still exist. The recently deposed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was a master of this technique; he spent many years performing what he called “the peacock dance” to convince the European Commission (and chancellor Angela Merkel) that he wasn’t creating a kleptocratic autocracy.

This contrast between what the social scientists Serguei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have called “fear dictatorships” on the one hand and “spin dictatorships” on the other is empirically proven: there really is less........

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