'Time may not be on his side': Dictator expert claims age could shatter Trump's plans

With multiple experts agreeing that Donald Trump is using every page out of the authoritarian playbook to seize more and more power, a professor who specializes in the rise and rule of dictators suggested there is every reason to believe he may not live long enough to finish the job.

In a column for The Bulwark, Lee Morgenbesserof the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University in Australia, claimed the 79-year-old American president, who increasingly shows signs of mental and physical decline, wavers back and forth from fully being aware of what he’s doing and occasional signs of dementia.

More to the point, he wrote: “He is alternately a conniving destroyer of Republican institutions or a mentally and emotionally debilitated, increasingly senile wackjob.”

According to Morgenbesser, Trump has not been able to succeed at getting a stranglehold on power because, while he may be using all the tools previous dictators deploy, he’s simply not good at it due to his limitations.

"Trump is merely implementing the authoritarian playbook poorly,” he observed. “Like a high school squad trying to run the same plays as an NFL team, the play sheet can be identical but the results won’t look the same. Early in Trump’s first term, Benjamin Wittes dubbed this synthesis ‘malevolence tempered by incompetence.’”

Saying Trump lacks the skill of a “top-tier destroyer of democracy,” he claimed his impetuousness is making it harder in his second term to keep a substantial number of people by his side.

Then there is his health, which raised alarms on Labor Day weekend when Trump uncharacteristically went silent and was only photographed from a distance.

“Time may not be on Trump’s side,” he suggested. “He is already 79, showing signs of deteriorating health, and liable to be under considerable stress for the foreseeable future. And he does not seem mentally robust, which is too bad for him and too bad for the United States.”

He then warned, “While elected autocrats can numb citizens to their actions by generating economic growth, stoking nationalist fervor, and providing political stability, mad kings wreck just about everything they touch.”