This is like how people argue Tim Snyder can talk about a future American Holocaust because he's studied the Nazis. Okay. He hasn't studied Americans. If you're an expert on elections that doesn't make you an expert on populist uprisings. Worse than that, it's a "don't question the intellectual because he's an intellectual" argument, rather than a "don't question the expert because this is his expertise" argument. People misuse the appeal to authority fallacy all the time but this, right here, is it.
So why are we taking Trump at his word now? This is a guy who wanted a cost estimate on a border-length alligator moat. Look - I work with maybe eight people who did season after season of The Apprentice. Donald Trump can't tell people where to eat lunch. The authority he has is entirely due to (A) owning the people he bosses around or (B) inheriting a power structure. People listen to the President because he's the President, not because he's Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump acts outside the bounds of being President, he's got to fall back on his abilities as a leader.
Hitler had the SS. Mussolini had the Blackshirts. Trump has an email list full of senior citizens. Yeah - there's a lot of MAGA-heads in the army but ask yourself - what's the moral distance between voting for a guy or shooting your superior officer for a guy? Is Trump that kind of leader?
Edsall doesn't want you to notice that he lined up a dozen experts who all answered "no." So he launches into 500 words of prevarication.
This is one of those "let's drive to the geographic middle and stand around with our thumbs up our asses asking what 'real Americans' think" pieces.