Either way, L’état c’est lui More on the subject of my earlier post. William Saletan at the Bulwark catalogues all the ways in which the right endorses his status as an autocrat: Once again, Trump is testing America’s tolerance for autocracy. And once again, his allies on the right are backing him up with extreme and dangerous theories of vast presidential power. Here are some of their arguments. 1. A former president is entitled to obstruct investigators if he doesn’t trust them. John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, says Trump’s lawyers can argue that “he didn’t initially cooperate with DOJ or the FBI because of the way he’d been mistreated by them.” Alan Dershowitz, who represented Trump at his second impeachment trial, goes further. According to Dershowitz, it doesn’t matter whether Trump was truly mistreated; his subjective perception is enough. In defense of Trump’s defiance of the FBI, Dershowitz asserts: “A president doesn’t have to cooperate with people he believes are trying to get him.” 2. A former president is entitled to withhold documents from investigators based on his belief that he declassified the documents. Here, again, Dershowitz suggests that facts don’t matter; all that matters is the former president’s perception. According to Dershowitz, “If President Trump believes he had declassified the material before he left the White House, then he had no obligation to turn them over to the [National] Archives.” 3. Federal law grants a former president sole authority to decide what he can keep. “The only statute that applies to…