Long before Donald Trump was indicted on 91 felony charges or fined more than $US350 million for fraud, his admiration for autocrats and tyrants should have disqualified him from ever holding high office.
Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:
Trump has never tried to conceal his man-crush on Vladimir Putin or his esteem for the Russian president’s murderous regime. Towards the homicidal North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – a leader he once mocked as “Little Rocket Man” – he quickly came to display something nearing paternal pride. He also enjoys a convivial personal relationship with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, even after the murder in 2018 of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, a gruesome killing which the CIA concluded the crown prince had approved.
Yet a prime reason why so many Trump supporters are prepared to countenance his veneration of foreign despots is because they themselves are happy to consent to an American strongman.
Trump’s four years in the White House provided regular glimpses into what an American autocracy would look like, from demanding the creation along the Mexican border of a moat stocked with alligators and venomous snakes to telling senior aides that “scumbags” in the press should not just be imprisoned but executed. A president who believed that power should flow through the tip of his Sharpie pen also had a penchant for authoritarian flourishes, such as orchestrating military tattoos on July 4 that featured tanks, armoured personnel carriers and a B-2 stealth bomber, and which culminated in a speech delivered from the most majestic pulpit that Washington has to offer: the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In their seminal 2018 book How Democracies Die, the Harvard academics Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt developed four behavioural warning signs to help identify an authoritarian. First, when a politician rejects the democratic rules of the game. Second, when he “denies the legitimacy of opponents”. Third, when he “tolerates or encourages violence”. And fourth, when he “indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media”. Even before he had incited the attack on the US Capitol, Trump had ticked all four boxes. Still, more than 74 million Americans voted for him in 2020, an almost 20 per cent increase from four years earlier.
Donald Trump has never disguised his man-crush on authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin.Credit: AP
This should have come as little surprise. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.
The commonplace has it that Trump was a president like no other, especially when it came to trashing so many norms. None of his predecessors incited supporters to storm the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the result of a presidential election. However, the country’s 45th president tapped into a centuries-old tradition of iron-fist US heads of states. Historically speaking, he is not such an outlier as is ordinarily supposed.
President Andrew Jackson, who served between 1829 and 1837, is the most obvious example. Dubbed “King Andrew I”, this brutal former general rode roughshod over Congress and has been likened by historians to an “American Caesar”. John Adams, the country’s second president, tried to ban the opposition, while Thomas Jefferson also subverted the spirit and letter of the constitution. The boldest move of his presidency was also the most legally dubious: the Louisiana Purchase agreed with Napoleon, which almost doubled the size of the United States, was not just a land grab but a power grab.
Why America’s historic weakness strengthens Trump
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23.02.2024
Long before Donald Trump was indicted on 91 felony charges or fined more than $US350 million for fraud, his admiration for autocrats and tyrants should have disqualified him from ever holding high office.
Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:
Trump has never tried to conceal his man-crush on Vladimir Putin or his esteem for the Russian president’s murderous regime. Towards the homicidal North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – a leader he once mocked as “Little Rocket Man” – he quickly came to display something nearing paternal pride. He also enjoys a convivial personal relationship with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, even after the murder in 2018 of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, a gruesome killing which the CIA concluded the crown prince had approved.
Yet a prime reason why so many Trump supporters are prepared to countenance his veneration of foreign despots is because they themselves are happy to consent to an American........
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