Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Adolf Hitler, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Saddam Hussein: What do they have in common? All of these authoritarians would have received praise from former US president – and now Republican presidential candidate – Donald Trump, who promised Americans that he too will be a dictator “on day one” of his term.
This isn't just idle talk. Like a new anchor book CNN and national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reminds us, Trump supposedly believes that even the most murderous dictators, like Hitler, did good things.
According to one of the former president's former chiefs of staff, Trump had Hitler in mind as a leadership example to emulate during his time in the White House, including telling the military what to do as chief executive.
Given the risks to our democracy in the 2024 election, it's worth considering why Trump continually praises dictators and who he is trying to reach with this kind of talk.
Part of this is undoubtedly Trump playing out his fantasies of the kind of authority he could wield as president.
He praises Hitler, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and others because of their absolute power, not despite it. He repeats these leaders' cult of personality propaganda by presenting them as so strong and fearsome that it would be futile to resist them.
Thus, Xi, in Trump’s account, is “strong as granite. He manages 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” And Putin is a “genius” for “taking over a country – a really vast place, a big piece of land with a lot of people and just getting more and more in,” Trump declared days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as if the fierce Ukrainian resistance did not exist.
Foreign autocrats are certainly targets of such praise, especially those whom Trump sees as helpful to his political or personal fortunes.
The most obvious case is Russia, given the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And the flow of adulation directed at Xi Jinping is probably unrelated to the benefits Trump has received from “doing services,” as he put it, for the Chinese government during his presidency. Trump properties have received more than $5 million from entities allied with the Chinese government, according to House Democrats.
But Americans are the most important audience for the stream of praise he directs at autocrats. Trump's repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership must be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy.
This is probably why he is explicitly casting himself as a strongman governing his brand, telling Americans that it is in their interest to allow him to save them from the supposed chaos and crime of democracy and give them an orderly authoritarian world under his control.
Propaganda is not just about making people believe this or that lie – for example, that he won the 2020 election – but changing the way people think and feel and the associations they make when they hear certain words.
Think about how Hitler's ruthless speeches and writings made Germans associate “Jews” with disease and depravity to the point of making him popular for ostensibly saving Germany by persecuting Jews.
This is what Trump is doing to authoritarians. Trump uses his rallies and other public occasions to sell strong rules to his followers, so Americans begin to see autocrats as positive, glamorous figures (“There is no one in Hollywood who can play the role of President Xi,” he gushed in a town hall hall of 2023 in Iowa) who are doing good for their people and the world.
If Trump mentions the repression of these autocrats, it is to justify it, as when he praised former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2016 for being “good” at killing terrorists, or praised Turkish President Erdogan, presenting him in 2017 as “a friend of mine” who is “getting very high marks” for governing “very, very strongly.”
At the time of this observation, Turkey was in a state of emergency, including the arrests of more than 47,000 Turks, many of them civilians, as part of a government crackdown following the 2016 military coup against it.
Trump even presents leaders who are heads of failed rogue states, such as North Korea's Kim Jong-Un, as inspirational. “We fell in love,” Trump said of his relationship with Kim, whose country reportedly earned 50% of its income from cybercrime in recent years.
American voters should take Trump's enthusiasm for autocrats seriously. He is foreseeing the kind of leadership he will pursue if he returns to the White House and doing his best to re-educate Americans to tolerate – or worse, even desire – an approach to governing that, wherever it has happened, has created despair and division – and it often set nations on a path of destruction, as with Germany under Hitler.
Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, autocrats are united in their disregard for human rights and dignity and their attempt to persuade people that it is in their interests to support governments that take away their rights. This appears to be Trump's project as well.
The former president may be telling us that he will only be a dictator for a day, but no authoritarian has ever relinquished power once he gains it and the strong men he exalts have been in power for many years.
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
