Losing sleep over Trump? It’s time to wake up to the real tyrants

In January 2017, as President Donald Trump was inaugurated, America succumbed to a kind of hysteria. The world hyperventilated over the anticipated dangers of a Trump presidency.

In the end, America muddled through more or less intact. Trump supporters claim that he did more good and no more harm than Joe Biden has managed when he – increasingly frequently – succumbs to a senior moment on stage.

Donald Trump campaigns in Waterloo, Iowa, last month.Credit: AP

“As harmless as Joe Biden” is hardly a compliment Trump would relish. But as Trump slouches towards the presidency again, that is what Republicans and international Trumpists are saying to downplay his weird promise to only be a dictator “on the first day”.

Meanwhile, Democrats and international anti-Trumpers believe that, if re-elected, he would usher in an era of American autocracy. Despite this apocalyptic prospect, they can’t seem to find a more compelling candidate among their ranks than Biden, who most Americans believe is too old for the job.

The US seems to be losing confidence that liberal democracy matters.

Trump has a strange kind of talent. In his opponents, he awakens a fear of totalitarianism, but that doesn’t translate into supporting its opposite. His supporters, drawn from those who used to staunchly defend liberal democracy, are oddly unable to recognise Trump’s affinity with dictators, regardless of how he parades it. At a time of autocratic revival, that matters. Trump is dangerous because he causes people around him, supporters and detractors, to become cretinously blind to how they allow themselves to give totalitarians succour.

Saturday was the third anniversary of the January 6 breach of the Capitol building, the seat of the US Congress, after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden and blamed ballot fraud. Since then, Trump supporters have retold the story of what happened at the Capitol to exonerate their hero. Alternative tellings include the claim that it was an Antifa plot to discredit Trump supporters.

In the years since January 6, 2021, as Trump’s narratives have taken hold, loyalty to Trump has increased. Despite an undisputed recording coming to light of the former president urging an ally to “find” enough votes to overturn the result which favoured Biden, Trumpists are now more likely to believe the presidency was stolen by Democrat ballot box malfeasance.

This puts so-called conservatives in the strange position of supporting their man against the world’s largest democracy, while simultaneously overlooking his affinity for autocrats. They have to because he has never hidden it: as president, he praised Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, celebrated China’s Xi Jinping for making China a dictatorship again – suggesting the US might “give that a shot” – and said North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “totally gets it”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin with then president Donald Trump in 2018. Credit: AP

Trump sees himself as striking deals with the bad boys because, along with many Americans, he’s sick of US involvement in “endless foreign wars”. Fair enough. But there’s no deal, just less liberal democracy. Trump doesn’t value or believe in the system and therefore doesn’t see anything about it worth defending.

Meanwhile, progressive anti-Trumpers have their own peculiar blindness. They seem to believe Trump is the only, or greatest, global threat to freedom and peace. By focusing on him and his close friend Benjamin Netanyahu (a very flawed politician and, yes, it’s arguable that Trump admires in the Israeli prime minister the same strongman qualities shared by the other pals I’ve mentioned), some progressives overlook the fully fledged theocratic totalitarians who surround the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and take sides against Israel.

In doing so, they aren’t just ignoring Hamas, which has a declared goal of eradicating Israel, but also the Houthis, who hate the US (a proxy for all Western liberal democracies) and couldn’t resist jumping in to support Hamas when it attacked Israel on October 7.

The Lebanese group Hezbollah has always been a party to these tensions but has recently become more openly involved. And we’re not going to be allowed to forget Islamic State. It asserted its brand of theocratic totalitarianism this week, expressing the ongoing hatred between extremists of the Sunni and the Shiite branches of Islam by killing 84 people and injuring hundreds of Shiite mourners commemorating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard officer Qasem Soleimani in Iran.

This blindness to authoritarianism in the Middle East is so acute that, when some American TikTokers discovered Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America last year, they began to celebrate the former leader of theocratic totalitarian organisation al-Qaeda. The letter was Bin Laden’s rationalisation for flying airplanes full of innocent people into New York’s Twin Towers – also full of innocent people – killing thousands. TikTok eventually removed the hashtag behind the Bin Laden trend when the international media started reporting on it.

A recent study by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that, “whether content is promoted or muted on TikTok appears to depend on whether it is aligned or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government”. So it’s possible that the Chinese autocracy was not fundamentally opposed to Americans aligning themselves with theocratic totalitarianism against liberal democracy.

Between the pro-Trump mob and the anti-Trump mob, right-wing or left-wing, progressive or regressive, somehow many people are barracking for totalitarians, dictators and autocrats.

As 2024 gets under way, that means there is only one real choice: not left versus right, or yes-Trump vs no-Trump, which are now functionally all the same, but authoritarian vs democratic. Forget the US election. There’s a much bigger decision for us to make.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.