On several occasions, I’ve offhandedly mentioned to friends that I wanted to write an article on the 10 things Donald Trump and Zimbabwe’s dictator, President Robert Mugabe have in common; the similarities between them seemed striking right off the bat.
When Vox’s article on authoritarianism came out in March 2016, it reinforced and more articulately framed this notion of Trump, The Dictator, preying on and drumming up frenzied and fearful subjects who respond to authoritarianism.
As I finally sat down to put some words on paper, I found, and perhaps not too surprisingly, that my envisioned article had essentially already been written. A 2003 Atlantic article on Zimbabwean President Mugabe criticized his dictatorship by framing 10 ‘how-to’ steps to destroy a nation. Not surprising, moreover, they were nearly perfect parallels to the 10 notable features of Donald Trump and his campaign scribbled in my notes.
(And then I also learned that I’m really not original, but also clearly not off-base; Trevor Noah brilliantly covered the very same topic on The Daily Show nearly a year ago.)
To begin, though, some background on authoritarianism. The Vox authors, and the social scientists they cite, refer to authoritarianism as a “psychological profile of individual voters… thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force.” The dictatorship style of Trump, they offer, explains the unexplainable in his rise to the Republican nomination, and presumably what continues to carry him in the presidential polls.
Indeed, Trump, like Mugabe, incites and instills fear – think only of his reference to Mexicans as rapists and his out of context exaggeration of crime rates – and uses punitive rhetoric to rally his fan-base: Build the wall! Make them pay for it! Ban all Muslims! Trump, also like Mugabe, is so far lost in his own hubris and narcissism that he is impervious to criticism to the extent that when provoked, he just doubles down on his fear-invoking, punitive rhetoric to defend his absurd ideology, only to make him look stronger in the eyes of his authoritarian followers.
So if the political scientists are right, and I think they might be, that this isn’t uniquely a Trump phenomenon, but rather a broader phenomenon across individuals and societies, it’s no wonder that 2016 Trump lines up so neatly with 2003 Mugabe (and no wonder he has formed such an odd admiration for Putin!).
Mugabe // Trump (following from Atlantic’s 2003 article)
- “Destroy the engine of productivity” // Build a wall with the border of Mexico and undermine a relationship with the country that accounts for $584 billion in imports, our 3rd largest trading partner.
- “Bury the truth” // PolitiFact qualifies only 4% of Trump’s statements as “true” compared to 53% as outright false, to complete exaggeration (18%).
- “Crush dissent” // While Trump has not wielded the same sort of power as Mugabe, who has been in power nearly 40 years now, he has already demonstrated his willingness to incite violence, encouraging his campaign followers to punch and evict protestors, sending the opposition “out on a stretcher.” Even Mugabe didn’t begin with such furor (far from it, actually).
- “Legislate the impossible” // Again, Trump has yet to see the inside of the Oval Office, but his tendency is to spout off one absent, unrealistic idea after another that could never amount to any real policy or legislation.
- “Teach hate” // Trump propagates hate: towards Hispanics, Muslims, women, Democrats, our allied countries…
- “Scare off foreigners” // Trump burst onto the scenes on a platform of xenophobia: Build a wall! Evict all Muslims! Mexicans are rapists!
- “Invade a neighbor” // Insult and offend our neighbor, Mexico; and our allies, NATO
Tenants #8, 9: “Ignore a deadly enemy” (HIV in the case of Zimbabwe) and “commit genocide” // While I am confident and hopeful that genocide is not where this country is headed, even with Trump at the helm, issues of poverty, economic inequality, racial inequality and racial tensions, issues that Trump shows no promise of effectively addressing and would likely only exacerbate, do directly and substantially threaten marginalized people in this country, and threaten the stability and future of the country as a whole.
- “Blame the imperialists” // Trump blames everyone else, for everything, and takes no responsibility whatsoever for his own actions
Just to paint a clearer, or rather, starker, picture, when Mugabe took power, the country had one of the fastest growing economies in Africa; it now has the distinction of having one of the fastest shrinking economies and inflation has plagued the country. Poverty, crime, food insecurity and threats to civil liberties have risen with Mugabe’s consolidation of power and increased tendencies towards authoritarianism.
In short, it’s not a direction we should aspire to.
So where’s my sense of optimism?
As Mugabe so clearly demonstrates, the stakes are too high for any of us to remain onlookers during this year’s election. We all have a civic duty to ensure that fear does not rule us, and that exclusion does not define us. We have an opportunity, in whatever ways we can, to alleviate our families’, our friends’, our neighbors’, our communities’, our fellow citizens’ fears. And we can demonstrate through our own tolerance, compassion, and inclusion that we are not a country that will be swept away by intolerance, dispassion and exclusion.
