10 defining and shared features of Donald Trump and Robert Mugabe

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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)

  1. “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.
  1. “Bury the truth” // PolitiFact qualifies only 4% of Trump’s statements as “true” compared to 53% as outright false, to complete exaggeration (18%).
  1. “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).
  1. “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.
  1. “Teach hate” // Trump propagates hate: towards Hispanics, Muslims, women, Democrats, our allied countries…
  1. “Scare off foreigners” // Trump burst onto the scenes on a platform of xenophobia: Build a wall! Evict all Muslims! Mexicans are rapists!
  1. “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.

  1. “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.

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Two fundamental reasons to be optimistic about and support Hillary

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In any election, there are two fundamental aspects in selecting a candidate: qualifying experience and credibility; and ideological alignment and commitment to the issues.

I’m optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s presidency, and fully support her candidacy, for exactly those reasons: she’s experienced, competent, and has for her entire life been dedicated to the issues that I define as progress, from civil, women’s, and children’s rights to health care.

Experience

For half a century – since the early ’60s – Hillary has been involved in public affairs and public policy, serving public office for 13 of those years, including the Senate and Secretary of State. That matters. She’s smart, knowledgable, well-versed, well-traveled, and also weathered, beleaguered, and still persevering. That matters, too. A lot. Especially in this political climate.

Dedication to the issues

She’s also committed to the issues, and not just in rhetoric.

  • Children and Healthcare:  She’s been championing children’s rights and healthcare since the beginning of her career. She chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the boards of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Arkansas Legal Services and the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s.

The 1993 Health Security Act, or HillaryCare as was sometimes quipped, didn’t muster the support from conservatives, libertarians, pharmaceutical companies, and even some of her own Democratic Party, but it did lay the foundation for the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, twenty years later and is certainly an indication of her commitment to people’s health and well-being and universal health care.

  • Women’s Rights: She is a champion of women’s rights and has personally contributed to advancing them, including through her global initiative, “No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project.” Her own 2008 presidential candidate concession to Obama captures some of those sentiments:

“Although we were not able to shatter that highest and hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it has 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time, and we are going to keep working to make it so, today keep with me and stand for me, we still have so much to do together, we made history, and lets make some more.”

  • Civil Rights: Most impressively, she is a life-long advocate for Civil Rights, and has been since a teen! As the DailyKos reports:

“At age 21, unknown Hillary Clinton made headlines. She and her  [Wellesley commencement] speech were featured in a Life Magazine article about the activist ideals of the class of 1969. She had led protests to protect black civil rights. She had accomplished civil rights goals. She advocated active civil disobedience to better African-American lives, to make the changes that passive compliance and blind trust had failed to make.”

(You can listen to excerpts of that speech here.)

Something interesting I only learned about Hillary is that she had been an active young Republican in the 1960s until hearing a Martin Luther King speech in Chicago and then attending the 1967 GOP convention (at 20 years old) where she denounced the Republican party as being racist. She has, since then, been committed to the Democratic party.

I realize for some that stokes the critique that she is opportunistic, fluctuates in her policies, or ‘flip-flops.’ And my rebuttal to that oft-invoked critique is that this is exactly the kind of admirable pragmatism that she has demonstrated since she was a young activist and upcoming politician.

The Republican Party of the 1950s and early 1960s was the more supportive of Civil Rights. As the table below highlights, only 19, or 10% of Republican House Members and NO Republican Senators voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act bill, compared to 107 (nearly 50%) and 18 (35%), respectively, of their Democratic Counterparts.

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As many know well, the Democratic Party of that era was largely propped up by southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, who despised the Republican Party of Lincoln (who had freed the slaves). By the mid and especially the late 1960s, essentially once President Johnson fully endorsed the Civil Rights Movement, the Dixiecrats defected and Civil Rights became a key component of the Democratic platform, which continues into present day. And Hillary had the pragmatism to move with the more progressive party.

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Responding to North Carolina’s discriminatory laws

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First it was Google, Apple and Disney, then the NBA pulled the Allstar game from Charlotte, and just last week, the NCAA pulled 7 championship events from North Carolina, all in criticism of the state’s surprising transgender law that was hastily passed in March.

The House Bill 2 (HB2) has been widely criticized as limiting anti-discriminatory protections for LGBTQI individuals and potentially violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act; beyond, some argue that:

HB2 doesn’t just repeal the existing civil-rights ordinances protecting the LGBT community; it bars any locality or agency from enacting new ones.

It’s encouraging to see some of the country’s most powerful institutions uncompromising on civil rights.

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DNC: the true LiberalOptimist venue

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The Democratic National Convention was brimming with optimism, hope, pragmatism, and the theme of “Stronger Together.”

Barack Obama may have captured these sentiments best, delivering an inspirational speech:

“The America I know is full of courage, and optimism, and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous… America has always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government. And that’s what Hillary Clinton understands.”

More substantively, he spoke of what’s been accomplished during his presidency: jobs, healthcare, etc. This blog post captures 371 accomplishments under his presidency, accomplishments easily overlooked in today’s political climate.

Other highlights from the Democratic National Convention:

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Bernie forced the issue of inequality

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Whether you’re a Feel the Bern kind of person or supported Hillary throughout, we should all agree that Bernie brought an important issue to the conversation that had otherwise been largely ignored in institutionalized politics: economic inequality.

The Tea Party Movement that began in 2009 started as something of a populist revolt, though skeptics, and rightfully so, also saw the big money behind it: The Billionaire’s Tea Party. All the same, by 2010, dozens of self-proclaimed Tea Party members were in Congress. By contrast, the 2011 Occupy Movement lived hard and died fast, never making real headway in DC, with the exception of a brief stint on K Street where protestors occupied the buildings of lobbyists as a statement against the influence of money in politics.

Without Bernie’s unwavering, and, for some, somewhat relentless hammering of the issue, outcry against America’s widening economic chasm would not have made its way as it did into campaign debate, news coverage, and everyday conversation.

Granted, several obstacles remain: we have yet to see the extent to which a Hillary Clinton administration will continue to push for that progressive of an agenda (I’m too desperately optimistic to even consider a Trump agenda), and the ability for any sort of substantive policy change to take root, a steep obstacle in today’s partisan politics.

But in this moment, there is reason to recognize and appreciate that inequality, which is at unprecedented levels since the eve of the Great Depression, is at least on the agenda in ways that have largely escaped institutionalized politics outside of the usual nod to the “middle class.”

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(Dis)Enfranchisement in Virginia

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Updated post:

Unfortunately, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s efforts to reinstate voting rights to ex-felons, those who have served their sentences and are no longer on probation, was overturned on Friday by the state court system. The ruling stated that the governor does not have the “authority for the blanket restoration of voting rights.”

While fully acknowledging the setback, there are three reasons I’m holding to my optimism:

1. McAuliffe has vowed to continue signing on an individual basis; he has already re-enfranchised some 10,000 voters this way.

2. The fact that the Governor is making headlines brings attention to the issue (more below).

3. And, this is actually an issue that has had bipartisan support. In 2013, former Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell issued an executive order making it easier for nonviolent felons to regain their voting rights. Nationally, the issue has had some bipartisan support as well, including from states most restrictive of voting rights for former felons. A bipartisan committee has put forward the Democracy Restoration Act (still pending).

Felon Disenfranchisement

Why is this issue important? Disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons has implications for political equality in the same way that efforts to restrict voter registration undermines a fundamental principle of democracy: participation in the democratic process. Some 5.8 millions citizens are currently excluded from the political system, the majority of whom have completed their sentence and, in the words of Governor McAuliffe, “paid their debt to society.”

Moreover, and made more visible through the Black Lives Matter movement, are the racial inequalities and injustices in our criminal ‘justice’ system. The Sentencing Project has done extensive research on the subject, some of which is highlighted in Michelle Alexander’s provocative book, The New Jim Crow.  This short documentary captures the sentiment: The New Fight for Voting Rights.

Barring a more exhaustive review of the topic here, some insights include:

  • One in three black men is likely to be incarcerated at some point in his life; that number is one in six for Latino men, and Black Americans are more than five times as likely to go to prison than whites.
  • The “incarceration epidemic” in this country is reflected by the 500% increase in the number of people incarcerated over the past three decades. Today, roughly 716 out of 100,000 are imprisoned making the U.S. the leading jailer in the world. (See Deeply Divided, Chapter 8 & Figure 8.10).
  • Most Western Democracies maintain the voting rights of those incarcerated, or at least under some circumstances, and, quite the contrast, the United States is among just a few countries globally to restrict those rights even after release from prison.

 

Posted July 6, 2016 

From NPR: “More than 9,000 former felons have registered to vote in Virginia since April, when the governor issued an executive order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 ex-offenders. Democrat Terry McAuliffe said the residents, who are no longer in prison, had paid their debt to society.”

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