Tyrants Are Bad and Some Are Worse
A Q&A with Waller R. Newell, a scholar of despotism, on how a democrat should judge an autocrat.
How many dictators can you find in this picture?
Photographer: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images“Where’s my favorite dictator?” That was a question asked by President Donald Trump at the G-7 summit in August. The missing tyrant? Not North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, not Russia’s Vladimir Putin, not China’s Xi Jinping — all of whom have been subjects of Trump’s flattery. It was Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt. While the U.S. president later said he was joking, it’s hard to imagine that he doesn’t have a soft spot for a strongman who once had a 38,000-square-yard red carpet rolled out in his honor.
Trump’s fondness for strongmen is alarming, but how closely does he resemble one? Plenty of Americans agree with the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, who in September said Trump was becoming “more and more of a tyrant.”