Rogues’ gallery
It’s said you should judge someone by the company they keep. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to keep many people in his close circle of confidants — one consequence of constantly, publicly and unabashedly tossing putative allies under a bus — nor does he reserve much praise for people other than himself. He appears to believe that the vast majority of other people, if they have any integrity at all, are suckers and losers, a sentiment many of his supporters don’t appear to realize he would surely extend to them.
That makes it particularly notable when the former president does decide to pump someone up, especially off the cuff. At a New Hampshire campaign rally he managed to shout out not one, but four of what he seems to view as his contemporaries — despotic and nationalistic leaders who have weaponized their countries’ political systems to push their own power.
Trump had kind words for “Viktor Orbán, the highly respected prime minister of Hungary” who this month derailed a $52 billion EU aid package to Ukraine defending itself from Russia’s invasion. Trump praised the very imperialist who launched that disastrous war, Vladimir Putin, favorably quoting the despot’s assertion that the criminal cases into Trump’s coup attempt, mishandling of classified documents and other misconduct were politically motivated — a bit like defending your financial prowess by citing the endorsement of Bernie Madoff.
Trump talked up Chinese President Xi Jinping, who flatly warned President Biden that he intended to take Taiwan by force and is moving forward with the trial of Hong Kong pro-democracy activist
Jimmy Lai, who was held in solitary confinement for three years. And Trump touted North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, “who was very nice, I will tell you,” and just launched a new missile test as part of his goal of developing weapons capable of striking the United States.
There’s no need to really parse this for deeper meaning or read between the lines, no great mystery here as to why Trump seems most comfortable in this type of company. What these leaders have is what he wants, not surreptitiously but openly, with Trump and his advisers laying in detail how they’ll purge the military leadership, install loyalists at all federal agencies, persecute political and social opponents and dissolve democratic guardrails.
Where once he was somewhat coy about these desires, he’s increasingly blunt, having finally embraced calling himself a would-be dictator and taking phrases straight out of fascist rhetoric. Most extreme might be his new applause line about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States, a favorite notion of Hitler’s (as a general rule, it’s not a good sign when a candidate feels the need to deny he’s cribbing from “Mein Kampf”).
The tendency to hand-wave all this away is absurd since Trump already tried to overthrow the government once. He’s not kidding, he’s not exaggerating, he’s not trolling or merely being incendiary as an electoral tactic. Trump wants to end more than two centuries of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States and import the autocratic methods of Xi, Putin, Kim and Orbán, those leaders he seems to so admire. He must be held to account, and he must never get near the White House again.