Trump tests a role he’s long admired: strongman imposing order
President Donald Trump came closer last week than at perhaps any point in his presidency to reproducing, in appearance if not in form, some of the same traits of the strongmen rulers for whom he has long expressed admiration.
The man who praised President Vladimir Putin’s “very strong control” over Russia, and once said that China’s violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square showed “the power of strength,” found himself threatening to deploy the military to states where governors did not restore calm.
Trump also told governors “you have to do retribution” against the protesters he described as “terrorists” and, later, endorsed as “100% Correct” a tweet by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-ark., calling for “zero tolerance” of “anarchy, rioting and looting” and for deploying an Army division against “these Antifa terrorists.”
Such moments — in another, Trump warned protesters, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — echo his praise for Rodrigo Duterte, the strongman president of the Philippines. Trump lauded Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” referring to a campaign of vigilante police violence thought to have claimed thousands of lives.
And after long admiring the pomp and regalia of military leaders and military parades, Trump this week marched across Lafayette Park in Washington flanked by senior Defense Department officials. One of them, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, separately referred to cities as “the battle space.”
Trump’s unapologetic calls for force, his efforts to position the military as backing his political line and his warnings of usvs.-them internal threats that must be put down swiftly all follow, whether he knows it or not, a playbook used by the very strongmen he has praised.
The episode heightens a question that has busied political scientists since Trump took office: whether that playbook, developed in shakier democracies, would bring Trump similar political gains and whether it would do similar damage to the norms and institutions that serve as the guardrails of democracy.
“Saying you’re going to shove aside the niceties of democratic norms in order to take a hard line against crime or against chaos, that’s a really common appeal,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist who studies democratic decline. “Duterte is the leading example of this.”
But, Levitsky added, “whether that will work for Trump or not, well, it’s a very different context in the United States.”
Psychological research finds that, under certain conditions, when a threat feels chaotic and uncontrolled, some people will not only tolerate but desire extreme steps by the government to reimpose order and forcibly control whoever is perceived as the source of the danger.
Some leaders — Duterte, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Putin early in his career and others — rose by promising to fulfill those desires, a strategy that Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell University scholar, has termed an appeal to “order over law, instead of law and order.”
“If people think that the normal functioning of the rule of law won’t protect them, maybe they’ll find someone who can crack a couple skulls or tase some college kids in their car or shoot a protester in the eye,” Pepinsky said.
Where this goes to extremes, Pepinsky added, is when people do not just tolerate force as a regrettable necessity but also “feel real pleasure in seeing the capital-o ‘other’ being put down and controlled.”
Deep social polarization, along with sometimes alarmist portrayals of protesters who have committed some looting but only scattered violence, may prime some Americans to be receptive to the language of us-vs.-them and of a threat growing out of control.
Duterte is planning to sign legislation that would allow his government to classify some political opponents as terrorists, mere days after Trump claimed he would designate the leftwing protest group antifa as terrorists.
Under that playbook, transgressing democratic norms — by, for example, deploying the military at home — is seen as part of the appeal in its own right.
In another echo of the leaders he has praised, Trump, far from presenting his deployment of troops and his threat to overrule governors as regrettable necessities, has held them up as shows of strength.
“Populist figures almost invariably use norm-breaking as a signal to supporters,” Levitsky said, calling it a way to signal that the leader will “take an ax to the political elite” who set those norms.
And it shows the leader’s willingness to take drastic actions that others won’t.
For opportunists such as Duterte or Orban, this creates an opening to consolidate power. Trump’s aims appear more narrowly tailored to appearing strong and in control at a moment of economic calamity and a runaway pandemic.
“Creating a sense that the military is a partisan political actor,” said Kori Schake, a former Pentagon official now with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, “really does violence to the nature of the civil-military compact of the United States.”
It calls to mind Trump’s pledge on accepting the Republican presidential nomination: “I alone can fix it,” a message common to populist leaders who are skeptical of norms that restrain them and institutions that govern somewhat independently.
He has frequently moved to take direct control of institutions like the Justice Department or the State Department, purging troublesome inspectors general or career civil servants and installing loyalists
But the military is a very different entity. It may prove harder to politicize.
”The military is a big, very professionalized institution,” Levitsky said. “It has a lot of prestige, which gives it some capacity to push back, which we’re already seeing.”