MikeLigalig.com

The President's struggle to cement long-lasting political achievements along with efforts by his own aides to rein him in have meanwhile tempered fears of some critics when he took office that Trump was a tyrant-in-waiting.

Yet, Trump has slipped easily into some of the imagery, rhetoric and affectations exhibited by dictatorial leaders throughout history and in illiberal societies around the world.

Seeing an American president, of all people, adopt such behavior has not yet lost its power to shock.

Trump's latest posturing came in the Oval Office on Wednesday, when he warned that it was ultimately his call on whether to strike North Korea.

"I listen to everybody, but ultimately my attitude is the one that matters, isn't it?" Trump said.

"That's the way it works," he added, in remarks that came in the context of the Republican chair of the Senate's foreign relations committee, Tennessee's Bob Corker, warning that the President could put the United States on the path to World War III.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=87670.0

Identifying Trump as a leader with authoritarian impulses does not mean bracketing him with monsters of history like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. And unlike modern day tyrants in Asia or Africa, Trump faces a robust political system of devolved power specifically set up to thwart tyranny.

And while Trump castigates the press, journalists are not being murdered in droves. Officials are not persecuted when they are ousted from the Cabinet. Trump's political enemies do not disappear.

But within Western constraints, Trump has displayed plenty of examples of imperious behavior that raise concerns that his presidency represents a challenge to constitutional norms and civic institutions.

In many ways, Trump is a politician with counter-liberal instincts operating within a liberal society, who uses the rhetorical techniques of authoritarian regimes.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=87670.0

But that tweet could also come across as a culture war attack against mostly African-American players. And to anyone familiar with state-controlled societies, it recalls efforts by powerful heads of state to impose a national definition of patriotism.

In such appeals to his political base, Trump replicates another technique of autocrats from the Philippines to Venezuela: empowering supporters who believe they are marginalized in their own culture.

"Many of these men are disrupters, they come from outside of politics, they start something new, they have a movement," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and cultural critic at New York University who has written extensively about Trump's "authoritarian playbook."

Like many strongmen, Trump nurses an ego in need of constant affirmation.




Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=87670.0