Far From a Kink, Donald Trump’s Dictator Fetish Puts Him Squarely in the Mainstream

Donald Trump is rarely happier than when he’s enjoying the company of an autocrat or dictator. Indeed, it often seems that for Trump one of the chief perks of being a politician is the chance to hang out with strongmen. On Friday, March 8, Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Praising his guest, Trump said, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.” Trump slyly alluded to Orbán’s record as an aspiring authoritarian who has run roughshod over Hungary’s fragile democracy—but the former president made clear that this was a selling point rather than a liability. Trump sarcastically noted that Orbán is “a noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss.” For Trump, being “the boss” is an admirable goal.

Effusively praising autocrats is nothing new for Trump. Four days after that Orbán lovefest, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told CNN about Trump’s habit of celebrating despots past and present. Trump told Kelly that Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” in particular signaling out the economic growth under Nazi rule and the führer’s ability to command the loyalty of his generals. (Trump seems to have forgotten the July 20 plot in 1944 where at least a few Wehrmacht officers conspired in an attempt to assassinate Hitler.) Trump also described Chinese leader Xi Jinping as “brilliant” and had kind words for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Kelly, “He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy.”

CNN claims that Trump’s praise of dictators reflects “a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy.” This might be a consoling thought, but it isn’t true. Trump’s dictator fetish shouldn’t be treated a merely a personal peccadillo. Trump has the gift of turning subtext into text, of making visible powerful tendencies in American history and culture that have often been ignored by polite society. Because Trump is a loud vulgarian, he often blurts out shameful impulses that are more widely shared—but carefully hidden.

The deep historical roots of Trump’s pro-dictator sensibility have been explored by the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn in a brisk, timely, and lively new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. With a bounty of telling detail and devastating quotations, Heilbrunn documents how, since the First World War, the American right has often felt a deep affinity with autocrats and tyrants, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, and Augusto Pinochet. Leading promoters and intellectuals from the American right have been unabashed in praising the apartheid government of South Africa as well as murderous regimes and death squads in Central America, South America, and Africa.

With a keen eye for anecdotes, Heilbrunn dredges up figures like Walter Harnischfeger, a Wisconsin businessman who helped finance Joseph McCarthy’s rise and believed that the Nuremberg trials were “worse than anything Hitler did. It beats Dachau.” In 1977, William F. Buckley Jr.—often wrongly mourned as the voice of a civilized conservatism—swooned: “In Chile, General Pinochet is archetypically the leader. His portrait is now seen in every government office; standing erect, big-chested, penetrating eyes, the faintest glimmer of suspicion there, coordinating with the slightly arched, light traced moustache: regal, is another way to put it.”

In 1986, Jeane Kirkpatrick, formerly Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, enthused over Angolan militia leader Jonas Savimbi. Speaking at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Kirkpatrick gushed that Savimbi was a man of “dazzling accomplishment…linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior, guerrilla tactician. Savimbi has admirers the world over, and I have long been one of them.” In truth, Savimbi was a cat’s-paw of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He was also, as Heilbrunn notes, “a ruthless leader who murdered dissenters within his own ranks, terrorized his country for decades, and refused to accept the results of a free election.”

The motives for this love of dictators and their attendant death squads were manifold: Right-wing tyrants were seen as bulwarks against communism and working-class militancy; authoritarian regimes were admired for their alleged efficiency and cultural health (contrasted unfavorably to the putative decadence of liberalism); racists doubted that non-WASPs were capable of self-governance; and, more broadly, suspicion of democracy was pervasive.

The story that Heilbrunn tells is of the repeated return of the repressed. The Old Right of the early 20th century was openly authoritarian and unilateralist. After the revelations of the Holocaust, these impulses were partly (but never completely) held in check—when the American right joined Cold War liberals in the bipartisan consensus of anti-communist internationalism. But after the end of the Cold War and the discrediting of neoconservative interventionism caused by George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, the authoritarian right reemerged with a vengeance. Donald Trump represents the atavistic revival of the Old Right.

This is a compelling story—but also a partial one, marred by partisan blinkers. Two forms of myopia limit Heilbrunn’s work: German ethnic guilt and Cold War liberalism. Heilbrunn’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and perhaps for that reason Heilbrunn is inclined to indict not just the Nazi era but German history more broadly. German American conservatives, with a propensity to whitewash their homeland, are particular villains in his book in a way that seems excessive.

Heilbrunn’s account of World War I is ridiculously simple. He flatly states that Wilhelm II was a “monster” whose “jealousy of Great Britain impelled him to pursue policies that led directly to World War I.” Heilbrunn flatly rejects the revisionist historians that emerged during the 1920s as creators of a “farrago of myths.” While Wilhelm was indeed a monster, he was not the only monster of the era. As many on the left noted at the time, the First World War was a product of a system of imperial rivalries that all the great powers (including the United States, with its holdings in Latin America and the Philippines) participated in. Scapegoating Wilhelm I and ignoring the sins of the British, the French, the Russians, and the Americans is not good history; it’s merely a comforting rationalization of the status quo as inherently just.