Donald Trump’s Admiration for Authoritarian Leaders: A Threat to Democracy?

Who is favorably disposed to communism, and to communist and post-communist rulers—Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? The answer is obvious: Trump. Less obvious, and far more important, is the reason: not ideology, but lust for power.

The argument for Harris’s communist sympathies is weak: she must be a Marxist, goes one of Trump’s standard  accusations against Harris, because her father was a Marxist professor. If so, then Trump must have become a socialist when he married Ivanka, who had been a citizen of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

No less striking is that Trump has offered no examples of Harris having expressed favorable opinions about Communism or Communist or post-Communist rulers such as China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The same cannot be said for Trump. He has often shown that he respects and admires how communist and post-communist rulers have established and maintained unlimited control over the populations of their countries. While still in office, upon learning that Xi Jinping had succeeded in extending his term limit as president virtually for life, Trump called the Chinese dictator “great” and emphasized approvingly that Xi “is the most powerful president in 100 years.” In an August 11, 2023, interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump admiringly noted that Kim at a young age established “total dominant control. That’s not easy.”

Achieving “total dominant control” in North Korea required crushing the opposition and destroying “the enemy from within.” Incredibly, Trump said in an October 14, 2024, interview that the enemy from within was more dangerous to American security than Russia, China, and North Korea. On November 11, 2023, in New Hampshire, he promised at a campaign rally that “we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Trump’s high regard for Putin is well documented—and Putin is by any definition a fascist. Upon learning of Putin’s territorial grab of Ukrainian lands in February 2022, Trump remarked, “This is genius.” On many occasions he has referred to Putin as “smart” and has emphasized that he gets along well with him. Is this a “good thing,” as Trump likes to say? Clearly not, if you agree with the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Bob Woodward, who, commenting on Trump’s relationship with Putin, characterized the Russian ruler as “the Adolph Hitler of our century.”

Trump has also expressed admiration for the real, historical Hitler. According to retired four-star General John Kelly, Trump confided in him that he wished his generals served him in the same way as Hitler’s generals served the Führer, bound by personal loyalty and unquestioning obedience, and not a sense of duty and loyalty toward the country, its people, and constitution. (See here and here.)

Although the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Anne Applebaum, who has written seminal books on the Gulag and the Holodomor, the famine-genocide in Communist-ruled Ukraine of 1932-1933, finds an affinity between Trump’s rhetoric and that of communist and fascist dictators in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s highly unlikely that Trump is enamored of fascist or communist ideology, which, if he read it, he probably wouldn’t understand. Instead, he admires the success of both the fascist, Communist, and post-Communist rulers in achieving almost unlimited power. Trump wishes he could do the same.

Ironically, although Trump craves power and sees himself as a tough guy who can get things done, he fears Putin and Russia. See the first part of a Fox News interview with him and J.D. Vance on July 24, 2024, here. When asked whether he would cut funding to Ukraine Trump virtually unfurled the white flag, characterizing Russia as “a war machine. That’s what they do. They fight wars. They beat Hitler. They beat Napoleon.”

Trump’s view of Russia is obviously one-sided. Russia lost the war in Afghanistan; it also suffered decisive defeats in World War I and against Japan in 1905. It is highly unlikely the Soviet Union could have defeated Nazi Germany on its own had the United States not entered the war and led the Allied D-Day invasion, a critically important turning point that Trump failed to mention in the Fox News interview.

Trump’s view of Russia’s wartime record may be the product of ignorance. But it may also be a symptom of his admiration for Putin and strong-man rule. Strong men win, by definition, and they do so even when they appear to lose. Trump is of course the prime example of the strong man’s infallibility.

Is Trump a Communist or a fascist? He admires Xi and Kim, not because he adores the Communist Party and central economic planning, but because they can do anything they want, from crushing their oppositions to passing laws. Trump’s admiration for Putin also derives from Russia’s self-elected president’s ability to elect himself. In a word, Trump admires the totalitarian in Xi, Kim, and Putin, and not their totalitarian ideologies.

This doesn’t make Trump any the less dangerous for American democracy and the world. How can one square strong-man rule with democracy? And what can the world expect if a fearful, ignorant, and power-hungry person gains the most powerful position on the planet at a time of extreme international tensions caused by the people he most admires?

If the polls are any guide, we’ll know the answers in about three months.

About the Authors

Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”

Bohdan Klid is a historian and director of Research at the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.