If the past is any indication, Trump will do none of these things.

Instead, he'll likely try to discredit the protesters as stooges of some kind of enemy. That's what he did during the campaign, when he accused Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and George Soros of sending violent disrupters to his events. Sometimes, Trump and his surrogates even suggested that the activists were being paid to make a ruckus. There was, and is, no evidence of this.

This line of reasoning draws directly from the handbook of strongmen and dictators the world over. (“Discredit or dismiss the protesters” is an actual step in “The Dictator's Handbook,” a jokey dissection of how autocrats govern.)

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To take just a few examples:

In Ukraine in 2004, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Kiev to protest the fraudulent election of President Viktor Yanukovich. (Nelson Ledsky of the National Democratic Institute said observers “reported that the rigged voting was in the neighborhood of over 1 million extra votes.”). Russian President Vladimir Putin, who backed Yanukovich, accused the United States of financing the activists, saying that America has a history of pursing a “dictatorial” foreign policy, packaged in “beautiful, pseudo-democratic phraseology.”

In Turkey in 2014, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed “ foreign-backed” mercenaries for inciting the Gezi Park protests.

When protesters took to the streets in 2011 in Moscow to demonstrate against a rigged election, Putin accused the United States of orchestrating. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “set the tone for some opposition activists, gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work,” Putin said at the time

In Hungary, Viktor Orban has suggested that dissenters are actually “subversives from abroad.”

Syria's Bashar al-Assad has blamed antigovernment protests on “armed terrorist groups” “spreading chaos and instability." (Ironically, he would later release actual terrorists from jail, hoping that they'd join, and thereby discredit, the opposition.)

This is more than an effort to save face. It's a deliberate strategy, one intended to discredit the very idea of protest, to make the act of civil disobedience seem unpatriotic. As Foreign Policy explains, “according to dictators, dissent is always the work of a foreign agency whose ultimate goal is to impose Western values and destabilize the country. These foreign agents bribe impressionable and otherwise loyal citizens to execute their dirty work, turning them into puppets susceptible to manipulation and seduced by the promise of money.”

It's clever. Under this rubric, opponents of a regime are necessarily unpatriotic — stooges of rich anarchists or leaders from other countries. This makes it seem like any attempt to question a leader is suspect. Or, as Srdja Popovich, author of “Blueprint for Revolution,” writes:

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Such tactics condition people to distrust democratic action — or any kind of activism at all — creating an apathetic and cynical society in which corrupt authoritarians thrive. By blaming any and all dissent on foreigners, the regime convinces people that they have no right to question its actions. Furthermore, inventing a foreign adversary distracts people from domestic issues, further securing the regime’s stability. After all, the threat of a foreign invasion is much more frightening than high unemployment or corruption.

Of course, when leaders start to believe their own spin, they can lose sight of their country. That's what happened to Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevich, who worked assiduously to discredit the young people who rallied against him as “well-paid” stooges of the CIA. After his fall, secret police memos proved that Milosevich really believed this to be true. Popovich writes: