In recent weeks, two leaders — Xi Jinping in China and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia — have consolidated personal power to degrees unprecedented in their countries’ recent histories. And Donald Trump, presumptive leader of the free world, has praised them both for doing it.

In later October, China’s Communist Party added what it called “Xi Jinping Thought for the New Era of Socialism With Chinese Special Characteristics” to the Constitution. A cult-of-personality campaign for Xi, reminiscent of the days of Mao Zedong, is in full swing. So are purges of his political rivals, dressed up as “anti-corruption” drives.

A few days later it was Saudi Arabia’s turn, with Crown Prince Mohammed launching a wave of dismissals and detentions of senior ministers and fellow members of the royal family. Again, the pretext was corruption. Again, the goal was to sideline rivals as he aims to take his elderly father’s throne and remake the kingdom — at best, as an Arabian version of the autocratic liberalism practiced by the late Shah of Iran (an improvement, to be sure, over current conditions).

Xi and Mohammed are not alone. We are living through another age of strongmen: Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt; Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; Viktor Orban in Hungary; Vladimir Putin in Russia. Trump isn’t one of them — the American system won’t allow it, as Tuesday’s elections happily remind us — though he fits the psychological profile and yearns for their level of control.