Donald Trump has always expressed love for authoritarian leaders, but we failed to listen How did the US end up with a president who hates the press and envies dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin?

Kirsten Powers | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump: 'Got Along Very Well' With Kim Jong Un Shortly after the end of U.S. President Donald Trump's historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump sat for an interview with Fox News Reporter Sean Hannity where he said he and Chairman Kim "got along very well." (June 12)

In a Fox News interview Friday, President Donald Trump took his fawning over authoritarian monsters to new levels, saying of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, “He is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head ... He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

People tend to do that if they know the only other option is to live in a prison camp eating rats for dinner or to be publicly executed.

Trump sniffed that he was “kidding” when asked about this comment and chided the media for their humorlessness. Forgive us. Some people don’t think “jokes” about an entire population living in constant terror because of their sadistic leader are funny.

Then there is the fact that it really wasn’t a joke.

We know this because Trump has made his affection for authoritarians — from the Philippines’ Duterte to Turkey’s Erdogan to China’s Xi — well known. While he fights with American allies, he lavishes praise on Vladimir Putin, who he has discussed approvingly more than 80 times since 2013. This included such gems as, “You have to give [Putin] credit that what he’s doing for that country in terms of their world prestige is very strong” and praising the Russian dictator’s “very strong control over [his] country.”

Attacking the media

Trump not only admires dictators, he envies them. Surely stinging over Kim’s state-run media coverage, Trump tweeted after his Singapore visit: “Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools.” Yes, Trump views the media as a far bigger enemy than North Korea. Achieving his larger goal of destroying any sense of truth — which all authoritarians aspire to do — requires he destroy the institution that keeps pointing out that he is an inveterate liar. As he told CBS’s Lesley Stahl, his attacks are meant to “discredit” reporters so that people won’t believe negative stories about him.

Or as Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, “post-truth is pre-fascism.” Snyder describes fascist tactics to destroy truth, such as “shamanic incantation,” which involves the endless repetition of slogans and “self-deifying claims,” such as “I alone can solve it,” which are clearly nonsense — but supporters don’t care, because they are under the thrall of magical thinking.

A key authoritarian tactic is governance by spectacle, which “makes people excited positively or negatively so that we forget government is supposed to be making policy and instead get angry at one another,” Snyder told me in an interview. Seen through this prism it’s clear that Trump’s Twitter feed is meant to keep everyone on edge, constantly upending news cycles and sending reporters down pointless rabbit holes chasing non-stories while the world burns around us.

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It’s likely that Trump’s model is Russia, a crony-capitalist system that enriches the leader and people close to him who are freed of the burden of the institutions that would hold them accountable. “The president is borrowing tactics straight from the Putin playbook,” Freedom House President Michael Abramowitz told me. “He’s attacking the press and civil society, deriding verifiable facts as fake news, demonizing groups and institutions. Putin was Trump before Trump.”

How did we end up with this kind of leader?

Trump supporters

We hear a lot about Trump voters being motivated by economic anxiety and not enough about the psychological factors, including a predisposition to favor authoritarian leaders, that played a far bigger role in his election than any fears about one’s economic future. After all, Latinos and African Americans have the same level of economic anxiety as white voters, and they voted for Hillary Clinton. Matthew MacWilliams, a scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst studying authoritarianism, wrote in January 2016: “Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in their polls.” A New York Times survey of leading social psychologists in January 2016 came to the same conclusion.

Not all authoritarian voters are Republicans — though, as a statistical fact, most are. Warning in early 2016 that, “those who say a Trump presidency ‘can’t happen here’ should check their conventional wisdom at the door,” MacWilliams noted that in the likely primary voters he surveyed, 49 percent of Republicans scored in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale, more than double the number of Democratic voters.

A recent paper by two political scientists from Texas A&M and Clemson University found that white respondents who expressed intolerance towards other races, Muslims, immigrants/foreign workers, Jews and those speaking a different language “were more likely to support rule of government by a strong leader without legislative or electoral oversight, rule of government by the army, and were more likely to oppose democracy, in general.”

Most authoritarianism experts will tell you that warnings of the autocrat-in-waiting’s plans were out in the open, but people failed to take them seriously or believed the country’s institutions served as a bulwark or cast those posting warnings as hysterical.

Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen warns, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.” Put another way: people will always tell you who they are.

You just need to be willing to listen.

Kirsten Powers, a CNN news analyst, writes regularly for USA Today and is co-host of The Faith Angle podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @KirstenPowers