December 13, 2023

The Left has charged every Republican President since Nixon with fascism. The two presidents Bush were major targets before the campaign against President Donald Trump. Trump made fun of this during a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity. The once and future president declared he would be “a dictator” but only on the first day of his second term when he would “close the border and drill, drill, drill” for oil and gas. This statement drew the usual outrage on the Left, confirming their warning of Trump’s authoritarianism as a threat to democracy. Of course, Trump can only get a second term if he wins a fair election, which polls currently indicate he would. That is the normal definition of democracy. But these zealots assert it is only a true democracy if they win. Any means are justified to win because they know by ideology what the people want better than the people do themselves.

Four days after the Fox event, the left-wing journal The New Republic (TNR) sent out a fundraising email exposing “Donald Trump’s favorite dictators.” But their guilt-by-association play failed when one looked at the policies being discussed.

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Vladimir Putin was first, with flashbacks to the discredited “Russian collusion” hoax. What better way to smear an avowed nationalist candidate who wants to make his country great again than to allege he is a pawn of a hostile foreign power? But thrown at Trump it was unbelievable from the start. TNR cites Trump saying how “clever” Putin was in handling President Barack Obama on Crimea and deserves “a lot of credit” for taking over that strategic territory for “two dollars’ worth of sanctions.” But this does not mean Trump backs Putin. Trump’s point is that Obama was too weak to deter Putin. As was President Joe Biden who opened the door for the Russian invasion of the rest of Ukraine by declaring Kyiv was outside the NATO defense perimeter.

As Trump has said repeatedly, there would have been no invasion had he been reelected. His Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirms in his memoir Never Give an Inch. Fighting for the America I Love the “shows of strength that President Trump put on in private conversations with Putin.” Trump also sent weapons to Ukraine along with special forces trainers, something Obama refused to do. Pompeo laments that the “partisan hysteria” regarding the Trump-Zelenskyy phone call and impeachment fiasco weaken efforts to further strengthen Ukraine. As a vocal advocate of impeachment, TNR played a part in Putin’s aggression even before backing the election of a known appeaser in 2020 who spent his first two years waving a white flag around the world. The results have been wars on multiple fronts that threaten to spread because of lackluster responses by a Biden Administration only reluctantly waking up to an extremely dangerous world.

Putin thus still thinks the U.S. will abandon Ukraine and give him a victory that will cement his revanchist regime in power for another decade. And China believes this too. A recent editorial in state media outlet Global Times asked readers to “Imagine if the US, the largest single donor to Kiev…. reduces its Ukraine aid. Amid the growing war-weariness in the West, this will certainly deflate Europe’s willingness to support Ukraine. In that case, how the war will end is quite obvious.” And a “war-weary West” will eventually abandon Israel, Taiwan, and a long list of other targets to an axis of evil bent on overturning a world order upon which free people depend.

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TNR’s other dictators can be dealt with just as readily. The charm offensive with Kim Jong Un was a diplomatic ploy to appeal to an isolated, immature ruler. Kim did agree to halt nuclear and long-range missile testing. On denuclearization, Trump held firmly to the position that there would be no sanctions relief until North Korea had fully dismantled its nuclear program.

It is policy disagreements that are at the core of TNR’s complaints about its last two “dictators.” Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in 2016 and left office at the end of his constitutionally limited four-year term. During his 20 years as mayor of Davao City he “transformed the city from a haven of lawlessness into one of the safest areas in Southeast Asia. Duterte’s harsh crime-fighting tactics earned him the nicknames ‘the Punisher’ and ‘Duterte Harry.’” This was the main issue that led to his landslide election as president. He waged a ruthless campaign against drug cartels, using vigilante and counterinsurgency tactics in a true war on crime. This won Trump’s respect and the Left’s hatred, as we see today in America.

Defunding the police complements legalizing ‘recreational” drug abuse that not only kills more Americans than foreign wars, but also destroys families, careers, and sanity itself while rewarding soulless predators who sell poison for profit. Even without the deadly menace of fentanyl, drug abuse has turned Democrat cities into havens of lawlessness and homelessness. Trump’s pledge to close the southern border is a necessary but not sufficient measure to suppress the plague of drug abuse. The polling gaps between Trump and Biden are largest on these immoral and lawless policies that embrace criminals as a key leftist constituent group.

The tone-deaf TNR’s fourth “dictator” whose policies are to be condemned is Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi. While it is true he took power in a military coup in 2013, it was a very popular move against a Muslim Brotherhood leader who wanted to turn the country into another Iran. His legitimacy was confirmed by landslide election victories in 2014 and 2018, with another win expected in the upcoming December 17 ballot. Egypt will play a vital role in stabilizing a post-Hamas Palestine focused on peaceful reconstruction.

Egypt normalized relations with Israel in 1979 in reaction to the Iranian revolution. The alignment of the Arab states with Israel against the common enemy in Tehran (a Shiite theocracy with genocidal hatred towards all other religions) is an essential pillar of regional security. Those on the Left who have tried to undermine relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are playing into Iran’s hands (in most cases knowingly). The brutal, sadistic terror attack on Israel by Hamas, part of Iran’s terror network, is a direct result of leftist influence within the Biden administration that pushed appeasing Iran and insulting the Arabs.

TNR has been part of this campaign. It backs the protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza that will bring to an end Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas and has warned Biden that he is losing support on the Left by backing Israel. It has even claimed that the “grotesque” reason the Biden administration has not pushed harder for a ceasefire is “it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.” 

The influential book by Marxist Cornell West, a former Harvard professor now running for president, is titled Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. By which he means the “ugly imperialism aided by the unholy alliance of the plutocratic elite and the Christian Right” that has undermined “democratic energies” within the American Empire. The U.S.-led world order is built on “the dangerous dogma of free market fundamentalism” and defended by “militarism” leading to “authoritarianism.” West has marched with anti-Israel protesters. And while he thinks Putin is “a gangster’ he blames NATO for provoking his invasion of Ukraine and wants the alliance dissolved because “the American empire has little or no moral authority” to help Ukraine defend itself. The people should vote out American supremacy. If not, the Left will simply surrender America to the barbarians in their name and still call it democracy.

As the new political year dawns, voters need to look beyond slogans and name-calling to analyze the policies behind the rhetoric and make their choices based on what will best make America a secure, prosperous, and decent land, the lead nation in the lead civilization of our time.

William R. Hawkins is a former economics professor who served on the professional staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has written widely on international economics and national security issues for both professional and popular publications. 

Image: National Archives