There's Nothing "Enlightened" About Trump's Governing Style
What we can learn from studying other authoritarian leaders.
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In the debate about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, it’s easy to miss a critical point. Dictators are not identical; they come in different varieties. China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi may suppress individual freedom with the same brutality, but they rule in different ways, and the contrasts among them matter.
How does America’s would-be king compare with these other authoritarians? In the world gallery of dictators, Donald Trump’s portrait belongs among the most dysfunctional leaders rather than the most effective ones.
To think that through, it may be helpful to return to the fairly-distant past. In the late eighteenth century, a European form of rule called “enlightened despotism” appeared. This was a label for Catherine the Great and other monarchs who aimed to improve their empires—for example, by rationalizing the state bureaucracy and creating scientific academies to stay abreast of other great powers. Prussia, Tsarist Russia, and Austria all followed this model.
The leaders of those enlightened despotisms believed that autocracy, science, and sophisticated culture were compatible with one another. They actively worked to promote social progress of a certain kind. As monarchs, they rejected the revolutionary new ideas about popular sovereignty and citizen rule advocated by some philosophers. But their commitment to social progress set them apart from their despotic predecessors. That’s why they were called “enlightened”—at least for a while.
Donald Trump, however, does not fit this profile. He aims to become a despot, pure and simple, with no redeeming virtues. And that can have far-reaching repercussions beyond just his immediate expansion of powers. His actions display deep scorn toward expert thinking and the educated people who embody it. For Trump, science and refined culture are irrelevant distractions, and they dim his aura as an omniscient leader who alone can save the United States. That is why he has launched an all-out offensive to hamstring most parts of the federal government, disrupt research in higher educational institutions, and transform American cultural life at every level.
Nothing symbolizes President Trump’s behavior better than his decision to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Given his minuscule knowledge of history and the arts—recall his offhand assumption at a news conference that Frederick Douglass, a towering leader of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, is still alive—this vanity appointment is absurd. Still, it pales beside Trump’s tone-deaf decision to post an image of himself in papal regalia ahead of the Vatican deliberations to choose a successor to Pope Francis.
The president’s dictatorial attitude toward science and higher education is especially consequential and dangerous. The national greatness he claims to care about depends largely on the extraordinary achievements of American science and technology. In the years since World War II, the fusion of university researchers’ initiatives with abundant material support from the federal government has fostered cutting-edge American innovations in spheres ranging from medicine to military weaponry.
China’s Xi Jinping clearly grasps the connection between science and national power. Xi is hardly a leader to admire, but his style of calculated political leadership is different from the arbitrary despotism our president aspires to build. Although just as intolerant of political criticism, Xi has accelerated the rapid buildup of Chinese capabilities for scientific and technological innovation, and he is determined to make China a global actor—perhaps the most powerful actor in the world.
But Trump is oblivious to this fundamental reality. He wants to demolish the authority of all American experts. His attitude toward science and culture is nihilistic—in the strictest sense of that harsh word. His astonishing cabinet appointments reflect this attitude. He wants nothing to do with enlightenment, no matter how narrowly defined. He prefers to rely on his own arbitrary “common sense,” which swings wildly back and forth from one day to the next.
If Trump performs unfavorably in a comparison with Xi, he has more in common with Putin. Much like Trump, Putin is undercutting his country’s material progress. His invasion of Ukraine has badly weakened Russia’s economy, its military, and its scientific establishment. The country has experienced a massive brain drain of talented citizens who emigrated on grounds of principle or to avoid the military draft. Dictators like Putin and Trump can do tremendous damage to their country in the name of making it great again.
Thanks to Xi’s intense drive for modernization, China now poses a formidable challenge to America’s international primacy, and it probably will surpass our country if President Trump’s domestic policies are fully implemented.
It is too soon for U.S. analysts alarmed about China’s rise to throw in the towel, because great-power competitions like these are waged on more than one level. In Washington’s long-term rivalry with the USSR, the American commitment to promote science and research along a broad front—including the study of international history and the humanities—contributed to the U.S. geopolitical victory. The Soviet system was based on a radical denial of the murderous assaults on Soviet citizens in the Stalin era, and Western researchers helped bring the regime’s crimes to light. Something similar is true of China under Xi, who adamantly opposes truthful depictions of the countless Chinese deaths during the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen massacre. Those slumbering ghosts pose a fundamental threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese regime.
Nonetheless, despite Beijing’s ideological vulnerability regarding these past crimes, continuation of the Trump administration’s behavior could well enable China to eclipse the United States. As part of its frontal assault on science and culture, the administration is striving to propagate a sanitized version of American history just as deceptive as China’s official blinkered depiction of itself, and as false as Putin’s contrived image of Russia. The Trump administration, however, is pushing its cultural offensive much farther than those two dictatorships. It is striving to obliterate the purely scientific components of U.S. national culture—a self-defeating strategy that China tried out decades ago but rejected after the Cultural Revolution.
In other words, the dangers to America posed by the government’s conduct are more numerous than many of President Trump’s staunchest critics recognize. The implications of the administration’s actions for the future of the United States are sweeping. Trump’s dictatorial reign threatens not only our democratic political order, but also our national self-understanding, our economic well-being, our public health, and our future as an international power. The stakes could scarcely be greater.
Bruce Parrott is Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Becoming a Social Science Researcher: Quest and Context (2023).
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