Consummate rule-breaker Trump follows The Rules.
In 2015, it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious political force. Shocked pundits took to calling his campaign unprecedented. In using this word, they did their readers a disservice.
Only those who had been paying no attention to the global authoritarian revolution could imagine that Trump had no precedent. In reality, the decade before Trump’s rise saw the world swept by a particular species of authoritarianism — an entertaining but hollow form of plebiscitarianism, one that replicates, spreads, and consolidates itself through the new technologies of the 21st century.
Many Americans saw Trump as something entirely unfamiliar to their political experience and thus wholly unpredictable. I didn’t. I’d spent the decade before his rise in Turkey, reporting on the rise and consolidation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. Trump evinced in me not surprise, but déja vu. I’d experienced every stage of phenomenon Trump represented a decade before it reached American soil.
