I am flying back to the USA after a meeting in Istanbul with activists and NGO leaders from six or more countries. (By the way, I don’t think that all of them could have met in the USA because of our government’s visa policies and treatment of visitors.)
One of the many benefits of the meeting was to challenge a framework that I have been using which treats leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as examples of the same phenomenon. These men are both similar and different, and it’s important to keep the differences in mind.
All three (it seems to me) are national narcissists, meaning that they believe their own country is the best yet disrespected (Cislak & Cichocka 2023). All espouse a form of populism: the idea that they enjoy the united support of the true nation, whereas opponents and critics are enemies of the people. All identify a favored ethnic and/or religious majority as the authentic country and its rightful rulers.
All favor aggressive state economic interventions while favoring allied businesses and industries (and making money from these alliances). All prefer splashy infrastructure projects to providing consistently decent public services. To be generous, we could say that they each “see like a state” (Scott 1998). And they all use a similar toolkit. They don’t cancel elections or openly suspend (most) constitutional rights but rather prosecute opponents and use economic pressure against the producers of speech: publishers and universities (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).
As for the differences:
Modi represents a century-old effort to establish Hindu supremacy in India. Islamophobia is central to this project (Bhatia 2024). It already inspires regular violence, and it has the potential to spark vast destruction. Modi’s party and government are disciplined. Their agenda is not only social control or personal profit but also redefining a nation in a way that would exclude 200 million of its citizens.
Erdogan, I think, began by opening Turkish politics and civil society to groups and perspectives that deserved representation, including but not limited to observant Muslims. He made appropriate reforms. He is the kind of leader who should have retired a decade ago, in which case he could now travel the international circuit as an elder statesman with some genuine contributions to his name. Alas, he crossed many bright lines by jailing opponents and crushing opposition, perhaps in part because he sincerely believes that he is indispensable. But his managerial record is now quite poor.
Trump represents political views that he did not invent. He espouses familiar forms of xenophobia, chauvinism, and aggrieved nationalism. But I interpret Trump as more transactional than his counterparts in Turkey and India. For many voters, he offers a deal: better economic outcomes in return for legal impunity, the ability to settle scores, praise and monuments, and lots of sheer cash.
Since Trump’s relationships are always self-interested, they are also relatively fragile. I think an economic downturn would break his implicit contract with voters, lowering his approval by 10 points, and that would make him an increasingly problematic ally for Republican politicians. I can see him being discarded (not necessarily impeached, but rendered a lame duck) in a way that I cannot quite see for the regimes represented by Modi or Erdogan.
Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; James C . Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998) Stevnb Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018), and Rahul Bhatia,, The New India (Abacus, 2025)
See also: national narcissism; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; the Constitution is crumbling etc.
