Fascism is contagious — and with the help of Trump and his fellow autocrats — it’s mutating as it spreads.
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How far is our country from becoming another Turkey? It’s a question worth considering.
Many of us have now seen disturbing footage of a young woman being approached and forcibly hustled away off a suburban Boston street by plainclothes ICE officers, apparently for expressing her views on the Middle East. She has been transported hundreds of miles away to a facility in Louisiana where she is being held.
This woman was identified in the media as a graduate student from Turkey, a foreigner temporarily residing in the United States.
Related: You Could Be Next: Trump Can Seize Your Devices and Then….
Far fewer know that Turkey itself is currently arresting its own young people for their political views. Specifically, their protests over the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, a political opponent of the national government.
So far, unless I’ve missed it, Donald Trump has not arrested his own citizens over free speech and political challenges. Not yet.
But Trump has been very clear about his role models. It is truly a mutual admiration society and they are essentially egging each other on, taking inspiration from one another’s new excesses.
The leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an ally of Trump. As is the leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, another authoritarian society. So is the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to which Trump has shipped Venezuelan nationals (1 percent of El Salvador’s entire population, including 3,000 children, are held in megaprisons, where they are subject to torture).
Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who rose to power carrying around a chainsaw to “slash the overgrown state,” seems to have inspired Elon Musk’s brandishing a chainsaw at a recent rally of conservative allies.
A TikTok video shows Milei in another symbolic display as he dramatically rips labels off a white board and throws them away while shouting (in Spanish) “Ministry of Culture,” “Ministry of Environment,” and “Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity.”
These are all part of a global anti-democracy movement.
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is acting on a theme promoted by Trump: Harass and strangle nonprofits you don’t like. Modi’s government obstructs and even dismantles nonprofits and human rights organizations by weaponizing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which governs the receipt and use of foreign donations by nonprofits. Without FCRA certification, nonprofits are barred from international donations.
Other autocrats, who got a head start on Trump, are now using his example to go even further.
The Hungarian government is orchestrating a crackdown on gay people far beyond anything Trump has done so far to reverse the protections that prior US administrations extended to gays and other vulnerable groups. And Orban is citing Trump as cover for these actions.
Hungary’s anti-gay campaign includes a bill against “gay propaganda,” under which stores were fined for selling LGBTQ-themed printed material without sealed plastic wrappers, and the firing of a museum director for allowing minors into an exhibit with images of same-sex couples. Earlier this month, the Hungarian parliament banned the annual Pride parade in Budapest, scheduled for June.
Joe Biden’s ambassador to Hungary, an outspoken critic of Orban, had defiantly marched in last year’s Pride parade. That was then. As The Washington Post reported:
“In terms of international pressure, Orban is now liberated,” said Marton Tompos, president of the opposition Momentum Movement. “It’s like he’s saying, ‘Okay, Trump won, and now I can do anything I want.’”
The Interpreter, a New York Times newsletter, amplifies this:
“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of How Democracies Die and Competitive Authoritarianism.
“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”
These events are not unrelated. Indeed, the world is very much approaching a battle royale over whether despotism and cruelty will become the norm, or democracy and freedom prevail.
Trump has seemingly gone beyond taking action against critics of Israel’s Gaza war. He has also apparently done a special favor for his favorite autocrat: Vladimir Putin.
As NBC News just reported, last month the US government arrested a Russian medical researcher at a US airport and shipped her to a detention facility in Louisiana. Supposedly, this action was taken because the researcher, Kseniia Petrova, had not declared some frozen frog embryos in her luggage.
The government claims that she was deliberately evasive while being interrogated but her attorney says she didn’t know she had to report it. In any case, bringing in such material for her research work at Harvard University hardly seems to rise to a high crime. (The penalty for improperly importing this non-toxic, non-hazardous material is a fine of up to $500.)
The government agents searched her phone, but it is not known whether they noticed all her anti-Putin comments on social media. In any case, despite the triviality of the alleged “crime,” immigration officers denied Petrova reentry to the US. According to her Harvard supervisor, Leon Peshkin, she then told them she feared being jailed again in Russia for protesting Putin’s war on Ukraine. They transferred her to ICE to wait for an asylum hearing.
Ironically, while Trump and his buddies worldwide are brutalizing human beings, he has now declared vandalizing Musk’s cars a “hate crime.”
These kinds of acts against freedom of speech, basic human rights, and the rule of law cannot go unchallenged — and, at least in some cases, probably will not.
It is all seesawing right now, and we see that corrections can and are taking place. For instance, a federal judge just ruled that the Tufts graduate student who was recently snatched off a Somerville, MA, street by masked ICE agents cannot be deported until he decides whether she was lawfully arrested.
Other Trump buddies worldwide are facing consequences for their actions, notably former presidents Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (arrested and turned over to the Hague tribunal for ordering mass murders of alleged drug dealers) and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil (arrested and prosecuted in his own country for plotting to reverse an election and mount a coup).
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” but the court has no way to physically apprehend them.
Meanwhile, Trump and his cohort are committing crimes and potential crimes against legal as well as undocumented immigrants, and using rhetoric that threatens the rights of US citizens, while working to degrade the judiciary and other institutional safeguards.
I believe — and have said — that now is the time to document and publicly billboard the crimes being committed in our country. We cannot afford to delay in calling out these actions for what they are: an attempt to degrade the protections long guaranteed to all residents of the United States, not only US citizens but all immigrants, legal and undocumented.
The transnational cooperation between perpetrators of repression is extensive. At the request of the Turkish regime, Musk’s X suspended accounts that were using the platform to coordinate civil protests against the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor. a political rival of Turkey’s president.
Could that happen here? What if other tech bros decided, under pressure from Trump or to curry favor, to do the same with the social media platforms they control? How would we all keep in touch? Mounting credible opposition to an authoritarian clampdown at home could become enormously difficult.
Planning for the worst-case scenario needs to begin now. It might start with some innovative minds devising alternative means of rapid communication. Perhaps something on the order of crypto’s use of blockchain technology.
Or something much simpler.
When dissidents in the Soviet Union were denied all access to public media, they organized an underground opposition based on hand-to-hand distribution of typewritten tracts known as samizdat. Against all odds, these sub rosa networks kept the flame of liberty burning during the darkest years of Stalinist repression.
One can only hope that it will not come to such dire straits here. But arguably, the best way to avert such an outcome is to reject the comforting thought that it is impossible.
