Event on Why Authoritarians Fear Women; When "Strongmen" Fall Ill; I've Had It Podcast

Multimedia contributions to autocrat psychology

Last week my episode of the wildly popular I’ve Had It podcast dropped. The title, “Little Diktator Energy,” is appropriate to the themes of “Strongman” insecurity and fear that feature in today’s post.

And on Thursday, September 11, at 7:30pmET, I’m doing a special virtual event with Red Wine & Blue on “Why Authoritarians Fear Women.” It should be a great discussion and everyone is welcome! You can register for the event here.

Don’t miss their essential guide, “160 Ways to Change the World Without Losing Your Sh*t.”

All the discussion about President Donald Trump’s poor health reminded me that I published an essay in the New Yorker in 2020 about Trump’s media management of his bout with covid and what happens when authoritarians fall ill. It was prompted by Trump’s “balcony performance” when he left Walter Reed Hospital and arranged a media spectacle to make himself feel powerful again which included theatrically ripping off his mask. I write:

What defines a strongman ruler is not just his willingness to trample democratic norms but his ability to cultivate an appearance of omnipotence.

And so falling ill is a blow to a personality cult founded on the idea that the leader is invincible. I discuss Soviet leaders, Jair Bolsonaro, Silvio Berlusconi (whose personal doctor curried favor with him by calling him “technically immortal”), and more.

President Donald Trump shows (himself) he is still powerful, standing on a White House balcony after leaving Walter Reed Hospital, October 5, 2020. Nicholas Kamm/AFP, via Getty Images.

Psychiatrist Jerrold Post and political scientist Robert S. Robins authored the definitive book on the subject: When Illness Strikes the Leader. I also discuss these issues in my book Strongmen.

In the Endings chapter, I show how illness can prove dangerous to a dictator at the peak of his unpopularity. This was the fate of Mobutu Sese Seko, who tyrannized and stole from the population of the Congo (renamed Zaire by him) for over thirty years. Note the appearance of Trump insiders Stone and Manafort: they have been working for corrupt autocrats for a very long time.

Mobutu’s fall from power is symptomatic. By 1990, twenty-five years of kleptocracy and violent behavior had turned elites and the population against him. He took one step forward and three back on his reluctant journey toward democratization. When his American backers grew ambivalent, he hired the lobbyists Roger Stone and Paul Manafort in a futile attempt to save his reputation. “Something died in him from that moment on,” said Mobutu’s former aide Honoré Ngbanda of Mobutu’s awakening to how much he was hated by his people.

A 1996 trip to Switzerland for treatment of prostate cancer provided a window for military action by rebel leader Laurent Kabila, prompting Mobutu’s hasty 1997 departure to Morocco, where he died a few months later. Charismatic in life, he commands attention from the grave: “Mobutu is the star of the cemetery” said the caretaker of Rabat’s European Cemetery in 2017.

In the brutal world of the authoritarian, showing weakness of the political or physical sort gives ideas to your enemies. I close with a passage from Strongmen about the fear and insecurity that hides behind these leaders’ violence and bluster. It was written during Trump’s first presidency, but Trump’s underlying desire for glory to offset the fear of obsolescence or death is stronger than ever, as his irrational quest for the Nobel Peace Prize shows.

The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s own people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies. It has no pages on how to deal with becoming a national disgrace, someone who is pelted with tomatoes and eggs when he appears in public after leaving office, like Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Mobutu and Amin.

Its discussions of how to control minds and exploit bodies do not extend to the deterioration of the leader’s own. Aging and the ebbing of virile powers is difficult for leaders whose “entire sense of self is bound up in being revered,” in psychological profiler Jerrold Post’s words. Disappearing from the scene due to illness, as Mobutu did in 1996, can be dangerous for men already on the decline. Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until he loses control of the nation and is hunted by his own people, as happened to Mussolini and Gaddafi.

For the strongman, such outcomes are unthinkable and yet ever-present. They fuel behaviors that make him feel safer and brush away thoughts of mortality. Such rulers also brood about what happens to their peers. Hitler made sure he did not end up like Mussolini, and Gaddafi cooperated with Americans and Europeans to avoid ending up like Hussein. Analyst Stanislav Belkovsky notes that the Arab Spring revolts made a big impression on Putin, who knew that “the destiny of Gadhafi could be waiting for him.”

Trump’s desire to stay in office indefinitely stems from the same fear of meeting a bad end, losing immunity from prosecution, or becoming a nobody. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” said the President, who is likely familiar with the anxieties about irrelevance that spur authoritarians’ demands for loyalty and attention, especially in the end stage of rule.