When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. summoned the leaders of democracy to the White House in 2021 and 2023, clearly dismantled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, a man who once had described an “autocrates” who deserved to be guided by the voters.
Tuesday, President Trump offered a much more pink evaluation of the Turkish president, even if the demonstrators filled the streets following the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, the main political rival of Erdogan.
“A good leader,” said Erdogan’s president during a meeting of his ambassadors to the White House. He did not mention the arrest or protests.
Since it came into office 66 days ago, Trump has transformed a central precept of American diplomacy to the head. He is embracing – rather than reporting – leader companions who abandon democratic principles. The long -standing bipartisan effort to strengthen democratic institutions all over the world has been replaced by a president who praises leaders who move towards autocracy.
And the actions of Mr. Trump – take revenge against his political rivals, attack law firms, journalists and universities and question the authority of the judiciary – offer new models for democratically elected leaders in countries such as Serbia and Israel who have already shown their will to push the boundaries of their institutions.
“There is a great encouragement,” said Rosa Balfour, European director for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What Trump says is strongly reverberated here. But also what the United States does not do. He does not punish or condemn any attempt to undermine the rule of law or democracy. There are no repercussions.”
Jane Harman, a former Member of the Congress and former president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, observed that Mr. Erdogan and other leaders around the world had been “removed” by democratic principles for years.
In 2016, a faction in the Erdogan government attempted a coup to overthrow it. Since then, he has strengthened control of the presidency by attacking the media, political opponents, courts and other institutions.
“This has become a very different world, but I don’t think Trump started, and I don’t think Trump will end it,” said Mrs. Harman. And he noticed that in at least some places, the return to power of Mr. Trump had pushed some voters to question the authoritarian tendencies of candidates and parties.
“Think of Germany,” he said, referring to the recent elections in the country. “The extreme right has increased in popularity, but did not win. And the repercussing in Trump could have been part of the momentum that held him back.”
Trump is not the first president to tolerate less than democratic actions by the allies when they deemed it necessary.
Mr. Biden offered a punch to the hereditary prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto sovereign of Saudi Arabia, even if he blamed him for the murder of the publishing player Jamal Khashoggi. Biden also worked with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who has increasingly remunerated dissent in his country and – sometimes – with Mr. Erdogan.
But the elections of Mr. Trump coincided with the actions by elected leaders who seem to deviate from the type of democratic principles that America has represented.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no longer has to fight with the opposition of Mr. Biden at a long planned revision of the courts, which many Israelis consider an attempt to control and politicize the judiciary. In 2023, Biden told journalists that Mr. Netanyahu “cannot continue on this path” of judicial changes.
Now, with Mr. Trump in office, the Israeli leader does not face this pressure. This month, he fired the head of the country’s national intelligence agency, a move seen as the mine of its independence. Later, the cabinet approved a vote of any confidence in the country’s attorney general, pushing new accusations that Netanyahu is braking the independence of the judicial system, eliminating the officials who consider it to be unfair.
Thursday, the allies of Mr. Netanyahu in Parliament voted to give themselves more power on the selection of the country’s judges. The vote came after the prime minister held a speech that echoed to Mr. Trump and said that the action meant that “the deep state is in danger”.
“The United States will not put any pressure on Netanyahu to respect the democratic institutions of her country,” said Mrs. Balfour. “Netanyahu feels he has impunity in this sense.”
In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vucic has spent years attacking the media and other political opponents. Last month – while Trump dismantled the US agency for international development – Vucic sent the police to Raid organizations in his country, some of which had received money from the American agency that has now been largely closed.
Vucic government authorities mentioned the actions of Mr. Trump in the United States as a justification to move against organizations, including the Center for Research, Transparency and Responsibility and Civic Initiatives. They mentioned Elon Musk, the billionaire who manages the so -called Department of Efficiency of the Government, who said, without evidence, that Usaid was a “criminal organization”.
Two weeks after the raids in Serbia, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, traveled to Belgrade, the capital of the country, to interview Mr. Vucic for his podcast. In the interview, Mr. Vucic complained that he, like the American president, is opposed by “an entire liberal plant in Washington and New York and the who goes against you”. He said that the raids of non -governmental organizations were designed to eradicate corruption and bad financial management.
Mr. Trump Jr. failed to Mr. Vucic, describing what he called “a hug of common sense, a embrace of law and order, of a sense of shared national identity”. He criticized the angry demonstrators for the recent actions of Mr. Vucic.
“I am sure that the media will cover them only in one way,” said Trump Jr. “and now there is apparently evidence that they are all linked in some form to the same left actors here in America. That same propaganda machine.”
The President’s son is not the only one who echoes his father’s language.
Last week, after the Erdogan government imprisoned the mayor of Istanbul, one of the senior diplomatic correspondents of Mr. Trump spoke positively of the leader of Turkey during an interview with the former conductor of Fox News Tucker Carlson.
“Really transformative,” said Steve Witkoff of a recent phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan. “There are only a lot of good and positive news that comes out of Türkiye right now due to that conversation.”
Ruth Ben-Ghat, a professor of history at New York University, said that the words and actions of Mr. Trump-and those of his subrogated-sider-observed by other leaders. He said that the lack of condemnation by the president of Mr. Erdogan following the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul would have been noticed by presidents and first ministers of authoritarian inclusion.
“Trump’s moves in this same direction,” he said, “they encourage foreign leaders who know that the United States now are an autocratic ally and there will be no consequences for repressive behavior”.