A cult of personality, and a national embarrassment to boot

In two charts

The big man at the 2016 RNC (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

One thing that’s often undersold about the Trump presidency is how incredibly embarrassing the whole thing was — the endless fawning devotion of his underlings, the aping of his grammar and syntax and general shoutiness by official party mouthpieces, the man’s own tendency to deliver wide-eyed self-praise in the manner of a precocious toddler.

As experts in authoritarian politics have repeatedly observed, the modern-day Trumpist GOP is in many ways more like a cult of personality than a functioning political party. Most strikingly, in 2020 the party eschewed a traditional platform and instead issued a one-page resolution simply reaffirming that the GOP “has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Trump is the platform.

Personality cults like this are one of the defining characteristics of modern authoritarian leaders. They “increase the leader’s credibility, since they present him as possessed of special powers or ruling with a divine mandate, making him seem infallible,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU historian and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, recently wrote. Consider, for instance, the hero-worship attending leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and India’s Narendra Modi.

As it turns out, you can actually quantify the severity of a personality cult built around a head of government, and you can even see how those cults evolve in a country over time. This is incredibly useful, because it allows you to formulate answers to questions like, “Did any prior presidents inspire similar levels of hero-worship in the U.S?” and “On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is Winston Churchill and 10 is Kim Jong-un, where does Donald Trump rate?”

For that, we’ll turn to one of my favorite sources of political data, the V-Dem Institute.

This chart plots political scientists’ consensus on the extent to which, in any given year, the U.S. president is seen as “being endowed with extraordinary personal characteristics and/or leadership skills.” For most of the twentieth century the consensus score falls somewhere between 1 (“to a small extent”) and 2 (“to some extent”).

Get a load of what happens in 2017, though — the score spikes above 3 (“to a large extent”) and stays there for the remainder of Trump’s term in office, a situation without precedent in the recent history of U.S. politics. The American strongman has arrived. He alone can fix us.

Let’s talk about V-Dem’s data for a second. They’re a consortium of academics out of Sweden. Their whole shtick is trying to quantify the quality of democracy over time in just about every country around the globe. To do that, they gather opinion from country-level experts on hundreds of different indicators for each country, in each year. To compile the U.S. numbers in the chart above, for instance, they lean on experts who specifically study U.S. politics.

Here’s the thing I really like about V-Dem: “the health of democracy” is an inherently qualitative concept, right? That makes it hard to measure. You can’t just go to the hardware store and buy a democracy-o-meter the way you can, say, a thermometer. If you do want to measure it, the best way is probably to call up a bunch of democracy experts — the people who work at universities and devote their lives to studying how democracies are born and how they die — and ask them what they think. If you call enough of them and pool their answers together, you’ll get a sense of what their overall consensus is.

V-Dem systematizes this entire process. For each country they identify experts, survey them on questions of interest, and compile their answers into aggregate scores like the ones in the chart above. They do a lot of work to try to make the numbers comparable across countries and years. I’ve spoken with some of the principal investigators and they give the impression of people working hard, in good faith, to tackle really thorny questions. By all accounts, their work does a much better job of capturing democracy’s messy nuances than other, more well-known efforts.

The nice thing about this approach is that it makes it possible to compare countries over time. American observers have often noted, for instance, that the cult of personality around Trump feels like something we’re used to seeing out of repressive authoritarian regimes like North Korea (the weird cringe-y bromance between the two strongmen further cements the impression).

V-Dem’s data show that yeah, there’s definitely something to that: the Trump personality cult looks more like North Korea or China than it does other anglophone democracies, like the U.K., Canada or Australia. (If you want to dig into this further, note that V-Dem offers a suite of nifty chart tools on their website where you can compare their indicators across countries and years. It’s highly addicting, if you’re into that kind of thing).

This is just one tiny slice of V-Dem’s data, but in illustrates the extent to which the past four years were a radical departure in American politics. When the 2021 data come out this particular question, at least, is likely to show a return to relative normalcy: Biden’s the head of government now, and the Democratic party doesn’t have the same sycophantic relationship with him that animates Republicans vis-a-vis Trump.

Therein lies the danger. With (just-barely) unified Democratic control of government, it’s tempting to think that the authoritarian threat has passed. But the strongman still maintains an iron grip on his party. That party is doubling down on minority rule, laying the state-level groundwork to make voting more difficult for everyone, but especially Democrats, in 2022 and 2024.

Even more ominous, perhaps, is that they’re being completely forthright about their reasons for doing so.