President Trump raised eyebrows with some remarks he made at a private Republican political fundraiser over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Trump praised Chinese president Xi Jinping’s recent
consolidation of power which effectively made him president for life in a state thatalready has a totalitarian system. Trump stated:
He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.
Now I strongly suspect that Trump’s defenders would claim their man was merely joking, just as he was when he suggested his poll numbers wouldn’t be adversely affected if he were to shoot people in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Trump certainly wasn’t jesting on the occasions which he has praised the human-rights violations committed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte. Nor was he joking when he praised the Chinese Communists’ brutal response to the Tiananmen Square in 1990.
On the contrary, such views ought to be anathema to any American president. Could you imagine President Reagan praising the Soviet political system before Gorbachev embarked upon glasnost and perestroika? Trump’s remarks should have also been anathema to all Americans. Frankly, the Republican audience ought to have jeered Trump the moment he entertained any notion of becoming president for life. The fact that they didn’t signals not only the fundamental change which has taken place within the Republican party in the Trump era, but an abandonment of the principles set out in the United States Constitution.
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