Former US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used to be best friends.
As bombastic right-wing ‘nationalists’, they had much in common. Trump torpedoed a largely functional nuclear deal with Iran for Netanyahu, and also moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, even as most of the world asked him not to.
For his efforts, Trump bequeathed the world a more belligerent Iran that is racing towards nuclear enrichment and ceaseless violence in Palestine. But it made him wildly popular with Netanyahu’s radical base in Israel.
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That was such a long time ago. When Netanyahu lost power to a fragile coalition some years ago, Trump thought of him as a loser and appeared to distance from him. Then, as Trump tried to overturn an election defeat in Washington, Netanyahu returned the favour by congratulating his triumphant rival.
The two are now living contrasting lives under contrasting political systems — and their experiences hold a few lessons for democracies around the world.
In some ways, America should be glad for having had Trump. As President, he pushed its democratic institutions to the limit — and, more importantly, failed. The then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation famously refused his diktats. The Secretary of State of Georgia also brushed off his threats. Even Vice President Mike Pence, who was otherwise unfailingly polite and loyal throughout his presidency, turned on him when he tried to pull off a coup.
This week, Trump became the first former US President to be formally charged with a crime, and he is now expected to go through that process. But things could, in fact, get worse on other fronts. Georgia has been investigating Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results for over two years and reports say that he could soon be charged there. And Pence appears to be preparing to testify against him over the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, faced with corruption charges of his own, Netanyahu somehow wrestled his way back to power with a handpicked selection of extremists. He is now taking revenge on Israel’s institutions before they purge him.
Amidst massive protests, Netanyahu is in the process of bringing the judiciary under his control. Most recently, he attempted to dismiss his Defence Minister a day after the latter dissented against those ‘reforms’.
That sacking was put on hold because of heightened fighting with the Palestinians, but it’s still a telling move. In days past, authoritarian leaders used to assail their opponents with flimsy corruption or terrorism charges. But now, the charges are quite simply that “you disagreed with me yesterday” (or in other places, “you made fun of my name”).
Trump is angry with America, in part because he wanted to do what Netanyahu and others are doing — and in a lesser democracy, he might have gotten much further with it. But in America’s fragmented, noisy and chaotic set-up, where power is distributed across multiple individuals and institutions, the President’s powers are kept well under check.
To be sure, Trump might yet come back to power next year. His conspiracy theories resonate so deeply that many deniers of his electoral defeat were elected to the US Congress last year. He packed the Supreme Court with people sympathetic to the right-wing agenda while in office. But as a democracy born out of a bloody revolutionary war, America instinctively built its institutions on the assumption that man is greedy and cunning. As James Madison once wrote, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
Perhaps that then is the lesson for democracy: to have weak governments and constrained leaders.
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