It was barely a month ago when TV watchers across the globe saw a show in which new US president Donald Trump treated visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as one of those voodoo dolls made for pushing needles into, thus dodging a curse.
After the show, TV talking heads speculated that, having come to the White House dressed as a rock star rather than a statesman, Zelensky had angered Trump and thus deserved what he got.
Last week, however, Trump hosted another young man dressed as a rock star rather than a statesman, this time with obvious warmth and decorum.
The lucky one was El Salvador's 37-year-old President Nayib Bukele.
Why such a difference in treating two foreign heads of state?
The answer is: Zelenskiy represents a brand of politics that has dominated the Western democracies for the past three decades at least, a brand symbolized by people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, in other words, all that Trump has rebelled against. In contrast, Bukele, though a novice in politics, is a born Trumpian.
But what are the characteristic features of a Trumpianism?
Trump's lazy critics have tried to answer that question with labels such as "authoritarian" or, in the case of the late Madeleine Albright, even "fascist".
However, the first feature of Trumpianism may be its focus on concrete issues rather than intellectual abstractions; issues such as rising crime, illegal immigration, growing poverty, political correctness, unfair trade, and discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination.
The second feature is its conviction that politics is the art of doing things rather than talking about what needs to be done.
An example of the latter was Obama, who, whenever there was a problem, he made a speech and moved on. Believe it or not, Obama even made a speech about the need for the transgender public bathrooms, and another in which he traced the invention of cinema to a lens-maker in medieval Baghdad.
The Trumpian politician is a man of action, careful not to go beyond the 280-characters limit set by X.
He is also not a reader of reports prepared by modern day, bloated bureaucracies. The late President Jimmy Carter claimed he spent at least five hours a day reading such reports, and we know his record. Trump is said to be content with a half-page or a single paragraph summary and prefers to hear and talk about things.
Since the dawn of mankind, politics has always seen those who talk and those who act. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic philosopher who didn't wish to be distracted by action and ended up as the last of the "five good emperors".
Back to Bukele.
When he took over as president, El Salvador was the world's most violent society, number one in murders, ahead of Honduras and South Africa. Five years later, as he won a second term with a whopping majority, it had become the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, ahead of Canada.
He did that by the gangs that terrorized the country and crippled the economy. Amnesty International dubbed him "a dictator that ignores human rights" and the liberal globalist media across the West saw him as an "enemy of democracy."
Yet, he was re-elected with 84 percent of the votes, in what everyone agreed was the cleanest election in Central American history.
Another Trumpian now under the limelight is Argentina's President Javier Milei. Even a year ago, the neo-liberal elites labeled him an "autocrat" and a man who takes the bread of the poor to give it to the rich.
Today the same elites in France and Germany are trying to imitate his policy of reducing public expenditure and thus national debt, and their kindred in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are signing checks for Argentina.
An early Trumpian was Philippine's President Rodrigo Duterte who, during his term in 2016-2022, took over one of the most drug-infested nations on earth and left it relatively clean of that plague. Today, obtaining drugs is much harder in Manila's Makati Square than in Place de la Concorde in Paris.
French Justice Minister Gérard Darmanin is now trying to do a Duterte by declaring war on drug gangs and building over 3,000 new prison beds.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an island. Yet, while Haiti, governed by lawyers and infested by gangs, is sinking as a failed state, its Dominican neighbor is booming under Trumpian President Luis Abinader, whose approval rating is around 70 percent -- just behind Bukele's 84 percent.
Does one dare add Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the bête-noire of the European Union elites, to the list of Trumpian leaders?
He has certainly been a man of action rather than words, by translating the Hungarian people's mood into concrete policies rather than analyzing them ad nauseum.
Some analysts include Russia's President Vladimir Putin among Trumpian leaders. There is no doubt that he has been a man of action by invading Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, and not a man of words. But, unlike Trumpians mentioned above, his actions have not addressed any of Russia's real problems. He has embarked his nation in a costly war with absolutely no prospect of serving the long-term interests of Russia.
To sum up: Trumpism leans towards taking the bull by the horns when it comes to issues that concern the average citizens, whom Hillary Clinton labeled "deplorables", rather than analyzing those issues out of existence in elite jargon and fake humanitarianism.
These are good days for the Trumpian brand of politics. However, there is, of course, no guarantee that this brand will succeed in the mid- or long-term to prevent the pendulum from bouncing back in the old direction, but it is certainly worth trying.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
