Does Donald Trump Know What a Dictator Looks Like?

He calls Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” but not Vladimir Putin.

President Donald Trump sure picked a curious venue to start calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a "dictator."

It was February 19, halfway through a remarkable two-week run in which America reversed its approach to both the Russia-Ukraine war and possibly the entire 76-year-old Washington-led trans-Atlantic military alliance. Trump was speaking in Miami Beach's Faena Hotel and Forum at a bland-sounding "Priority Summit" hosted by the innocuously named Future Investment Initiative Institute, which in turn is owned by the nondescript Public Investment Fund (PIF). But to the global financial elite, that latter entity is far from obscure. At an estimated $941 billion, the PIF is the sixth-largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, owned by one of the world's most authoritarian dictatorships, Saudi Arabia.

The institute's international confabs have not been without controversy. In October 2018, after the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was strangled to death and then sawed into bits at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, with Trump's blessing, joined a host of American and international CEOs and VIPs in withdrawing from the institute's flagship annual investment conference in Riyadh, sometimes known as "Davos in the Desert." Wall Street had largely gotten over its spasm of conscience by 2021, however, and Trump—like so many POTUSes before him, especially in the Bush family—maintains a warm relationship with the House of Saud. So by February 2025, no one was making much hay about an American president hailing Saudi Arabia as "a special place with special leaders," answering a question about his three ideal dinner guests by naming two Saudi officials in the room (plus the also-present and notoriously corrupt Italian-Swiss head of the international soccer federation FIFA, Gianni Infantino), and singling out for gratitudinal praise the aforementioned Salman.

Zelenskyy didn't get off so easily.

"Think of it," Trump mused about 53 minutes into his speech. "A modestly successful comedian, President Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn't be won, that never had to start, and never would have started if I was president." There are a variety of disputable claims in that windup, but as a wise man once said, forget it, he's rolling.

"He refuses to have elections. He's low in the real Ukrainian polls," Trump continued. "Every city is being demolished. They look like a demolition site, every single one of them. And the only thing he was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle. [He] has done a terrible job. His country is shattered, and millions and millions of people have unnecessarily died." The president accused Zelenskyy of obstructing peace ("Maybe he wants to keep the gravy train going?"), warned that he "better move fast or he's not going to have a country left," and summed up the Ukrainian as "a dictator without elections."

It was that last claim, rather than the actually electionless dictatorship hosting Trump's speech, that generated headlines around the world, including in subsequent days when the president was asked twice point blank whether he would also characterize the aggressor in the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as a "dictator." On February 21, Trump demurred, saying "I think that President Putin and President Zelenskyy are going to have to get together because you know what? We want to stop killing millions of people." On February 24, sitting in the White House next to the visiting French president, Trump responded: "I don't use those words lightly."

A more accurate characterization might be that the second Trump administration does not lightly use condemnatory words to describe condemnation-worthy governments and leaders that it is busy trying to persuade on a prioritized issue. Saudi Arabia is the object of a pined-for peace deal with Israel, is intertwined with Washington's attempts to contain belligerent Houthis and nuke-seeking Iranians, and has interjected itself as an interlocutor in U.S.-Russia talks over Ukraine, so there are no strong words for the Saudis. Ukraine, like Canada and Denmark, is seen less as a friendly power that needs sweet-talking and more as an insufficiently grateful and possibly duplicitous beneficiary of U.S. protection busily impeding near-term American ambitions. Hence: insults.

After the startlingly contentious White House meeting on February 28 between Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Zelenskyy (while a glum Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked on), analysts parsed the all-too-public footage to determine who escalated first. What most missed was that the temperature was initially raised not by a politician, but rather by a Polish journalist, who got Trump hot by asking a loaded if pertinent question about America's seemingly shifting values: "Poland was under Russian control for decades after the Second World War. When I was a kid, I looked at the United States not only as a most powerful country, richest country in the world, the country that has great music, great movies, great muscle cars, but also as a force for good. And now I'm talking with my friends in Poland, and they are worried that you align yourself too much with Putin. What's your message for them?"

The president's immediate words were revealing.

"Well, if I didn't align myself with both of them, you'd never have a deal," Trump snapped. "You want me to say really terrible things about Putin, and then say, 'Hi, Vladimir, how are we doing on the deal?' It doesn't work that way. I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America, and for the good of the world. I'm aligned with the world, and I want to get this thing over with. You see, the hatred he's got [gesturing at Zelenskyy] for Putin, that's very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He's got tremendous hatred."

The historian Will Durant once observed that, "To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy." But Donald Trump did not become the most consequential American politician through subtlety and discretion. At the same time, the president is more focused than most of his detractors acknowledge on pulling peace deals out of seemingly intractable conflicts, à la the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and four Muslim-majority states. ("It's my hope," he said in Miami Beach, "that my greatest legacy will be as a peacemaker and a unifier. That would be a great legacy.") There is an inherent, spark-generating tension between Trump's freestyle insult comedy and his ambitions to reorient the global order along new nationalist lines. Some bad hombres are going to get spared.

Thorny questions about foreign policy expediency and hypocrisy are as old as diplomatic time, bedeviling political thinkers in America since the Founding. "Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies," future U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote in her massively influential 1979 Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards." "Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest."

The American public's principles have long tilted toward liberal democracies (especially English-speaking ones) and those playing defense against larger and more authoritarian neighbors. Gallup's latest U.S. polling shows Ukraine receiving a still-robust 63 percent favorable rating vs. Russia's woeful 17 percent. Trump is attempting simultaneously to disengage from America's international commitments, reassert hemispheric dominance to the point of acquiring territory, wage a global trade war, and bring an end to at least two armed conflicts. It's an inconsistent if audacious agenda, toward which the president is unevenly deploying one of his most potent weapons: his tongue.

Putin Is Bad, Actually

So what exactly constitutes a dictatorship? Though definitions differ and variations proliferate (military, absolute monarchy, one-party, personalist), the rough nomenclatural consensus is that dictatorships hold and exercise power over a given country with few if any limitations imposed by law or society or competing institutions. You may have won an election to gain or consolidate that power, but no foreseeable election can now remove you.

There are four widely cited comparative democracy/dictatorship indices that as of press time have been updated recently—the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, Freedom House's Freedom in the World, the V-Dem Institute's Democracy Report, and the Fraser Institute/Cato Institute Human Freedom Index. (The Economist Intelligence Unit is a division of The Economist, Freedom House is an 84-year-old nonprofit funded largely by the U.S. State Department, V-Dem is a newer project run by the University of Gothenburg, and the Fraser Institute is a 51-year-old conservative think tank in Canada.)

With differing methodologies, the four arrive at broadly the same conclusions about the states under discussion. Ukraine is a bit less free than the average country, Russia is a good deal worse, and Saudi Arabia is scraping the cellar. (Also, the United States is backsliding, and northern Europe is the regional capital of freedom.)

The numbers: Ukraine is ranked 92nd out of 167 countries by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which designates it a "hybrid regime" (between "flawed democracies" and "authoritarian regimes"); it is ranked 115th out of 193 countries by Freedom House (which says it is "partly free"); according to V-Dem, it is 110th out of 179; and the Human Freedom Index ranks it 122nd out of 165. Russia, respectively, is 150th ("authoritarian"), 172nd ("not free"), 159th, and 139th; Saudi Arabia is 148th ("authoritarian"), 176th ("not free"), 169th, and 155th.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's hybrid regimes, like Freedom House's partly frees, tend to be transitional, usually though not always on the road from authoritarian to democratic, with some leftover bureaucratic rot and bad habits mixed with authentic stabs at liberal improvements. "The current administration has enacted a number of positive reforms as part of a drive to strengthen democratic institutions," Freedom House concludes about Ukraine, "but the country still struggles with corruption in the government, the judiciary, and other sectors." The Fraser Institute, on the other hand, lists Ukraine as one of the top 10 backsliders from 2007–2022, alongside such other freedom-constricting countries as Hong Kong, Turkey, and Hungary. 

So Zelenskyy might not qualify as a "dictator," but is he, per Trump, "without elections"? Currently, yes: He was elected initially in 2019, but after the March 2022 Russian invasion he declared martial law, which under the country's constitution postpones parliamentary and presidential elections until six months after the order is lifted. Such wartime changes, including onerous military conscription, forcible media consolidation, and crackdowns on Russian-language expression, have materially degraded liberty in an already poor and corrupt country.

Yet even in the face of an extinction-level threat from its nuclear-armed neighbor, Ukraine permits significantly more freedom of expression and political opposition than Russia does. Zelenskyy, for example, in the wake of Trump's criticism, offered to step down in exchange for peace and security guarantees, a gesture that no matter the level of sincerity or plausibility would be inconceivable coming from Putin.

The 72-year-old Russian president, who has steadily tightened his grip on power over his quarter-century of rule, last held sham elections in March 2024, winning 87 percent of the vote. Putin has outlawed and imprisoned and likely ordered the murder of political opponents, including on foreign soil, while arresting tens of thousands for opposing the war. He has shut down hundreds of media properties, seized control of virtually all broadcast media, cut off citizen access to websites critical of the Kremlin, and jailed scores of journalists, including Americans.

"Russia has never experienced a democratic transfer of power between rival groups," notes Freedom House. "With subservient courts and security forces, a controlled media environment, and a legislature consisting of a ruling party and pliable opposition factions, the Kremlin manipulates elections and suppresses genuine opposition….Pervasive, hyperpatriotic propaganda and political repression have had a cumulative impact on open and free private discussion, which is exacerbated by state control over online and offline expression."

Nevertheless, some foreign policy thinkers maintain, such domestic crackdowns should be diplomatically de-prioritized by Washington. Yes, there are monsters in this world, Jeane Kirkpatrick and "realists" such as John Mearsheimer would argue (in their distinct ways), but what matters in the realm of U.S. foreign policy is how the brutes act toward other sovereign nations, and in relation to America's national interests.

It's the playing-with-others test where the case against Moscow's destabilizing malevolence starts stacking up. Russia in the early 1990s—before NATO expansion was even a germ of an idea—used deadly force against the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. In 2008, Putin invaded and won control over the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, then seized Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014; he intervened in Syria's civil war in 2015, the Central African Republic's civil war in 2018, Mali's civil war in 2021, and Burkina Faso's civil war in 2024. (The last three conflicts are ongoing, if underpublicized.) Russia exerts controlling influence over dictatorial Belarus and war-scarred Armenia; has been rebuked by the European Union for meddling in the elections of Georgia, Moldova, and Romania; has persistently launched cyberattacks on the independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and has attempted with varying degrees of success to leverage oil and oligarchical corruption to purchase influence in the former satellite states of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

So it shocked many European ears on February 14 when Vance declared, at the Munich Security Conference, that the "threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia" but rather the Western European suppression of free speech and political opposition. "When I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners," Vance said. "Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump."

Vance was correct if arguably impolitic in criticizing Europe's grisly trajectory on free expression and political competition, and he was on even stronger footing taking the opportunity of a security conference to remind ostensibly sovereign countries that they need to do much more in providing for their own defense. But elevating those threats above those from the country that launched a full-scale invasion onto European soil and scattered millions of refugees into the European Union, while in the same speech downplaying Russia's continental skullduggery as "a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising," is factually and morally grotesque.

If bending diplomatic language beyond the point of observable truth is the cost of prioritizing the U.S. national interest over some high-falutin' moralism, then the question becomes: What is the assumed national interest in minimizing malefactions from one of the globe's worst actors?

All Tomorrow's Nazis

In Jeane Kirkpatrick's view, double standards with dictators made strategic sense when they were aligned with some overarching American goal, which back in her heyday was winning the Cold War. South Africa's notorious apartheid regime was therefore grudgingly tolerated, not just because of which side it took in the superpower conflict, but because opposition to Pretoria's authoritarian racism was led by a group with ties to revolutionary communism.

For post–Cold War thinkers like Mearsheimer, however, it is the very language used by American critics of faraway baddies that first needs to be interrogated. Realists, who have been generally more right than wrong in opposing U.S. military adventures over the past 35 years, delight in puncturing the reality-stretching propaganda deployed in the service of interventionism. Particularly comparisons to Adolf Hitler.

"There's a direct parallel between what Hitler did to Poland and what Saddam Hussein has done to Kuwait," President George H.W. Bush declared in October 1990, four months before a U.S.-led coalition forcibly dislodged Iraq from its smaller neighbor. "What if," President Bill Clinton thought-ballooned in March 1999, hours before NATO warplanes began bombing forces in Kosovo loyal to Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, "someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?" In his final March 2003 speech before Operation Iraqi Freedom, President George W. Bush warned that, "In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war."

That last reference was to the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Britain, France, and Italy ceded to a bellicose Nazi Germany the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia—a country that had a theoretical military alliance with France yet no representatives at the talks. "Munich," former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer Jeffrey Record noted in a 1998 Air War College paper, "was invoked in the late 1940s on behalf of establishing the containment of Soviet power and influence as the organizing principle of American foreign policy. It was subsequently invoked on behalf of the Truman administration's decision to fight in Korea; on behalf of containment's militarization and extension to Asia and the Middle East; and on behalf of the Johnson administration's decision to intervene in the Vietnam War." In the 21st century, the analogy would be deployed not just to support America's hot wars but to call for yet more interventions in Syria, Iran, and even North Korea.

As many of us have spent years arguing, the metaphor is spectacularly inapt. The only Hitler comp with even a fraction of the führer's peak power was the postwar Soviet Union—and even there, had the "lessons of Munich" been applied the way uber-hawks demanded after the Warsaw Pact invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the world could have been a much more dangerous place. Also, labeling every less-than-satisfactory diplomatic negotiation as "appeasement" is a recipe for forever war.

The very word "realism" suggests a battle-weary, Humphrey Bogart–like disdain of either apocalyptic threat-inflation or airy-fairy idealism, in favor of a sober assessment of the fallen, interest-driven world as it actually exists. But as realism supplanted the discredited doctrines of neoconservatism and humanitarian interventionism, a funny thing happened: Instead of dropping overheated hyperbole, including Nazi analogies, many war-shy politicians and pundits have simply applied it to the opposing side of any given international conflict. And instead of realistic assessments of modern Russia, they have given Putin credit he abjectly does not deserve.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) accused Zelenskyy in March 2023 of having a "Nazi army." Then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in February 2023, after having previously declared his rooting preference for Russia over Ukraine, criticized Zelenskyy as "an instrument of total destruction," and then four months later on his Twitter show called him "sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians." (After that, Carlson infamously decamped to Moscow to proclaim the Russian capital's superiority to American cities and to lob softball questions at Putin.) The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire tweeted out images of Zelenskyy wearing a Hitler mustache.

Tellingly, some of the leading realists themselves have adopted a default that the United States, being by far the biggest player in the global sandbox, is therefore the main character in virtually every negative international story. In spheres where regional powers such as Russia seek to dominate, any U.S. defensive alliance or military aid or even strongly expressed support for smaller neighbors is seen as a reckless potential ramp-up to superpower conflict. "We forced Putin to launch a preventive war to stop Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO" is how Mearsheimer put it in a March 2025 New Yorker interview.

Such a view treats sphere-of-influence bullying as a postulate so obvious that it's hardly worth criticizing. (Indeed, Mearsheimer in that same interview declared himself "someone who believes in the Monroe Doctrine and does not want a great power in the Western Hemisphere.") But is that indeed the reality?

Not so fast, says the Columbia University historian Adam Tooze. In a perceptive March 2022 critique of Mearsheimer in The New Statesman, Tooze, a left-wing academic who has considerable respect for the realist school, argues that such resignation actually misses a more intriguing (and peaceful) reality. "Over the last century at least," Tooze wrote, war "has a poor track record for delivering results. Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover. A realism that fails to [recognize] that fact and the consequences that have been drawn from it by most policymakers does not deserve the name."

But it could also be that Tooze is, so to speak, fighting the last war, or at least looking backward at an American-led world of strong alliances, ever-lowering tariffs, and comparative prosperity. For better and for worse, Trump is changing that world.

The Evolution of Little Marco

In January 2017, there was a Republican senator alarmed by the incoming Trump administration's potential softness on Russia. At the confirmation hearings for soon-to-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Marco Rubio lit into the former Exxon executive, accusing him of lacking "moral clarity."

"I asked you about whether Vladimir Putin was a war criminal, something that you declined to label him as," the Florida senator said. "I asked about Saudi Arabia being a human rights violator, which you also declined to label them….You said you didn't want to label them because it would somehow hurt our chances to influence them or our relationship with [Putin]. But here's the reality: If confirmed by the Senate and you run the Department of State, you're going to have to label countries and individuals all the time."

Conclusion: "When [those struggling for freedom] see the United States is not prepared to stand up and [say], 'Yes, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, Saudi Arabia violates human rights,' it demoralizes these people all over the world."

What a difference eight years makes. Or even eight months—as recently as May 2024, the interventionist senator was tweeting that "Tyrant Vladimir Putin, who once again stole an election, uses his 'inauguration ceremony' as propaganda. Another example of an authoritarian dictator masquerading as a democratically elected leader."

And now? When asked on CNN in February how to reconcile his past fire-breathing toward Putin with the Trump administration's reticence to criticize, the secretary of state said, "My job working for the president is to deliver peace, to end this conflict and end this war….How are you going to get Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation to a table to discuss even the opportunity, whether even to explore whether there's an opportunity for peace? You're not going to do it by calling them names."

Critics were quick to ridicule Little Marco for bending the knee to Trump. While there may be some truth to that dig, it misses what looks like a more momentous shift.

On January 30, 10 days after being sworn in, the secretary of state gave a wide-ranging interview to podcaster Megyn Kelly, in which the 2025 Rubio sketched out a foreign policy vision that would have been unrecognizable to the fresh-faced Cuban-American politician who first entered the Senate 14 years ago.

"The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what's in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what's in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what's in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what's in the best interest of the United States," Rubio said. "Where our interests align, that's where you have partnerships and alliances. Where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they're going to further theirs. And that's been lost."

He continued: "I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem….It's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was…an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China, and to some extent Russia."

Trump is accelerating toward a multipolar and less connected world, which for him requires hastening the European takeover of its own security, muting criticism of regional imperialism abroad, and engaging in some neighborhood bullying of his own, whether in Panama, Greenland, or across the 51st parallel. "In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. They loved using our very powerful military," Trump said May 13, in a major foreign policy address in Riyadh, at which he again lavished praise on Crown Prince bin Salman. "I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment; my job, to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace."

The flowery, often hyperbolic, yet usually aspirational rhetoric that Americans and the rest of the world have long been accustomed to is being replaced by a rougher-edged, erratic transactionalism, where ideals are for suckers and Saudi royals will be treated better than elected Canadians.

American presidents used to be able to call the Kremlin an evil empire while simultaneously negotiating with its leaders to reduce nuclear arsenals and free hundreds of thousands of captive people. Now we are afraid to use the d-word for fear of scotching fruitless ceasefire negotiations, while signaling in an ever-louder voice that our participation in mutual defense treaties will soon be worth the same as a 1938 alliance with France. Realists and other anti-interventionists will soon find out whether their long-heralded return of great-power rivalries will bring a more lasting peace. Using evasive language seems like a weird way to get there.