"I left when I had the inner conviction that everything was lost and there was nothing left to save, when terror wouldn't let me live and blood was choking me."
— Manuel Chaves Nogales, By blood and fire (1937)
Donald Trump is not just an American anomaly. He is the symptom of a profound malaise: the crisis of liberal democracies in the face of the global fascination with strong leadership. Putin and Xi are variants of this, and Trump is the spectacle version. Together they are rewriting the rules of the world: imposition instead of negotiation, force instead of law. More business and less philosophy.
When Donald Trump descended the gilded escalator of Trump Tower in 2015, his resentful and xenophobic rhetoric was that of a television mogul. It wasn't a joke: it was a warning. Throughout his first term, he wielded power not as a servant of the Constitution, but as an extension of his ego. His role models are not Lincoln or Roosevelt, but figures like Orbán, Putin, and Bolsonaro: men who despise the rules of the game, use democracy to rise to power, and, once there, try to dismantle it from within.I alone can fix it", he said in 2016. It wasn't a promise. It was a threat.
Trump didn't want to be president a second time to govern, but to dominate and to get revenge on the elites who have never recognized his authoritiesThe result is that American institutions are increasingly cracking.
Authoritarian populism doesn't need armies, at least not at first. It only needs a simplified narrative—the people versus the corrupt elite—and a leader invested as the sole legitimate voice. Today we know that this is not a style, but an authoritarian strategy, and that in the second term, democratic principles are in danger. This is not just a matter of domestic politics, but also a disregard for diplomacy and the role of a withdrawn, yet arrogant, United States.
As Hannah Arendt said, "True power begins where violence ends." And Isaiah Berlin recalled that "Civilization is the distance between desire and action." Trump has eliminated that distance. He has confused democracy with spectacle and law with force.
But this model is not unique to him. It is part of a new world order of authoritarian power that orbits three poles that Trump recognizes as worthy of dividing up zones of influence: his United States, Putin's Russia, and Xi Jinping's China. Three styles and three degrees of democratic degradation, but the same essence: contempt for deliberation, law, and institutional limits.
Putin, heir to the KGB and nostalgic for the Russian Empire, has turned power into a war machine. Xi, for his part, leads a digital and controlled authoritarianism, where obedience is monitored in real time and dissent is dissolved with bureaucratic and violent efficiency. Trump admires them not for their ideology, but for their exercise of power without those pesky intermediaries that the courts, universities, and the press have become. He would like Putin's impunity and Xi's control, with the gifts and perhaps also the women's rights of the Gulf regimes.
If Trump is as unpredictable and addictive as a TV show, realityPutin represents the calculated rigidity of a regime that seeks to discipline. But the bond between the two is not only one of admiration: it is structural. Both see the truth as an obstacle. Both use lies to dominate. And both understand power as an extension of the self.
Xi Jinping, for his part, has a sophisticated architecture of algorithmic control, selective repression, and narrative hegemony. Xi does not seduce the masses: he integrates them into a system of surveillance, enforced silences, and apparent consensus. Trump admires their results—control, submission, order—but he lacks the patience, the history, and the one-party apparatus. Unlike Xi, Trump does not want to build an empire: he wants to destroy the institutions that frustrate him from fulfilling his immediate desire.
The fundamental difference is, perhaps, this: Trump wants to be flattered, Putin feared, and Xi obeyed. But all three share the conviction that power is not shared, it is retained.
Their influence has disfigured international relations and the language of diplomacy. Now, a new grammar prevails: might over law, imposition instead of dialogue.
The degradation of international diplomacy is one of the darkest results of the Trump era and Putin's warlike drift. Foreign policy has too often become a symbolic and internal battlefield, abandoning the basic consensus on the defense of human rights, multilateralism, and peace. Spain is no exception, where the political virulence has left no sector untouched. The breaking of all bridges between the PSOE and the PP prevents cohesive foreign action with a vision of state. Anything goes in times of destruction.
