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Trump’s Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company


MOSCOW — When the strongman ruler of Belarus declared an implausible landslide victory in an election in August, and had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president, the United States and other Western nations denounced what they said was brazen defiance of the voters’ will.

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s victory, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month, was “fraud.” Mr. Pompeo added: “We’ve opposed the fact that he’s now inaugurated himself. We know what the people of Belarus want. They want something different.”

Just a month on, Mr. Pompeo’s boss, President Trump, is now borrowing from Mr. Lukashenko’s playbook, joining a club of truculent leaders who, regardless of what voters decide, declare themselves the winners of elections.

That club counts as its members far more dictators, tyrants and potentates than leaders of what used to be known as the “free world” — countries that, led by Washington, have for decades lectured others on the need to hold elections and respect the result.

The parallel is not exact. Mr. Trump participated in a free and fair democratic election. Most autocrats defy voters before they even vote, excluding real rivals from the ballot and swamping the airwaves with one-sided coverage.

But when they do hold genuinely competitive votes and the result goes against them, they often ignore the result, denouncing it as the work of traitors, criminals and foreign saboteurs, and therefore invalid. By refusing to accept the results of last week’s election and working to delegitimize the vote, Mr. Trump is following a similar strategy.

There is little indication that Mr. Trump can overcome the laws and institutions that ensure the verdict of American voters will carry the day. The country has a free press, a strong and independent judiciary, election officials dedicated to an honest counting of the votes and a strong political opposition, none of which exists in Belarus or Russia.

Still, the United States has never before had to force an incumbent to concede a fair defeat at the polls. And merely by raising the possibility that he would have to be forced out of office, Mr. Trump has shattered the bedrock democratic tradition of a seamless transition.

The damage already done by Mr. Trump’s obduracy could be lasting. Ivan Krastev, an expert on East and Central Europe at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, said Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede would “create a new model” for like-minded populists in Europe and elsewhere.

“When Trump won in 2016 the lesson was that they could trust democracy,” he said. “Now, they won’t trust democracy, and will do everything and anything to stay in power.” In what he called “the Lukashenko scenario,” leaders will still want to hold elections but “never lose.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been doing that for two decades.

Among the anti-democratic tactics Mr. Trump has adopted are some that were commonly employed by leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia — refusing to concede defeat and hurling unfounded accusations of electoral fraud. The tactics also include undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the courts, attacking the press and vilifying opponents.

Like Mr. Trump, those leaders feared that accepting defeat would expose them to prosecution once they left office. Mr. Trump does not have to worry about being charged with war crimes and genocide, as Mr. Milosevic was, but he does face a tangle of legal problems.

Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, described the president’s “refusal to accept the results of the election” as “his parting gift to autocrats around the world.”

An early draft of the playbook used by leaders who never admit defeat was written in 1946 by the Socialist Unity Party, a communist outfit in the then Soviet-controlled eastern lands of Germany. Trounced in the first German election after World War II, the party, known as the SED, greeted its defeat with a bold headline in its newspaper — “Great Victory for SED!” — and took over ruling East Germany for the next 45 years.

It never risked a competitive election again.

In November 2010, President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast refused to accept his loss in an election, suppressing protests with live ammunition, killing dozens and dragging the country into a brief civil war in which over 3,000 people died.

Like Mr. Trump, he freely used government machinery to challenge the election result, insisting he had not been defeated. The crisis stretched out over almost five months and brought Ivory Coast to its knees economically.

With French military support, the president-elect, Alassane Ouattara, finally assumed power as Mr. Gbagbo — whose campaign slogan had been “We win or we win” — was dragged out of his bunker in Abidjan, the capital.

This year, Mr. Ouattara changed the constitution to allow him to run for a third term, and declared last week that he won in a landslide.

Even veteran dictators, however, sometimes concede defeat, particularly if they can engineer a succession that promises to guarantee their personal and financial security.

Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in 1973 in a military coup in Chile, accepted defeat in a 1988 constitutional referendum that would have allowed him to stay in office, and relinquished the presidency in 1990 after an opponent won a presidential vote.

But he remained commander in chief and was made a senator-for-life immune from prosecution. (Still, he was arrested in 1998 in Britain after an extradition request by a Spanish judge investigating his alleged crimes while president.)

A 2018 study, based on elections around the world since 1950, found that only 12 percent of dictators who submit to elections and lose at the polls leave office peacefully. But military dictators, the study found, are generally more willing to concede defeat because they can return to the barracks and avoid getting arrested or killed.

The vote was denounced by most Western and Latin American nations as neither free nor fair, and immediately brought fresh American sanctions. To punish Mr. Maduro, Mr. Trump banned transactions in Venezuelan bonds, and imposed crippling sanctions on Venezuelan oil.

And in January 2019, Mr. Trump recognized Venezuela’s chief opposition leader and congressional speaker, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate leader, another major blow to Mr. Maduro. Dozens of America’s European and Latin American allies followed suit within days.

Mr. Trump condemned Mr. Maduro’s “usurpation of power” and said that all options, including military intervention, were on the table to remove Mr. Maduro from office and install Mr. Guaidó to the presidency.



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