Authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat is predicting that President Donald Trump’s praise for China’s Xi Jinping will end the same way his Iran standoff did: with the president backing down to a strongman he admires.
Her forecast came in response to an Axios clip in which Trump gushed about the Chinese leader on “The Axios Show.” Asked about Xi, Trump described him in the language of physical admiration he often reserves for fellow autocrats, calling him tall, “6-foot-2,” and praising his “great stature,” “great confidence,” and intelligence. For Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism and author who has spent years studying how leaders flatter and accommodate dictators, the fawning was a tell rather than a throwaway line.
“He will cave to Xi in the end just as he capitulated to Iran,” Ben-Ghiat wrote, situating the comment within what she sees as a consistent pattern across Trump’s foreign policy. She tied the prediction to a larger argument about whose interests the president ultimately serves, describing Iran as “an ally of China” and noting that Trump “has consistently acted to help Russia,” which she also called a Chinese ally. Her conclusion was blunt: in her telling, Trump “is in office to make the strongmen leaders he admires do well.”
The framing reflects the through-line of Ben-Ghiat’s broader work, which holds that authoritarian-minded leaders are drawn to one another and that public displays of admiration often precede real concessions. Her reference to Iran points to the recent memorandum of understanding that ended Trump’s war, a deal numerous analysts described as lopsided in Tehran’s favor. By her logic, the same dynamic of tough talk giving way to accommodation is poised to repeat itself with Beijing.
Ben-Ghiat’s argument lands at a moment when Trump’s critics are increasingly scrutinizing the gap between his strongman rhetoric and his actual outcomes. Her point is that the admiring description of Xi’s height and confidence is not idle praise but a window into how the president approaches the world’s most powerful authoritarians, and that the flattery, in her view, tends to be a preview of where the policy is heading.
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