Trump & Erdoğan / A comparison
There’s a lot of Trump-Erdoğan comparisons out there. Most are from the liberal perspective, and talk about the similarities between the two men. There’s pieces in the Washington Post in 2018, the FT in 2017 and 2024, the Independent in 2020, the Chicago Sun-Times in 2023, as well as many academic articles and talks.
There is a weird mind meld between the bases of the two men. One Turkish poll indicates that more people in Turkey favor Trump than favor Harris, and there’s international outfits confirming the finding. That sounds right to me. There might be a bit of tactical calculation behind this, especially concerning US support for the PYD in Syria, but I don’t think that’s a huge factor. There isn’t really enough information about that in the Turkish media sphere. I think it’s more about gut feeling. Harris is the status quo candidate, and thus Turkish voters usually like things that go against the status quo. They also like Trump’s uninhibited style. (I first made that argument in FP in November 2016.)
What I want to do here is to look at presidents Erdoğan and Trump in a bit more detail. Sure, both are right-wing reactionaries, but what else is similar about them? And crucially, what’s different about them? Does the comparison help us think about the men and the movements they lead? Does it help us think about these types of movements, and their pathways to power?
Let’s go through the comparison. Some of this is about the proclivities of the men themselves, but a lot of it is about the movements they lead and the political energy they exude.
A 2010s Turkish meme depicting Trump as a ‘dolmuş’ minibus driver.
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Similarities
There’s a lot to choose from on this list, and I tried to go from the most general to the more specific items.
Revivalism
I won’t spend a lot of time on this, but it’s worth noting at the outset that both leaders are reacting to a status quo. Sometimes they refer to it as the “Deep State,” a term that may have traveled from Turkey to the United States. Other terms are the bureaucratic oligarchy, the administrative state, or “müesses nizam” meaning the “established order” or “üst akıl” meaning “the high mind.”
Both promise to “take back” the power of the state, enlist it in the service of the people, and initiate a period of national revival. Hence Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” In the Turkish context, the key term is “diriliş,” meaning “revival,” and there are other slogans attached to that, like “the century of Turkey.” Both movements are versions of Palingenetic nationalism.
We could get into other aspects of their politics, like their depiction of their rivals, the “enemies within” mentality, the use of conspiracy theories, the emphasis on the wholesome nation, but I think that comes with this territory. I’m going to skip all that and focus on the more structural aspects.
Theory of executive power
Both men believe that state power should be centralized in the hands of the executive. Neither has respect for the judiciary and legislative branches as separate branches. The movements both men represent also have broader theories to institutionalize this proclivity.
In Turkey, the theorizing and institutionalization is fairly shallow. The AK Party was born in the 1990s, when coalition governments wrecked the country’s economic base. Their priority has always been to avoid coalitions at all costs. I remember a founder of the AK Party telling me that they’d prefer the CHP to be in power rather than having to deal with a power-sharing arrangement. In the 2010s, as Erdoğan’s star was rising, this morphed into a theory of executive superiority. They ended up calling it a “Turkish-style presidency” and implemented it in a plebiscite after the 2016 coup attempt. I’ve written about that elsewhere for anyone interested in the details.
In the United States, the constitutional structure is more rigid. Trump, after all, couldn’t enact his authoritarian instincts during his first term. This being the US though, the intellectual firepower behind the authoritarian drive is also much greater. Trump supporters like the “Unitary Executive Theory,” which would imbue the presidency with far greater powers, allowing them to enact radical changes to the U.S. government. This is essentially the same thing as the “Turkish-style presidency.” You seize power and adjust things so that you’ll restart the Republic with new values and a new vision.
So both movements are based on the authoritarian intuition that the leader of the country should be able to control pretty much all of the state, and by extension, all of civil society and the private sector. Erdoğan is obviously much farther along in the realization of this goal than Trump is, but if Trump should win this election, he might start to move much faster in this direction.
Institutional battle
Both leaders have identified the bureaucratic apparatus (aided by the establishment media) as their real enemy, with status-quo politicians merely serving as the handmaidens of those elites.
I’ve written about Erdoğan’s theory of the “institutional oligarchy” elsewhere. As mentioned above, MAGA has (knowingly or not) adopted the Turkish term “deep state” to describe their opponents (Ryan Gingeras has written an excellent piece on that). I’d point out that the term has a slightly different meaning in the two countries, mostly because they’re on different points in their far-right trajectory. In Turkey, the Islamists ran against the “deep state” in the 1990s and 2000s, then became the deep state in the 2010s (a related term is “müesses nizam” meaning “estnalihsed order”). So here, the “deep state” was always right-wing, it just switched from a Kemalist-Turkish character into an Islamist-Turkist character.
In MAGA’s collective imagination, the “deep state” is a liberal/managerial/leftist/Marxist/statist machine. Unlike in the Islamist example, there’s varying ideas in MAGA on what to do with it. There’s the libertarian group (Vivek Ramaswamy, etc.) that wants simply to abolish it, and there’s a more statist group that wants to make it “national,” implying a change of character. The latter is closer to the Islamist example.
A pro-Trump cartoon published ahead of the Harris-Trump debate.
Building big
Erdoğan and Trump both like to imprint the world with massive buildings. They are both great builders of pyramids.
With Erdoğan, this manifests itself in huge mosques, the third Bosphorus bridge, the gigantic Istanbul airport, a Manhattan Skyscraper across the street from the UN, and of course, the massive palace (across the street from our offices at TEPAV).
Trump has made a career out of building big shiny buildings and putting his name on them. What’s more interesting here is Elon Musk, who’s practically on the Trump ticket. Musk builds megaprojects of an entirely different scale, including space exploration and renewable energy. He’s also to be made the head of a new “government efficiency” force that would be tasked to cut red tape and make such projects easier to undertake. I can see how this would be appealing. It has become far too difficult to build things in rich countries. I’m just not sure how the MAGA movement would make it easier.
I think there is a sense in both movements that the bureaucratic mechanisms are needlessly in the way, and that they would simply bulldoze their way through them. Both movements also subscribe to the idea that governance isn’t really about making people’s lives incrementally better, it’s about satisfying people with the grandeur these large projects bestow on the nation.
Religion
As you’ll see below, this is a factor in both columns. The commonality they have is that they use religious symbols, and appeal heavily to the religious side of the secular-religious cleavage. This is significant because there’s a good argument to be made that both men are immoral in their individual personal dealings (in terms of corruption, and in Trump’s case, sexual exploits). Organized religion is thereby decoupled from individual morality, and attaches itself to an older form of blood and soil nationalism.