President Trump's thing for thugs

Authoritarian leaders exercise a strange and powerful attraction for President Trump. As his trip to Asia reminds us, a man who loves to bully people turns to mush — fawning smiles, effusive rhetoric — in the company of strongmen like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

Perhaps he sees in them a reflection of the person he would like to be. Whatever the reason, there’s been nothing quite like Mr. Trump’s love affair with one-man rule since Spiro Agnew returned from a world tour in 1971 singing the praises of thuggish dictators like Lee Kuan Yew, Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, Mobutu Sese Seko and Gen. Francisco Franco.

Mr. Trump’s obsessive investment in personal relations may work for a real estate dealmaker. But the degree to which he has chosen to curry favor with some of the world’s most unsavory leaders, while lavishing far less attention on America’s democratic allies, hurts America’s credibility and, in the long run, may have dangerous repercussions.

In China, he congratulated Mr. Xi for securing a second term as ruler of an authoritarian regime that Mr. Trump had spent the 2016 campaign criticizing. He again absolved Mr. Putin of interfering in the United States election, despite the finding of American intelligence agencies that Moscow did extensive meddling. As for Mr. Duterte, Mr. Trump effused about their “great” relationship while saying nothing about the thousands of Filipinos who died in a campaign of extrajudicial killings as part of the Philippine president’s antidrug war. En route, he gave a verbal thumbs-up to the Saudi crown prince for arresting hundreds of senior officials and cementing control of the kingdom.
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