Fox News and other pro-Donald Trump propaganda outfits are sounding more like the Kremlin every day. They have recently warned that a “color revolution” is under way to overthrow Trump if he wins re-election to a new four-year term on Nov. 3, 2020.
That term has been used derogatorily by Kremlin pundits and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to spin lies about the popular uprisings in Georgia, in 2003, and in Ukraine, in 2004 and 2014, to press for political change. Dictators think alike. Putin, Xi Jinping, Alexander Lukashenko, Viktor Orban, Mohammad Bin Salman, Bashar al-Assad and all other illegitimate leaders live in fear that the people will organize and assert their democratic rights. So they relentlessly suppress popular uprisings, demonstrations, freedom of speech and the press and, worst of all, murder opponents. All of them run their nations like mafia bosses and kleptocrats, putting cronyism ahead of national interests, getting rich while their nations sink deeper into poverty.
Many of these dictators support the re-election of Trump. The American president has done more in four years to undermine U.S. democracy and damage the country’s image abroad than perhaps any president in history.
“Of all the Kremlin talking points these guys have recycled, I didn’t think I’d ever see this one picked up. I was wrong,” tweeted Michael Carpenter, senior director of the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania and a former U.S. assistant defense secretary who knows Eastern Europe and Russia well.
An example of the type of people spouting this nonsense: Former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, fired after CNN revealed his ties to white nationalists, went on Fox News to accuse the U.S. “deep state” national security apparatus of overthrowing regimes it opposed in Eastern Europe, presumably including Ukraine. Having lived through both Ukrainian revolutions, we know better: These were genuinely popular uprisings, the first against a rigged presidential election and the second against an attempt to turn away from the European Union by Kremlin-backed kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych. The revolutions had support from the West because standing up for Ukrainian democratic aspirations is the right moral stance.
It’s no mystery why dictators and autocrats want Trump to remain in the White House. He excuses their human rights abuses, cheers them on in their suppression and murder of journalists and loves corruption — as long as the Trump family shares in the spoils.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Sept. 21 publicly endorsed Trump, accusing Democrats of “moral imperialism.” Actually, he’s accusing them of standing up against autocrats like him, which the world should do.
