Undermining elections and democracy is a page out of the dictator’s handbook. Literally.
by Jared O. Bell
When word came down that USAID was being dismantled in Nicaragua, I was sorting through old documents amid the chaos of the mission close-out. On the desk next to mine sat a book abandoned by a colleague: The Dictator’s Handbook, by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which lays out, in plain and clinical language, how dictators actually operate.
It felt fitting: Nicaragua had been seized and was being run as a family enterprise by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, according to Human Rights Watch. I snatched the book, sensing it would be relevant. What Trump did last week in his primetime address was not a policy speech. It was a page out of that handbook.
On July 16, Trump used a national address to revive claims the 2020 election was tainted, alleging China had covertly obtained 220 million voter files and citing a Department of Homeland Security review claiming roughly 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. He closed with a line that sounded protective but read like a threat: “We can never watch a stolen election again.”
None of it held up. NPR reported voter files are largely public records, and a declassified 2021 intelligence report already concluded “we have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process.”
This was not new information his administration lacked. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, told the Associated Press weeks after the 2020 election, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome,” and his own Department of Homeland Security called that election “the most secure in American history.”
CBS News found neither Trump nor Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explained how the administration reached the noncitizen number, and that its method is prone to false positives. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said bluntly, “that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters.” Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the claim outright, saying “they have provided NO evidence,” and Senator Alex Padilla called it “a political stunt built on sham numbers.”
This is the part where the book on my shelf stopped being an abstraction and started reading like a roadmap. Bueno de Mesquita explains why authoritarian election theater exists: “Rigged elections are not about picking leaders. They are not about gaining legitimacy. How can an election be legitimate when its outcome is known before the vote even occurs?”
The book describes the mirror image of what Trump did nationally: a regime rigs a vote while making it look clean, so “observers will easily conclude that elections were free and fair” when “we can all recognize that they were neither really free nor fair” (The Dictator’s Handbook, p. 124). Trump ran that trick in reverse, inheriting a legitimate system and trying to make it look rigged, a cheaper manipulation since manufacturing doubt requires only a microphone and a willingness to lie. The objective is identical either way: make the public stop trusting the count.
Casting doubt on elections is not a side effect of authoritarian rule; it is a core tactic. Protect Democracy’s research on the authoritarian playbook identifies “corrupting elections” as one of seven defining moves would-be autocrats use, flagging Trump’s effort to block certification of the 2020 results as a textbook example.
This is not new. We have the private version on tape: on January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
Raffensperger refused: “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find.” It is also a documented pattern abroad: Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, noted that after Peru’s 2021 election borrowed the same fraud claims, Trump’s example “creates a bad example that other leaders and countries can follow.”
Researchers have connected these dots. The V-Dem Institute dropped the United States from the 20th most democratic country in the world to 51st, between Slovakia and Greece, and its director Staffan Lindberg did not hedge: “What we are seeing now is the greatest democratic backsliding the country has ever seen.” The rollback that took Orbán four years in Hungary, and a decade for Erdo?an and Modi in Turkey and India, took Trump about one. Manufacturing doubt about elections is part of what makes that speed possible: a public convinced its elections are already compromised is far less likely to mobilize in defense of the ones still ahead.
I did not expect to find a warning this precise on a shelf while an American foreign aid mission burned down around me in Managua. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith were not writing about the United States; they were describing a general theory of political survival that applies with equal force to any country willing to follow its rules. The president stood in the East Room last Thursday and, without evidence his own intelligence agencies say does not exist, told the country it can no longer trust its own democracy.
If Nicaragua, Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary have taught me anything, the goal was never to fix an election. It was to make sure that when the next one does not go his way, enough people already believe it could not have been legitimate.
~~~~~~~~
Jared O. Bell, PhD, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
dictator’s handbook, democracy, voting, lies, 2020 election claims, William Barr, Trump
Undermining elections and democracy is a page out of the dictator’s handbook. Literally.
by Jared O. Bell
When word came down that USAID was being dismantled in Nicaragua, I was sorting through old documents amid the chaos of the mission close-out. On the desk next to mine sat a book abandoned by a colleague: The Dictator’s Handbook, by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which lays out, in plain and clinical language, how dictators actually operate.
It felt fitting: Nicaragua had been seized and was being run as a family enterprise by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, according to Human Rights Watch. I snatched the book, sensing it would be relevant. What Trump did last week in his primetime address was not a policy speech. It was a page out of that handbook.
On July 16, Trump used a national address to revive claims the 2020 election was tainted, alleging China had covertly obtained 220 million voter files and citing a Department of Homeland Security review claiming roughly 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. He closed with a line that sounded protective but read like a threat: “We can never watch a stolen election again.”
None of it held up. NPR reported voter files are largely public records, and a declassified 2021 intelligence report already concluded “we have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process.”
This was not new information his administration lacked. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, told the Associated Press weeks after the 2020 election, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome,” and his own Department of Homeland Security called that election “the most secure in American history.”
CBS News found neither Trump nor Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explained how the administration reached the noncitizen number, and that its method is prone to false positives. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said bluntly, “that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters.” Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the claim outright, saying “they have provided NO evidence,” and Senator Alex Padilla called it “a political stunt built on sham numbers.”
This is the part where the book on my shelf stopped being an abstraction and started reading like a roadmap. Bueno de Mesquita explains why authoritarian election theater exists: “Rigged elections are not about picking leaders. They are not about gaining legitimacy. How can an election be legitimate when its outcome is known before the vote even occurs?”
The book describes the mirror image of what Trump did nationally: a regime rigs a vote while making it look clean, so “observers will easily conclude that elections were free and fair” when “we can all recognize that they were neither really free nor fair” (The Dictator’s Handbook, p. 124). Trump ran that trick in reverse, inheriting a legitimate system and trying to make it look rigged, a cheaper manipulation since manufacturing doubt requires only a microphone and a willingness to lie. The objective is identical either way: make the public stop trusting the count.
Casting doubt on elections is not a side effect of authoritarian rule; it is a core tactic. Protect Democracy’s research on the authoritarian playbook identifies “corrupting elections” as one of seven defining moves would-be autocrats use, flagging Trump’s effort to block certification of the 2020 results as a textbook example.
This is not new. We have the private version on tape: on January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
Raffensperger refused: “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find.” It is also a documented pattern abroad: Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, noted that after Peru’s 2021 election borrowed the same fraud claims, Trump’s example “creates a bad example that other leaders and countries can follow.”
Researchers have connected these dots. The V-Dem Institute dropped the United States from the 20th most democratic country in the world to 51st, between Slovakia and Greece, and its director Staffan Lindberg did not hedge: “What we are seeing now is the greatest democratic backsliding the country has ever seen.” The rollback that took Orbán four years in Hungary, and a decade for Erdo?an and Modi in Turkey and India, took Trump about one. Manufacturing doubt about elections is part of what makes that speed possible: a public convinced its elections are already compromised is far less likely to mobilize in defense of the ones still ahead.
I did not expect to find a warning this precise on a shelf while an American foreign aid mission burned down around me in Managua. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith were not writing about the United States; they were describing a general theory of political survival that applies with equal force to any country willing to follow its rules. The president stood in the East Room last Thursday and, without evidence his own intelligence agencies say does not exist, told the country it can no longer trust its own democracy.
If Nicaragua, Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary have taught me anything, the goal was never to fix an election. It was to make sure that when the next one does not go his way, enough people already believe it could not have been legitimate.
~~~~~~~~
Jared O. Bell, PhD, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
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