With all the news and controversy around Trump and his possible impeachment, something that is not brought up enough is his influence and impact left upon other world leaders. I’m not talking about the impact and influence he inherited as a by-product of leading one of the world’s most impactful countries but rather the impact and influence of his remarkably different leadership style. Compared to Obama’s relatively honest presidential term where The New York Times claims that he only lied 18 times1 within his 8-year term; Trump has been unabashedly aggressive and has lied time and time again even to the point of attacking journalists he disagrees with. Unfortunately, Trump’s tactics have worked, and other leaders have taken notice.
Now elected leaders in other countries such as Brazil and India are starting to mimic his tactics of harassing journalists to suppress news that may paint them in a negative light. This is an interesting parallel of the cascading effect. Previously, elected leaders had to lead honestly and follow certain societal guidelines in fear of angering the masses, thus losing their influence over the nation. Trump has completely flipped the script and has demonstrated that if you decide to just go on the offensive, things will work out for you, and unfortunately other countries are copying the tactic. This would be as if there was a new social media tool that was so impressive that it didn’t matter that most of your friends shunned it for having shady practices and morals, the benefits are potentially so large that it only took a couple of friends to use it to cause you to use it too. This cascading effect can be terrifying as we know that it only gets easier for a cascading effect to occur as more people within the network follow suit. If more and more people decide to follow suit we may be in for a world with more and more leaders who imitate Trump and if the popular vote is anything to believe in, even the Americans didn’t want that.
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Works Cited
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html