The New Yorker:

In a commemorative interview on his ninety-third birthday, in 2017, Robert Mugabe, who was the President of Zimbabwe at the time, reflected on his new American counterpart. “When it comes to Donald Trump, on the one hand talking of American nationalism, well, America for America, America for Americans—on that we agree,” he told state television. “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans.”

The two men were wildly different in many ways, yet I was struck by how much they were alike when I heard that Mugabe had died on Friday. Both came to power with a fiercely populist dogma defined by victimhood and the righteousness of their truths, the facts be damned and their critics publicly shamed. Both men relied on political bases that hero-worshipped, often to the disbelief of the outside world. Both men had economic theories that defied global trends. Both men displayed demagogic narcissism. And each reflected wider global political challenges—Trump among Western nations, Mugabe in Africa.

I interviewed Mugabe the day after he was elected, in 1980, to lead the new nation of Zimbabwe out of the ashes of Rhodesia. The election marked the formal end of a fifteen-year civil war, the British colonial era, and white-minority rule in a nation where blacks outnumbered whites twenty-two to one. It also marked the virtual end to prospects of democracy in the African country best equipped—in education, economic prospects, and infrastructure—for independence. Mugabe ended it in a flash. “As you saw from the decision of the people, it is virtually only one party, the Patriotic Front, that is in power,” Mugabe told me. “The rest of the parties have been rejected, so we have a one-party state already.” That was patently false; other parties won forty-three of the hundred seats in Parliament, in a poll tainted by voter intimidation. But Mugabe ruled under that illusion for the next thirty-seven years. In 2016, Mugabe, his megalomania seemingly having no bounds, dared to tell an African Union summit of more than fifty nations that he would rule “until God says, ‘Come.’ ”

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