By Jeremy Kinsman

October 19, 2025

While Donald Trump spent the days following the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire deal he secured taking a victory lap in the Middle East, his domestic footprint as a peacemaker became more and more dubious.

The same unpredictability that made Trump’s leverage plausible in the dynamic with Israel — and makes less plausible his leverage with more symmetrical actors like China — remains the hallmark of Trump’s domestic presidential command as he unilaterally explodes norms on several fronts at once, exceeding presidential authority and precedent to destabilize U.S. society and dominate the news cycle.

Trump continues to demonize Democratic opponents and civil society protesters he depicts as “the enemy within,” deploying troops into “Democratic” cities to counter invented disorder he is actually seeking to incite — a time-worn technique of aspiring dictators, one that the long-gone drafters of the US Constitution intended to insulate the people against. Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court have abandoned conservative originalism in deference to authoritarian appetite.

Trump’s strongman persona surfs on a wave of rising authoritarianism that has been cresting across the world for at least a decade as a counterforce to the “third wave” of democratization that followed the end of the Cold War.

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, David Brooks references democratic uprisings in Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, South Korea, Ukraine, east Timor, Serbia, Madagascar, and Nepal, where “peoples have risen up to defend their rights, their dignity, and their democracies.”

Brooks cites the 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works, whose authors Erica Chenowith and Maria Stephan documented how until 2006, this “force more powerful” often did prevail against dictators, notably in the ex-Soviet orbit where “colour” revolutions frustrated Putin’s wish for pliant authoritarian allies.

Popular uprising did overturn Tunisia’s dictator in 2011, igniting the Arab Spring that spread to Egypt, Syria, and the autocratic dynastic monarchies of the Gulf. But alas, the Arab Spring’s non-violent resistance to established dictatorships became serially crushed by violent repression. In Cairo, the inspiring young occupiers of Tahrir Square ended the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak but couldn’t agree on what to do next and were displaced by the better-organized Muslim Brotherhood regime.

The chief of the Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah El Sisi, led a military coup in 2014, and has since imprisoned 65,000 Egyptian citizens in a blatant lockdown of civil rights. But at the Sharm el Sheikh summit, President Trump lauded his Egyptian co-chairman autocrat as “tough on crime,” just his kind of leader.

The street rally also needs inspiring democratic leadership able to present a positive alternative to Trumpism.

El Sisi and other dictators drew from the virtual “dictator’s handbook” that Bashar al-Assad followed in 2011 to crush rising democratic opposition in Syria. Al-Assad survived for a dozen years before an armed revolution forced him into exile in Moscow late last year, but in Belarus, Myanmar, Venezuela, and most demonstrably in Russia, nonviolent civic democratic opposition protesting stolen elections and repression has been suppressed by intimidation, imprisonment, and even murder.

In his Atlantic piece, Brooks’ main preoccupation is about a “miasma of passivity” in America, which “needs a mass movement — now” to counter Trump’s erratic and divisive actions against dissent and protest in the US.

Hi fellow citizens may be mobilizing. As I write this, the “No Kings” demonstrations across America and abroad  drew an estimated seven million protesters to more than 2,500 sites. It could be the start of the sort of citizens’ rally that David Brooks hopes for.

But the street rally also needs inspiring democratic leadership able to present a positive alternative to Trumpism. An interesting example is the unlikely favourite to be elected November 4 as New York City’s next mayor, 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whom Trump labels a “communist.” Mamdani, the son of Oscar-nominated director Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, Salaam Bombay!), fuses charisma with common sense commitment to kitchen-table issues of affordability, and need of efficient basic public services.

Some doubt whether Mamdani has the experience to manage the City’s budget of $118 billion. But he is leading because he has a positive, motivating message that professional politicians in other democracies lack.

In Europe, elected centrist leaders are running scared from ultra-right nativist opponents who exploit tensions and conflict over identity issues, especially immigration. Incumbents under pressure try to present themselves as capable managers of government, but increasing public distrust of the system makes them seem pale by comparison to Trumpian look-alikes.

Simon Kuper in the Financial Times argues that “Mainstream parties in Europe no longer offer an element that every successful political project requires: the promise of a better world.” Bizarrely, nativist insurgents promise a nostalgically misremembered past that nonetheless “outcompetes both present and future.”

Kuper urges they offer voters a “values utopia — that is, a society that honours their beliefs”, while, like Mamdani, pushing hard to provide decent services and public goods.

A combination of the political leadership Kuper describes and the mass movement Brooks is calling for just might be the answer. It certainly beats waiting for 2028 while hoping Donald Trump won’t cause any lasting damage.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.