A Tougher Road With Biden: The World Leaders Who Banked On Trump
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had no greater friend in the White House than him. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the only European Union leader to endorse him for president in 2016. And Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he admires him greatly. President Trump has counted several world leaders as his fans, many of them authoritarians, nationalists or populists. But they might have trouble keeping their relationship with the United States as friendly and their growing authoritarian tendencies unchecked if Joe Biden wins the presidency.
Besides the various torn up international accords, the retreat of traditional American leadership from the global stage and the cementing of the "America First" doctrine, there has been perhaps no more glaring consequence of President Trump's tenure than his embrace of strongmen who largely eschewed the Western-based human rights and rules of law agenda. By figuring out relatively early how to win favor with Trump, these leaders often leveraged their close relationship with him to cement their own power at home. Some borrowed his rhetoric like decrying "fake news" to crack down on dissent, some appealed to his sense of pomp by throwing lavish ceremonies and others adopted his brazenly transactional approach to geopolitical dealmaking.
None of these Trump "bromances," whether forged for pragmatic or ideological reasons, are likely to continue with the same fervor with Biden. The 77-year-old former vice president, who has
