Yesterday, I published part 7 of The Strongman’s Playbook in The Planet. Here I share a few thoughts on what stood out most. The transcript is below for those who prefer to read.
This is the video about the seventh installment of The Strongman’s Playbook. It is a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
If you subscribe now, you can follow the full series as it unfolds and read the previous series, The Fall, in the archive. Ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story.
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Transcript
Six weeks ago, I started a new series, offering another historic, and often European, perspective on America’s flirt with fascism. On this side of the Atlantic, we have tried out both communism and fascism in the last century, and it’s now like “been there, done that, and please never again”.
But it seems like, as any child growing up, countries go through phases of history without taking into account the lessons learned from the past in other countries. It’s a pity, but history never develops along a straight line, although it often follows patterns. These don’t predict very well, but they help to put events into context. The current series is about the Strongman’s Playbook, for which I had in mind as an alternative title ‘Dictatorship for Dummies’. It followed on my series “After the Fall” where I examined how difficult and often painful it is to achieve justice once a country returns to a democratic system. Then we made one step back. Instead of ‘after the fall ’, the focus became the necessary first step: how does the fall of a regime happen? And then we took one more step back in time to look at the functioning of a regime, and that’s where The Strongman’s Playbook started. How do you run a dictatorship? It turns out that all over the world, patterns are followed: learn to recognize them, and you understand better what you will read in the news tomorrow.
Six weeks ago I covered the courts, often the first target for the strongmen. Then the media. Four weeks ago, I wrote about the business elite, and then I focused on the civil service. Two weeks ago I wrote about how to weaponize the law. Last week we rewrote history. This week we move to the seventh technique in the strongman’s playbook: manufacturing the enemy. Each of these topics is worth a separate book, and there are so many examples to choose from.
Let me start with a sentence from a presidential debate. I’m sure you’ll recognize it:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The moderator fact-checked Trump on air. Springfield’s city manager told ABC there were no credible reports of pets being harmed by immigrants. Local police denied it. The woman behind the original Facebook post retracted it. PolitiFact named the claim its 2024 Lie of the Year.
But Trump kept repeating it. He did it so often that you will most likely remember it.
Springfield, Ohio, then faced bomb threats at schools and government buildings. The city that had welcomed Haitian workers into its factories and its economy was reduced in public consciousness to an image of pet-eating immigrants that had been fully debunked before it spread.
That is the technique in its simplest form. The claim does not need to be true. It needs to be vivid, frightening, and politically functional. The debunking spreads the story. The repetition makes the claim feel substantial. The fear circulates regardless of the facts.
Last week, on the evening of July 16, this technique scaled up to a primetime presidential address. Trump claimed China had stolen the voter data of 220 million Americans and used it to manipulate the 2020 election. He released declassified documents as proof. However, those documents did not support the claim. The intelligence community’s own assessment concluded China had not attempted to change vote totals. John Solomon — a conservative commentator Trump had brought onto his White House staff — said the intelligence community had zero evidence that any foreign power had flipped a vote.
Why the escalation now? Trump’s approval numbers are weak. The midterms are approaching. The party in power typically loses seats in midterms, and his record on the cost of living, housing, and healthcare has consistently failed to gather any enthusiasm. He cannot run on the economy. So he needs an enemy. Because a president under attack by existential threats cannot be judged by grocery prices.
The same week, Secretary of State Rubio convened a summit of 66 nations focused almost entirely on left-wing political violence. He called leftists enemies of civilization and an encroaching darkness. Stephen Miller said their civil rights claims must fall on deaf ears. Reuters has documented that Trump had invoked communism 81 times in just two weeks.
This is not random. Political scientists who study democratic backsliding — Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Timothy Snyder — have noted that authoritarian movements almost always expand their enemy lists over time. It starts with one group, then incorporates every institution that tries to protect them. The important fact is not which group is named first. The important fact is that the list keeps growing, and that growing list keeps justifying growing powers.
Viktor Orbán built his government in Hungary on two manufactured enemies. The first was George Soros, who was turned from a philanthropist into a puppet master of a globalist conspiracy. There were billboard campaigns across Hungary. Laws criminalizing assistance to asylum seekers. The Central European University was expelled. And the second main enemy was migrants. They were transformed from a policy problem into an existential civilizational invasion. The emergency never ended, because the point was never to solve it.
It is worth noting why this worked in Hungary specifically. Hungarians lived under actual communist rule until 1989. The fear of foreign ideological influence, of hidden networks, of institutions captured by outside forces, was not invented. Orbán activated something real in the collective memory of a country that had really experienced those things. The mistake Trump makes is to blindly copy the framing of Orban. But the Reuters focus groups confirm that the communist framing works less well on younger Americans who did not live through the Cold War.
Orbán governed for sixteen years on those manufactured enemies. In April 2026, he was defeated. Hungary proved that an illiberal democracy can be beaten at the ballot box. Péter Magyar won a two-thirds majority and has moved quickly to dismantle Orbán’s captured institutions.
And here is the detail that arrived just as I was finishing writing the article in The Planet. Reuters reported that Orbán has announced a resistance movement against Magyar’s new government, accusing him of establishing a tyranny.
For sixteen years, Orbán portrayed NGOs, Brussels, Soros, migrants, and the opposition as existential threats to Hungary. Now he is portraying the democratically elected government as the existential threat. It is clear that the manufactured enemy technique does not retire when its practitioner loses office. It continues in opposition. It is the only political language he knows.
Bolsonaro in Brazil built his career on a communist conspiracy so comprehensive that any institution checking his power automatically became part of it. When he lost the 2022 election, his supporters stormed Congress and the Supreme Court. In September 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted him on five counts and sentenced him to 27 years and 3 months. He is serving that sentence under house arrest with strict conditions. Luckily, the institutions held long enough.
I have a friend from Albania who grew up under Hoxha’s communist state. She told me: everyone knew the system was built on lies. They could watch Italian television illegally. They could see how different life was outside the borders. And still the system held for decades, because the cost of resistance was too high and the mechanisms too interlocked.
That is what I think about when I watch America. I see real signs of hope. But I also see how patient the strategy is. How each step that meets too much resistance is withdrawn and tried again. How each institution captured makes the next harder to defend.
The manufactured enemy does not require belief. It requires circulation.
The enemy is manufactured to justify attacking institutions. The institutions are attacked to prevent them from exposing the enemy as manufactured. The circle closes.
Please like, share, and subscribe so you will receive Part 8 next week, where we move to buying the base.
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Stay inspired,
Alexander
This is the video about the seventh installment of The Strongman’s Playbook — a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
If you missed the previous series, The Fall, it is all in the archive: ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story — how power is seized, and how it is eventually lost.
If you know an American who is watching the news and wondering how this is supposed to end, send them Part 1. The courts are where the story begins.
New subscribers get 20% off the first year.
If you missed part 7 of The Strongman’s Playbook:
Trump Called Democrats Communists 81 Times in Two Weeks. History Knows This Technique.
During the September 2024 presidential debate, Donald Trump said this:
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