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Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election seems to have inspired a number of illiberal leaders overseas.
Apart from hurting confidence in elections and diminishing the United States’ stature on the global stage, the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have encouraged foreign copycats over the last four years.
The effects could be seen almost immediately.
Just a month after Trump directed his supporters to try to halt certification of his election loss — saying "we can't let that happen" — the pro-Trump Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and self-described "world's coolest dictator," staged a similar event when he led an armed group of military members to the country's parliament building, where they surrounded members of El Salvador’s Congress and pressured them to authorize his violent anti-crime agenda. The event has drawn comparisons to Jan. 6 and led to Bukele becoming a darling of America's right-wing in the years to follow.
In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro — another Trump ally — and his underlings incited his supporters to lay siege to government buildings in a Jan. 6-style event in 2023, after spreading Trumpian lies of election fraud about his loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
And the Institute for Strategic Dialogue noted in 2023 how Republican election denialism in the U.S. after the 2020 election has served as a model for illiberal, far-right movements in countries like Brazil, France, Germany and Austria to spread election-related disinformation and extremism. All of this speaks to the trend of global democratic backsliding that experts have warned about in recent years.
To the extent the United States has been seen as a prominent supporter of democracy on the international stage, Trump’s rise and return to the presidency and the illiberal tactics his movement deployed on and around Jan. 6, 2021, to try to maintain power may have all but destroyed that image. Time will tell, but for now, it's clear they’ve provided a permission structure for similar movements around the world looking to trample on civil rights.