Under my article The State of the World: A Strategic Overview, a reader raised two excellent questions:
Dear Sir, may I ask you a question? To prevent spies like Trump from ever gaining political power again, why hasn’t anyone in Europe or America proposed legislation disqualifying anyone with extensive ties to authoritarian countries—particularly financial ties—from running for president or parliament? Marine Le Pen in France and Alice Weidel in Germany are effectively being manipulated by China and Russia behind the scenes.
I do not believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War constituted a victory for the free world. After the Soviet Union collapsed, only a handful of socialist countries remained. On the surface, it appeared that the liberal democratic world, led by the United States, had won the Cold War. In reality, the free world never truly won.
Although only a few socialist countries remain—China, North Korea, Cuba, and so on—the authoritarian world has always been far larger than the liberal democratic world. Russia, Belarus, the former Soviet republics (the various “-stans"), North Korea, Iran, India (which also stands on the side of darkness), and countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are essentially authoritarian states. The vast majority of humanity still lives under dictatorship, oppression, and fear. China and India alone account for enormous populations. These countries control most of the world’s population and resources.
I am actually a pessimist. You all believe that democracy is powerful. And certainly, liberal democracy is powerful: it possesses extraordinary powers of innovation and creativity that dictatorships lack.
But dictatorships have advantages that liberal democracies do not. Authoritarian regimes can extend their tentacles into the free world without restraint. The populism and divisions stirred up by Trump, Le Pen, Weidel, and others, as well as riots in France, all bear the fingerprints of China and Russia.
Yet the influence of the free world on authoritarian countries is negligible. For example, the vast majority of Chinese people are hostile toward Western liberal democracies.
What must the free world do to ensure that it will not eventually be corrupted and consumed by these dark authoritarian powers?
Why can’t we pass laws to prevent villains like Vladimir Trump from running for office?
The essence of democracy is to place a nation’s destiny in the hands of its people.
If a candidate is too close to the enemy, the people will naturally refuse to elect him; while if the people do elect him, that means they do not consider him too close to the enemy.
Therefore, there is no need to legislate against particular individuals running for office. Let the people’s votes decide.
Not only is such legislation unnecessary, it is extremely dangerous.
When America’s Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, one of their overriding concerns was preventing those in power from using their power to consolidate their power—including fabricating charges against opposition leaders, such as corruption or treason, to prevent them from standing for election.
Right now, Vladimir Trump is shamelessly using the Department of Justice as a weapon against his political opponents and as an instrument of personal revenge:
- Cassidy Hutchinson (former White House aide): Hutchinson testified about Trump’s conduct during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Trump’s Justice Department subsequently sought to prosecute her for allegedly lying to Congress. On October 27, 2026, a federal grand jury refused to indict her.
- James Comey (former FBI Director): Comey investigated Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump publicly demanded his prosecution and replaced a federal prosecutor who was unwilling to cooperate. His Justice Department has now attempted to bring criminal charges against Comey three times, most recently in October 2026.
- Letitia James (New York Attorney General): James successfully pursued a civil fraud case against Trump. Subsequently, Trump’s Justice Department charged her with alleged mortgage fraud. A judge dismissed the charges, and grand juries repeatedly refused to indict her again.
- Adam Schiff (Democratic Senator): Schiff played a leading role in Trump’s first impeachment investigation. Trump publicly demanded that Schiff be brought to justice. The Justice Department subsequently investigated him for alleged mortgage fraud, even though prosecutors reportedly struggled to find sufficient evidence.
- Jerome Powell (former Federal Reserve Chairman): Powell refused to lower interest rates as Trump demanded and consequently became the target of repeated, ferocious attacks. Trump’s Justice Department subsequently launched a criminal investigation into the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings. A judge found virtually no evidence of wrongdoing, and the investigation was eventually terminated.
Fortunately, America’s judges have not yet abandoned their integrity, and Trump has therefore not succeeded.
But consider this: during Trump’s first term, members of his administration were still refusing to collude with him. Attorney General William Barr, for example, insisted that there had been no widespread election fraud, even at the risk of being fired by Trump.
In Trump’s second term, however, every member of his cabinet has become a shameless, utterly unscrupulous lackey, willing to aid and abet his abuses of power.
If a Trump II were to remain president for another eight years, it would hardly be surprising if America’s judges, too, eventually became equally unscrupulous accomplices.
At that point, Trump II could effortlessly manufacture charges against opposition figures—including baseless accusations that they were sympathetic to communism—and then bar them from running for office.
The Founding Fathers foresaw precisely this possibility. That is why the US Constitution does not even prohibit a convicted criminal serving a prison sentence from running for president.
This means that if an incumbent’s dictatorship has aroused widespread public outrage, the people can elect an opposition leader whom the dictator has thrown into prison—and make that prisoner the next president.
You might then ask: “But what if the dictator refuses to relinquish power?"
That is why the Founding Fathers included the Second Amendment in the Constitution, guaranteeing the people’s right to bear arms. If a ruler refuses to surrender power, the Constitution, in this interpretation, gives the people the right to rise up in arms and overthrow him.
That is why gun control is so difficult in the United States. The underlying reasons go far beyond opposition from gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association.
You can therefore see that one of the Founding Fathers’ foremost objectives in drafting the Constitution was to prevent scoundrels like Vladimir Trump from transforming the United States into a dictatorship.
Can the people make the wrong choice?
Of course they can!
By twice electing an utterly unscrupulous, scandal-ridden Putin mole as president, the American people have irreversibly squandered the soft power that generations of Americans spent two centuries building.
This is arguably the most spectacularly disastrous electoral choice ever made by a people governing themselves in human history.
And yet, even when the people make such a catastrophic choice, allowing them to make that choice is still ten thousand times better than having them surrender control of their destiny to a strongman, only to find themselves at his mercy, powerless ever to reclaim their freedom.
Consider a lesson from history.
Thirty-five years ago, in 1991, the Soviet people had already endured 75 years of rule behind the Iron Curtain.
But back then, the General Secretary of the Communist Party was, after all, chosen by the Central Committee and subject to its constraints. He could not simply do whatever he pleased.
Consequently, Soviet society still retained some basic vestiges of human decency, dignity, and conscience. Its people had not yet been reduced entirely to the level of beasts.
When the elite Alpha Group special forces were ordered to storm the Supreme Soviet building and arrest Boris Yeltsin, they refused to carry out the order because too many civilians were protecting Yeltsin outside the building, and an assault would have caused hundreds of civilian casualties.
And so, the Russian people wrested control of their destiny back into their own hands.
Russia became, to a considerable extent, a democratic country.
But later, the Russian people handed their destiny to a man they regarded as a once-in-a-millennium great leader: Vladimir Putin.
This “great leader" then proceeded, step by step, to strip them of their political rights.
And once those rights were gone, the Russian people could never reclaim them.
At the same time, Putin systematically poisoned and degraded the minds of the Russian people, cultivating ignorance and moral depravity.
Look at Russians today.
A wife tells her husband fighting on the front lines that he is free to rape Ukrainian women.
A drone operator deliberately murders children playing outside, then posts the footage online to boast about it.
Military officers at every level sent 1.6 million young Russians into the meat grinder of war, a million of them reduced to fertiliser.
Most Russians have ceased to be human beings. To call them animals would be a grave insult to animals.
Now look again at what Vladimir Trump has been doing. He has been desperately striving to emulate his idols, Putin and Kim Jong Un. He relentlessly pushes against every boundary, testing how far he can go.
That is why allowing the people to decide their own destiny, even though they will frequently make mistakes, is always better than taking that power away from them.
No matter how catastrophic the decisions they make, the people must always retain the power to correct them.
