The only new element in Imran Khan’s speech on April 16 was this advice: “Wave Pakistan’s flag, not the PTI flag.” He was positioning himself as Pakistan’s saviour, taking a cue from Donald Trump, whose followers had always waved the American flag at his rallies.
Of course, there are many differences between Khan and Trump, but their similarities outweigh the differences.
Both men served one term in office. They were elected to office by capitalizing on their lack of political experience. One was a cricketer of international repute who had started building cancer hospitals after his retirement from cricket. The other hosted a widely watched Reality TV programme and was a global real estate baron.
They portrayed their lack of experience as evidence of their independence from a corrupt political establishment. Their opponents were selfish, narrow-minded people, beholden to special interests. Both gained office by lambasting existing politicians and deriding their policies. Both promised to restore greatness to their nation. They were critical of countries with which their nations had long-standing relationships, saying their allies had exploited them. In Khan’s case, the US was the focus of his vilification. In Trump’s case, it was the NATO allies that were not paying their fair share of defense spending. Both men bonded with countries that previous leaders had shunned, Khan with the Taliban and later Russia. Trump bonded with Russia and reached out to North Korea.
But their greatest similarity lies in their personalities. Both suffered from a Messianic Complex. Each said that only he understood the problems of the country and thus he, and only he, could fix them.
Several books have been written about Donald Trump’s personality. These books expose his naiveté, his duplicity and his narcissism. One book, written by 27 psychiatrists, called him “a dangerous case,” suffering from psychosis, delusions and hallucinations of grandeur.
A new book, I alone can fix it, focuses on his last year in office. In January 2020, he knew the pandemic posed a serious threat to public health. Yet he took no measures to safeguard the American public from it, concerned that his popularity would suffer. He put his political interests ahead of the nation’s, despite all his talk of patriotism. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and even more bereaved. The economy tanked and hundreds of thousands lost their jobs.
They portrayed their lack of experience as evidence of their independence from a corrupt political establishment. Their opponents were selfish, narrow-minded people, beholden to special interests. Both gained office by lambasting existing politicians and deriding their policies.
The book contains this outrageous statement of Trump: “If George Washington came back from the dead and he choose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.” During his tenure, Trump had boasted that if had been the president in 1860 instead of Lincoln, the Civil War would not have happened.
Trump lost November 2020 election to Joe Biden, a former vice president and senator with decades of experience. Trump refused to accept the results, saying there is no way that “Sleepy Joe” could have defeated him. He riled up his supporters to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, almost unleashing a Civil War. He has left behind extremist groups who wave the American flag and ride shotguns in pickup trucks to intimidate others.
Unlike Trump, there is a dearth of books on Imran Khan. But there are two very revelatory interviews that were published in The Times in February 2018 and in Vanity Fair in September 2019.
The most Trump-like quote is Imran Khan’s assertion: “I’m probably the most known Pakistani ever in its history.” Or that, “I am the most famous man in Pakistan.”
Before the 2018 elections that put him in office as the head of a coalition government, he had said, “Whatever happens, I’ll win. OK?”
When the two leaders met at the White House in July 2019, Khan did his best to bond with Trump, who he had earlier demeaned as being “ignorant and ungrateful.” The dynamic between the two narcissists was positively electric, with Trump calling Khan a “great leader.”
Imran Khan was unable to relate to the grief the country felt at Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, and had no visible sadness at her passing. All he could say, somewhat unable to hide his envy, was that she had now become an immortal.
The irony is that both Khan and Trump are elitists with a cult-like following among commoners. Through their demagoguery, they have convinced their followers into believing that they are “the voice of every forgotten man, railing against effete liberals and the corruption and nepotism of the political class,” according to The Sunday Times.
In the aftermath of the vote of no-confidence which deposed him, he kept asserting that the whole country was with him — but for an American conspiracy, he would still be the prime minister. As an American commentator put it, it was difficult to imagine that Imran Khan did not know that “Washington doesn’t pursue regime change through routine diplomatic meetings, especially in the midst of a full-blown international crisis.”
When asked how he was going to co-mingle the Islamic State which existed in the seventh century with today’s Sweden and China, Khan was at a loss for words. His senior advisor, Asad Umar, bluntly stated that Khan was not a strategy guy: “He has never been in an institution, and doesn’t know how to work in an institutional setting.”
The irony is that both Khan and Trump are elitists with a cult-like following among commoners. Through their demagoguery, they have convinced their followers into believing that they are “the voice of every forgotten man, railing against effete liberals and the corruption and nepotism of the political class,” according to The Sunday Times.
When asked about the philandering lifestyle that he followed for decades, Imran Khan compared himself to Muhammad bin Qasim, the eighth-century conqueror of Sindh, implying that it was common in Islamic history to comingle virility with governance.
One person noted, “He encapsulates all the double standards that Pakistan has.” Another commented, “Unlike other populists, Khan belongs to an elite even more rarefied than the one he attacks.”
Hillary Clinton wrote that Trump, despite his lack of knowledge, had a commanding presence in the room. The same can be said of Imran Khan. Both know how to read people. But both have a tendency to speak at people, rather than to them. Their rhetoric is studded with chicanery.
Yet millions take the bait. They gather at large rallies and cheer their leader on, accepting his statements as the truth. It’s a case of mass hypnosis, not very different from what catapulted Adolph Hitler into power in the 1930’s.
Dr. Faruqui has authored, “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan,” Routledge Revivals, 2020. He tweets at @Ahmadfaruqui.
