"I won't be a dictator, except for day one." —Donald Trump (1946- ), during an interview with Fox News, December 6, 2023.

"If it is forced to defend itself (the U.S.) or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea." —Donald Trump (1946- ), in a speech at the United Nations, September 19, 2017.

"If they [Iran] don't make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before." —Donald Trump (1946- ), in a NBC News phone interview, March 30, 2025, with similar threats repeated on June 15, 2025, on his social media site Truth Social.

"We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens." —Donald Trump (1946- ), in his inaugural speech, January 20, 2025.

"Trade wars are good and easy to win." —Donald Trump (1946- ), comment made on Twitter, March 2, 2024.

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I. Every hundred years or so, there seems to be a cycle of the death of a democracy and the rise of a dictatorship in an important country

The British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)) observed that "civilisations die by suicide, not by murder", as a result of moral decay, social strife or failure to adapt.

The same could be said of democracies. They are born, grow, prosper, age, and sometimes collapse and give way to plutocracies or to dictatorships. This is especially likely when democracies fail to solve major economic and social problems.

Indeed, over the past few centuries, a political revolution or a wave of collective madness or of collective ignorance have occasionally led to a dictatorship in a given country. At the beginning of the 19th century, this was the case in France, in 1804, with the consecration of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), of Corsican origin.