Samuel Fury, Childs Daly - Big Men and Little People
Two recent books on Idi Amin’s Uganda present an African mirror for Trump’s United States to see itself.
The best historical analogue for Donald Trump probably isn’t an American. It also isn’t one of the great villains of 20th-century Europe, despite a long and tired debate about his relationship to fascism. Rather, Trump’s most obvious predecessor comes from one of the “shithole countries” in Africa he disdains: General Idi Amin, the autocrat who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. “It is not only the braggadocio, the self-regard, the love for military ceremony,” historian Derek R. Peterson writes in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025); it’s also the cruelly funny rhetoric, the demonization of immigrants and outsiders, and the political chaos that comes from constantly hounding your rivals and betraying your friends. Amin and Trump carry themselves alike, and they give the same belligerent speeches. They share a catty kind of charisma. Like Amin, Trump tells his supporters he’s fighting for their freedom, all while turning the screws.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/idi-amin-slow-poison-popular-history-uganda-review/