Gaslight the People, Rule the World: Erdogan, Trump, Putin, Lukashenko, Modi, Orban, Maduro… (the list goes on)
Gaslighting isn’t a glitch in modern politics—it’s the operating system. From Istanbul to Gaza, the script repeats.
You know the trick by now. Call the other guy what you are. Do it loudly, often, and with utter conviction. Then sit back while the press, the public, and the opposition waste their time arguing with the lie—dignifying it by engaging it. That’s how projection works. And projection is a core tactic of gaslighting.
Consider the following.
Trump calls Zelensky a dictator. Not Putin—the man who poisons dissidents and imprisons teenagers for memes—but Zelensky. It’s not irony, it’s strategy. Not confusion, but calibration. Just like when American media outlets report on the war in Gaza as if it's a "conflict" between two sides rather than a colonial siege turned genocide. Just like Turkey’s government obsessively going after Ekrem İmamoğlu’s university diploma, pressuring Istanbul University to annul it, while Erdoğan’s own diploma has never once been seen in the light of day.
Hypocrisy is a failure of moral consistency. This is different. This is political gaslighting. The aim is to destroy the public’s sense of reality. To make them wonder: Wait, is this a joke? And then—before the laughter or rage can congeal into action—they’re drowning in more noise. The next scandal. The next lie.
Look closely at Turkey. Watch how the regime plays the projection game like a virtuoso at a grand piano. İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, became the object of endless scrutiny over his 35-year-old university diploma. The pressure on Istanbul University eventually worked; his diploma was annulled a few days before his arrest last week.
Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s own diploma—required by law to run for president—has never been publicly produced. For more than a decade, it’s been an open secret that he may only have a two-year degree, which would make him constitutionally ineligible. But instead of answering that question, they raised İmamoğlu’s diploma.
Deflect. Distract. Project.
Erdoğan’s regime throws every legal and institutional weight against opposition figures like İmamoğlu, while his own entourage swims through corruption allegations like fish in water. Former ministers, provincial mayors, and businessmen in his inner circle have faced serious accusations of embezzlement, bribery, money laundering, bid-rigging, and even the illegal shorting of public assets. Whistleblowers, leaks, and international investigations have all pointed to a deep rot in the architecture of his rule. One of the AKP’s founders, former foreign minister and prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu—now an opposition party leader—stood at the parliament lectern listing these allegations, asking why none of them were ever investigated.
Instead of accountability, we get theatre
And now, in a darkly comic twist, İmamoğlu and many of his colleagues at the Istanbul Municipality have been arrested on corruption charges—not based on any forensic financial evidence, but on the statements of three anonymous witnesses. Witnesses who simply regurgitate the rumors circulated in pro-government media. In other words, hearsay as evidence.
Similar stories, maddening in their design, abound elsewhere.
In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko's propaganda insists Belarus is a victim of foreign meddling—a narrative constructed to mask his own illegitimacy and authoritarian grip. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s regime presides over economic collapse, political purges, and electoral rigging. Wasn’t his move to issue an arrest warrant for Edmundo González after a contested election a textbook projection?
In India, Narendra Modi routinely frames opposition leaders as corrupt saboteurs while presiding over a government that has hollowed out institutions, silenced the press, and criminalized dissent. Accusations of conspiracy and misinformation flow freely from the BJP, distracting from its own authoritarian turn.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has perfected the move. He systematically dismantles democratic institutions, curtails judicial independence, and clamps down on press freedom. Yet he positions himself as the last defender of Hungarian democracy against foreign enemies and liberal elites. He accuses the EU of trying to impose a puppet government while consolidating near-total control at home.
And Putin. Ah, Putin. The apogee. The zenith. Wallahi, he embodies the tactic. The Kremlin accuses NATO of expansionism and aggression while invading Ukraine and jailing Russians for anti-war speech. The Russian media machine doesn’t even try to be consistent—just loud, fast, and repetitive. Flood the zone. Confuse the senses. Call the enemy what you are.
Like frat boy trading notes
What binds these men isn’t just tactics but solidarity. Erdoğan has cultivated ties with every single one of them. Putin calls him a ’reliable partner,’ Erdoğan shares diplomatic stages with Lukashenko who praised him for ‘pursuing an independent sovereign policy.’ Of course, Erdogan hails Modi as Turkey’s ‘greatest trade partner in South Asia,’ with not a whisper about Modi’s vicious anti-Muslim politics—so much for the so-called Islamist.
Steve Bannon once claimed that Trump’s favorite leader in the world is Erdoğan. Meanwhile, Maduro has called Erdoğan ‘big brother’ describing him as “benevolent and big-hearted.” Together, they resemble teenage members of a global fraternity club, trading notes. They project, they gaslight, and they call it governance.
Gaslighting doesn’t work by persuasion. It works by corrosion. You corrode trust. You corrode memory. You corrode the public’s ability to tell what matters. And you get them to argue with you on your terms, inside your frame. That’s the final victory: when your opponent starts treating your delusions like debatable claims rather than what they are—attacks on the very idea of shared reality.
Hannah Arendt warned of this dynamic in her analysis of totalitarianism. The destruction of truth, she wrote, is not just a byproduct of tyranny—it is its precondition. A society that loses its grip on factual reality becomes ripe for domination. When everything is a lie, and everyone is lying, the liar becomes the only source of coherence:
‘The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.1
[…] Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.’2
That’s the state of things. That is how Gaza is framed as a “tragedy” rather than a crime against humanity; that is how Istanbul’s mayor, who might have challenged Erdoğan’s 23-year rule, becomes the fraud, while Erdoğan remains untouchable.
We are ruled by projection. Gaslighting is not a glitch but a crucial cog in the system—and not just in authoritarian states, but in the supposedly democratic ones that enable, mimic, and profit from them.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 460.
Ibid, 462.
Gaslighting is such a good way to think about strongmen communications - well put! Also, an important observation that there does seem to be real solidarity between these men.
Brilliantly told. I've always believed that the wild accusations of anti-social people actually reflect what they themselves think and do, and you've shown how exactly that applies to our corrosive new generation of dictators. Thank you!