With love, from Erdoğan's Turkey to Trump's America
While Erdoğan and Trump sit together, let this sister of yours offer a pocket atlas of the troubles we endured in Turkey — and that you are bound to face in Trump’s America.
Donald Trump and Tayyip Erdoğan’s meeting in New York alongside the UN summit. Two ‘good’ friends with the same worldview — but only minor, trivial issues such as the genocide in Gaza — meet in New York to do ‘business.’ While they are at it, I will give you a pocket atlas of troubles drawn from Turkey’s experience under Erdoğan. Think of it as a three-course meal that is hard to digest, but you must sit through it to take the right steps later. Or a gentle reminder of the larger patterns and longer shifts.
First Course: From CEO of Islamism to CEO of Evangelism
Trump and Erdoğan share more than transactional affinities. They both think and act through a managerial lens, approaching statecraft less as statesmen and more as executives. Problems are framed as operational snags, solutions are cast in terms of deals, and success is measured in the language of profit and loss. We know the type by now.
Far from being embarrassed by this reduction, both take pride in it. Erdoğan built an entire regional vision on it, something I have written about in The New Spirit of Islamism, where one chapter is titled “The CEO of Islam.” It was this CEO-like model of leadership — entrepreneurial, managerial, transactional, operational — that Erdoğan tried to export to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia during the post–Arab Uprisings moment. That was the reality behind the so-called “Turkish model,” which Egyptian and Tunisian Islamists tried to emulate in 2011–12. They couldn’t, they didn’t, and today they stand in disarray. But that tale belongs elsewhere.
Trump, of course, embodies the same mode. When announcing Erdoğan’s visit, he spoke as a businessman detailing a contract pipeline: “We are working on many trade and military deals with the President, including the large-scale purchase of Boeing aircraft, a major F-16 Deal, and a continuation of the F-35 talks, which we expect to conclude positively. President Erdoğan and I have always had a very good relationship.” In similar vein, Erdoğan himself has lined up a potential purchases. Observers note that Congress remains resistant on the F-35s, but the CEO-style announcement is the point: each man signals to his base and his partners that what matters is the deal sheet, not the diplomatic script. What diplomacy? (Have you seen Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly. Historically embarrassing for American foreign policy.)
In between the formalities of arms sales, they will touch on the volatile transition in Syria : Erdoğan keen to maintain leverage over Ahmad al-Sharra’s government while curbing Kurdish standing. Here again, the logic is managerial: secure assets, minimize liabilities, expand influence. Both men govern on a personal cost-benefit calculus. Underscore personal.
Another point of attention is that both men fuse their corporate logic with the dominant religion of their country. Erdoğan long ago ceased to be an ideologue in the strict sense of Islamism. The AKP never possessed the doctrinal blueprint of Islamist ideology. Instead, religion functions for him as the flag does, a populist adhesive, only here deployed in corporatist fashion, branding Islamism as if it were a product. Much as he does with the Ottoman past.
But let’s be clear: If Erdoğan is the CEO of Islamism, Trump is the CEO of Evangelism. Recent analyses of Trump’s support make this clear: Christianity is a critical driver of Trumpism. Within his base lies a Christian nationalist current that fuses race and religion into an explicit project of making America an avowedly Christian nation. Survey data show a strong correlation between belief in that project and support for Trump in 2024, especially among White voters. The structure is strikingly similar to Erdoğan’s: religion not as doctrine but as populist cement, a binding agent in a larger managerial project of rule.
Second Course: The Backbone of the Business Elite
John Cassidy of the New Yorker — who has also just published a new book on the dramatis personae of modern capitalism, waiting on my urgent reading shelf — asked the question we used to ask in Turkey a decade ago. Now we don’t anymore. I will tell you why, but first let us hear him.
The title of Cassidy’s article is Why Won’t America’s Business Leaders Stand Up to Donald Trump? Cassidy draws a portrait of who is staying quiet and what they are caving to: titans of tech like Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai lavishing praise on Trump at White House dinners; media conglomerates like Disney and Paramount bending to regulatory pressure; and billionaires such as Elon Musk and Larry Ellison positioning themselves to own more of the media landscape in Trump’s orbit.
What they are not standing up to is an authoritarian campaign that reaches from late-night comedy to corporate boardrooms. The chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — a regulatory agency that oversees television and radio — leaned on Disney to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, a household-name late-night host, after he made a fairly modest comment about Charlie Kirk’s murderer being a MAGA supporter. Disney has since backtracked, and Kimmel may return to air, though not across all the channels that once carried his show.
Major networks such as ABC and CBS have settled lawsuits Trump brought against their journalists and even cancelled shows critical of him. And because companies seeking government approval for mergers or licenses depend on the administration’s goodwill, they are especially exposed to this kind of pressure.
Cassidy draws explicit parallels to Orbán’s Hungary, where regulatory threats and financial levers were used to bring media companies to heel and allies snapped up once-independent outlets. But credit must be given where it is due. The diffusion of authoritarian media capture in our time did not start with Orbán, although he is a capable enforcer. The broader genealogy starts with Putin, the master of harnessing state power and oligarch wealth to domesticate the press; then to Erdoğan, who perfected the art of forcing media owners into compliance through tax investigations and coerced sales; and only then to Orbán, who adapted these methods for his own nationalist project. Yani… please.
Without understanding this broader diffusion of tools, it is impossible to analyze the machinery of the state to intimidate companies and capture the media.
Why the silence from the corporate class? Profit above principle. That should not shock any of us, but it does, because one assumes that after a certain amount of money — which for these American giants is infinite — the reflex of fear against the state should be numbed. But no. It is again the question of dignity.
Executives remember Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, and they see more gain in compliance than resistance. Cassidy points to the “prisoner’s dilemma” that prevents collective action: each firm fears being punished if it resists, so none take the risk. The result is a corporate sector that once at least mouthed opposition — after Charlottesville, or on January 6 — now largely mute as Trump turns state power into an instrument of intimidation.
We saw this prisoner’s dilemma in Turkey around 2008, when Erdoğan’s government came after one of the biggest media families with astronomical tax fines. No other businesses, many of whom had long flaunted themselves as the face of modern Turkey and the promoters of democracy, stood by them. They watched with false security. A decade later, not one conglomerate, holding, or corporation remains untouched by the whims of Erdoğan’s rule.
That is why we no longer ask why the business elite stay silent in Turkey. Because it is conspicuous that they are all hostages to their own timidness, laxity, and complicity, waiting to be rescued by the very people they have exploited for a living.
I’ll tell you the next steps are predictable. Silent elites will leave the country; those who remain will see their relations with Trump’s circle shift drastically. They will find themselves cogs in a corrupt machinery, paying their dues in untraceable ways just to be left alone. Some businesses will be confiscated outright and handed to more servile sycophants — loyal, reckless, and madder still.
Third Course: The Mafiasiation of the Judiciary
The mafiasiation of the judiciary is another striking parallel. In Turkey, Erdoğa spent more than a decade stacking the courts with loyalists and using prosecutors as political hitmen. The judiciary became a weapon not only against political rivals but against critics across society. Journalists, academics, even artists. Fear was transmitted not just through imprisonment but also through the confiscation of property, a technique as much about material dispossession as about silencing dissent.
For years, Western think tanks described such developments with the vocabulary of Orientalism — unconsolidated democratic institutions, immature civil society, weak political culture — as if Turkey’s experience were an ‘eastern’ pathology. But it is no longer confined to Erdogan’s Turkey, right? It is happening in Washington.
President Trump is openly directing the Justice Department to pursue his political adversaries. He has called for investigations into figures such as former FBI Director Jim Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff. Thousands of Justice Department employees have already been pushed out through dismissals and forced resignations. The public integrity unit has been hollowed, and three-quarters of the lawyers in the civil rights division are gone. A firewall that once separated the White House from prosecutorial power has been steadily dismantled.
The next steps, I fear, will be a transformation from politicization to outright mafiasiation, where the law is not a system of rules but a racket to reward allies and punish enemies. This is what we are experiencing in Turkey right now. Over time, the courts themselves morphed into a machinery of corruption. Judges and prosecutors split into rival factions, trading political favors, extracting bribes, and deploying cases like mob families settling scores. Most recently, this weapon has been turned against the main opposition: the party itself, its leader, its presidential candidate, and the mayor of Istanbul all face ongoing cases, each calibrated to cripple Turkey’s political competition.
Never think this cannot happen in American courtrooms simply because it is the United States of America, the land of the free. Listen to this sister of yours. We have been there, and seen it in every shape and form.
With the ‘right’ context and the ‘right’ leadership, anything is possible. No institution is too strong, no political culture too democratic or liberal or plural to withstand it. Unfortunately, in this temporality of the human political story, “the right context and the right leadership” turn out to be circuitous . And they resemble the darkness that built up during the interwar years.
Ok, that seems enough for today. I will let you go before the pudding this time.
But wait… One more minuscule premonition.
The trajectory does not stop with Jimmy Kimmel’s show being cancelled. In time, it could be Kimmel himself, or another popular personality with millions of followers on YouTube, locked away. Did you know that Turkey’s most-watched YouTube news presenter, journalist Fatih Altaylı, has been in prison for months for ‘threatening the president’?
Rain check for pudding?