They become them. It takes time to learn the skills of dictatorship, just as it does anything else. 10,000 hours hardly gets you into Dictator College. Indeed, the skill developed from constant practice in dictatorship is a rare and hard-won skill, like being a concert pianist, not the reflection of a general attitude to life, like singing in the shower.

Vladimir Putin didn’t start acting as a dictator until 2014 when he invaded Crimea. Victor Orbán became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010, but he took five more years to build his first border fence. Even Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, who also took office in 2010, took four years to plunge his country into dictatorial chaos.

Whether Donald Trump has the discipline to move from being a caricature of a dictator to acting like one is open to question. But he has already satisfied one necessary condition of successful dictatorship by getting elected. We’ll find out next year if it’s a sufficient condition as it was with the most powerful dictator in modern history.

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