When Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan meet in Washington on Tuesday, they might find they have a lot in common.
The presidents of the US and Turkey are both nationalists who have promised to make their countries great again. Both have turned governing into a family business and rely heavily on their respective sons-in-law, Jared Kushner and Berat Albayrak. Both are despised by metropolitan elites but often adored outside big cities. Both have accused their countries’ permanent bureaucracy of plotting against them.
However it is the similarities in the Trump and Erdogan approaches to the media and the courts that should be most chilling for Americans. Mr Trump is famous for calling the mainstream media “the world’s most dishonest people” and for his denunciations of “fake news”. Mr Erdogan is at war with much of the Turkish media. Mr Trump denounced a “so-called judge” who ruled against his travel ban for refugees. Mr Erdogan is contemptuous of the Turkish constitutional court and had two of its members arrested last year.