Visiting North Korea twice, in 1997 and 2011, I got a rare glimpse of the Kim personality cult firsthand. Epitomizing the extreme of brutal buffoonery was dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A personality cult is a way to demand fealty through fear, and a theatrical way to enforce conformity. Across Syria after the December 2024 revolution, statues of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, were reduced to rubble. President Donald Trump, a real estate mogul with a clear edifice complex, seems drawn to the temptation to leave a mark.

Source: Washington Post March 23, 2026 23:01 UTC