When word came down that USAID was being dismantled in Nicaragua, I was sorting through old documents amid the chaos of the mission close-out. On the desk next to mine sat a book abandoned by a colleague: The Dictator’s Handbook, by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which lays out, in plain and clinical language, how dictators actually operate.
It felt fitting: Nicaragua had been seized and was being run as a family enterprise by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, according to Human Rights Watch. I snatched the book, sensing it would be relevant. What Trump did last week in his primetime address was not a policy speech. It was a page out of that handbook.
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