I'm not a fan of strongmen rule or dictatorships, but most don't have death pits, or even widespread assassinations and torture. This post is clearly aimed at the US, which of course means Trump. Strongmen rule is not just a black/white type of thing; Trump will never have Stalin-like power. Putin today doesn't have that either, and even though some individuals inconvenient to Putin brutally accidentally stabbed them…
> Trump is not going to open death pits, put people in torture camps, or any of that. He's not going to close down public spaces or monitor "everything you say" either He keeps saying that he wants to do all of these things. Explicitly and repeatedly. Alligators, shooting migrants and protestors, setting up enormous camps on the border, door to door deportations, government purges, locking up his rivals and enemies,…
That is not what I said at all. I said most don't have, which of course implies that some do. Many strongmen rulers are relatively bloodless and "only" target inconvenient people with prison sentences and the like, and perhaps the occasional targetted killing.
And other have genocide of some group or the other as an explicit goal, and/or have widespread killings of people with undesirable opinions.
There is a lot of variety. The idea that widespread killings are at the core of strongman rule or dictatorships is just wrong.