Muhmmad Yunus and Donald Trump appearing separately at the podium of the UN General Assembly (UN Photo)

Two elderly revolutionaries – Muhmmad Yunus ostensibly of the left, and Donald Trump on the right - separately at the podium of the UN General Assembly (Loey Felipe and Cia Pak/UN Photo)

Fear and loathing in Dhaka and DC

An unlikely comparison, maybe, but revealing nonetheless.

Abhijnan Rej

13 February 20255 min read

At first glance, Donald Trump and Muhammad Yunus – the de facto head of Bangladesh’s government since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was overthrown six months ago – have very little in common. Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work on microcredit. Trump has bitterly complained about not winning one. Yunus’ businesses have revolved around empowering millions of Bangladeshis, especially poor women. Trump has been described as an “unscrupulous landlord” who built his empire on racial discrimination and strong-arming, not to mention outright fraud. And let us not forget, landslide or not, Trump was elected to office while Yunus remains untested politically, his indefinitely “interim” “chief adviser” role largely secured through the backing of the Bangladesh military.

And yet, the two elderly revolutionaries – Yunus ostensibly on the left, and Trump on the right – are quite similar, both in terms of their political trajectories and how the situation on the ground has shaped up since their ascent. This presents a veritable analytical puzzle.

Both men effectively positioned themselves as an alternative to the key political parties in their countries decades long before they became plausible contenders.

For starters, both Trump’s and Yunus’ supporters describe their leader’s legal woes – Yunus was sentenced to prison last year on charges of corruption and labour law violations, while Trump’s encounters with the law are legion – as politically motivated.

Both men effectively positioned themselves as an alternative to the key political parties in their countries decades before they became credible contenders. In Yunus’ case, that was in 2007 when he launched a new political party – as an alternative to both the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – which he went on to shut down soon after, having not found many takers. Trump’s ambitions began to come to light from 1987 – during Ronald Reagan’s second term – when he placed full-page ads in three leading newspapers complaining about, among other themes, how the world was playing America for suckers.

Trump and Yunus have both portrayed the political earthquake in their respective countries in strikingly similar terms, as “liberation”, Trump on his inauguration as president, and Yunus after the fall of the Hasina government.

Now consider how events in Bangladesh have unfolded since the public stormed the prime minister’s residence last August leading to scenes of general melee not entirely dissimilar to the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021.

Attacks on religious minorities have become pronounced, with an influential Bangladeshi rights group noting in November that since August there had been 2,000 attacks on Hindus alone. It may be that at least some of them are a result of political reprisal for supporting Hasina’s Awami League, a party that “doesn’t have a place in Bangladesh” in “the short run,” as Yunus said in an interview last October. However, the interim government has removed the ban on a key Islamist party.

LGBTQ+ activists are concerned for their safety. Key officials including those in the judiciary and the central bank have either been fired or quit; Yunus was cleared of all graft charges almost as soon as he assumed office. And as if to underscore its sweeping ambitions, the new government in Dhaka has sought to reframe events leading to Bangladesh’s independence, de-emphasising the role of Mujibur Rahman, widely acknowledged to be the architect of a free Bangladesh. (Hasina – who served as Bangladesh’s prime minister between 1996 and 2001, and again from 2009 to 2024 – is Rahman’s daughter.) On the external front, Yunus does not seem to share Hasina’s affinity towards India, and has instead reached out to both Pakistan, a historical adversary, and China.

If these are on the debit side of the ledger, in a manner of speaking, on the credit side is the Yunus team’s pledge to root out “collusion between business, politics and bureaucracy”. And then there is the hope that Yunus’ ascent may boost Bangladesh’s telecom sector given his business interests. We also have Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla wholeheartedly “rooting for Yunus”. However, all of this excitement is offset by the relative lack of bureaucratic experience in the current dispensation in Dhaka – student leaders occupy key ministerial positions, for example – presenting a formidable challenge to day-to-day governance. “Bangladesh 2.0,” as Yunus has described the post-August situation, is as of now largely a vibe, the economy no better today than it was six months ago.

Minorities and political opponents feeling insecure and marginalised. Wholesale overhaul of bureaucracy. Rewriting history. Diplomatic churn. Technocratic buzz amid sweeping promises. And all with an inexperienced team at the helm. Sound familiar?

Prominent economists kept on pointing out in the run-up to the US elections that the economy was, in fact, doing much better than the Trump campaign’s claims and the public’s perception. Something analogous also played out in Bangladesh.

Analysts have flagged youth unemployment and inflation as probable triggers for the unrest in Bangladesh. However, under Hasina, the country’s economic ascent had been nothing short of remarkable. Between 2018 and 2023, the country’s nominal GDP per capita was higher than India’s, and by 2020 commentators were pointing out how Bangladeshis were in fact living better, healthier lives than Indians. The overall unemployment rate fell by almost a per cent between 2020 and 2023 after being almost flat between 2013 and 2019, while youth unemployment decreased by 1.3 per cent between 2017 and 2022.

So, if not economics, is it the dissatisfied, educated and yet insecure who have paved the way for Yunus and Trump? Is social media – and social isolation – leading to situations where a “vote for destruction is a politics of last resort”? Or is it that other recent catch-all explanation of the political upheavals, identity politics? Hypotheses abound. But answering the questions Bangladesh and the United States raise may not be straightforward.

About the author

Abhijnan Rej

Abhijnan Rej is an Indian researcher and writer, the founder of Tarqeq Research LLP and has published extensively on Asian security and geopolitics.

Topics

Bangladesh United States