Indian-born American novelist Salman Rushdie on Wednesday labelled United States President Donald Trump a “tinpot despot” and asked Americans to be wary of the president’s attempts to use the killing of African-American George Floyd late last month to take the path to despotism.

Floyd, an unarmed black man, was choked to death on May 25 as a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while arresting him for allegedly using a counterfeit note. The officer was later arrested upon public outrage and charged with murder in the third degree, which has now been changed to second-degree murder following massive protests.

In an article in The Washington Post, Rushdie blamed Trump’s racism for the rise of white supremacist violence in the United States. “We are so inured to the behavior of this man, so used to his lies, his inexhaustible self-regard, his stupidity, that maybe we are tempted to think of this as just another day in Trumpistan,” he wrote. “But this time, something different is happening. The uprising that began with the killing of George Floyd is not fizzling but growing. The man in the White House is scared, and even, for a time, takes refuge in the basement...”

Rushdie warned that Trump should not be allowed to use the actions of a small minority of white supremacists to invalidate the protests of the vast majority against the killing of Floyd. The novelist added that Trump’s inclination for despotism was visible by his threat to “use the Army against American citizens, a threat one might have expected from a leader of the former Soviet Union, but not of the United States”.

On June 2, Trump threatened to call in the Armed Forces as protests against the killing of Floyd escalated in cities across the country. This came soon after tear gas was fired at a group of protestors outside the White House. Trump said he would mobilise “thousands and thousands” of soldiers to keep the peace if state governors did not use the National Guard to take the sting out of the protests.

Rushdie said some of Trump’s traits include “extreme narcissism, detachment from reality, a fondness for sycophants and a distrust of truth-tellers, an obsession with how one is publicly portrayed, a hatred of journalists and the temperament of an out-of-control bulldozer”.

The writer also reminded Americans of past instances of tinpot despotism in other countries, referring to the Emergency imposed by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, and Pakistani military dictator Zia Ul Haq’s decision to depose and hang Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. He said one of the reasons he became a citizen of the United States was his admiration for the ideas of freedom present in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids the US Congress from making any law that encroaches upon the freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

“In my most recent novel, Quichotte, I characterized the present moment as the ‘Age of Anything-Can-Happen’,” the novelist said. “Today I say, beware, America. Don’t believe that it can’t happen here.”