Hey Hey! Ho Ho! This crazy f*ckers got to go!

[SkStu]

Inspired by a comment from Pineapple Stu on the American Politics thread... how would you rank this list of madmen in terms of most maniacal and diabolical to least? Any why

Trump
Putin
Netanyahu
Ali Khameini
Kim Jong
Xi
Modi
Erdogan
Ortega
Maduro

Others? I am light on my list of African madmen who will destroy the world, given that their world was already destroyed.

[Crosby87]

The President of Turkmenistan (I think his son is technically in charge now) is bat**** crazy. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow

[culloty82]

You'd have to add the Saudi royal family to the list also - ostensibly cosy with the West, but all the while using their oil revenues to finance mosques promoting their particularly fundamentalist branch of Islam.

[pineapple stu]

Probably Orban and Lukashenko would go in too - albeit they're more pawns than major pieces I feel. Aliyev in Azerbaijan as well - nice little bit of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh lately, and the story of Gurgen Margaryan's murder in Budapest by an Azeri officer whose freedom was later bought and whose back-pay was restored is a particularly nasty one.

Definitely the Saudis. A concerning reach into Europe too, through the likes of moderate (but poor) countries like North Macedonia and Kosovo.

I can't quite work out where to put Trump in that list. Netanyahu and Putin are up at the top for me in terms of direct impact for obvious reasons, but the Saudis are more subtle and the subtle trolls are often the most dangerous ones. Is Trump just a callous, self-centred idiot who's only interested in money? I can't quite tell.

Right now I think Netanyahu is number 1, then Putin and Trump as an enabler. But in terms of a direct threat to western civilisation, I think the Saudis have the potential to rank higher.

Ali Khamenei, Kim and so on are nut jobs but really their influence is a step down - and I think there's hope in Iran in that popular feeling is against him, albeit as we say with the hijab protests, the police are still quite powerful.